According to Chris Hynes, it turns out Stage Manager is a rehash of a project he worked on in 2006 called “shrinkydink”. On his blog, Tech Reflect, he described shrinkydink as…
…a radical new way to manage apps and windows and effectively made the existing Exposé irrelevant as well as the Dock as a way of managing running apps and windows.
And he then went on to describe Stage Manager as…
…a radical new way to manage windows and likely makes much of Exposé and the Dock functionality irrelevant… In addition to being a macOS feature, it’s also a much more elegant way to do multitasking on the iPad
Like Chris, I see Stage Manager as something that should obviate the Dock and/or Exposé1 in macOS, as well as the existing multitasking paradigm in iPadOS, but right now it exists almost in competition with them2. It’s one of the major reasons behind my initial pessimistic take. Operating environments should feel like a singular experience, not a bunch of apps cobbled together. Right now, Stage Manager looks to me more like a separate app than as a connected part of a whole.
Chris had another take that I whole heartedly agree with.
Stage Manager appears to be positioned as a power-user feature which I think is a shame. I’d much prefer to see it as something you pick in Setup Assistant or choose in Settings rather than hidden in a menu somewhere. I think this is something that would be especially appealing to a new Mac user.
You know who is comfortable with having a ton of windows open? Power users. Stage Manager should have been positioned as a less daunting alternative for normal people3.
It’s early days yet and there is plenty of time for Stage Manager to improve, though I would be surprised if there are significant changes this summer. If Apple is serious about Stage Manager, it will iterate and improve on the feature over multiple major releases. If that happens, I could easily see Stage Manager being an integral component to Apple’s user experience. For right now though, we have something that at the outset seems a bit tacked-on to me.
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And also Spaces. ↩︎
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Stage Manager is also functionally different than Exposé. Exposé is window switcher along the lines of command+tab. No one works while in Exposé. It’s transitional and doesn’t really compete with other UI mechanisms. Stage Manager is a persistent mode that is expected to coexist with Spaces, the Dock, etc… ↩︎
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Apple releasing Stage Manager simultaneously for both macOS and iPadOS puts them in a bit of a marketing corner. As much as I think Stage Manager isn’t a power-user feature on macOS, it definitely is a power user feature on iPadOS. Part of me wonders if Apple should have first released it only on iPadOS, where it was inarguably most needed. ↩︎