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Home / News / Apple’s iPadOS 16 software update is delayed

Apple’s iPadOS 16 software update is delayed

Apple's iPad software update will emerge later than planned

Apple has confirmed that the latest update to its iPad software will land later than the counterpart for the iPhone.

Traditionally both arrive together in September, but iPadOS 16 will be released later than iOS 16. The first version generally available will be 16.1.

We don’t have any confirmed details on what the delay is down to, but we suspect it is related to Stage Manager which we’ve written about before as being half-baked in the beta. In an opinion piece at the start of the month we said we felt the feature needed a lot of work:

Stage Manager requires an M1 chip and currently exists in iPadOS betas as somewhere between ‘dumpster fire’ and ‘grudgingly acceptable’ on the quality scale. It’s buggy. It’s finicky. It complicates matters by welding a second multitasking system to iPadOS.

“It wastes a ton of screen space, but turning off space-munching components requires a trip to Control Centre or Settings. Its reliance on the cursor and manual dragging and fiddling to fine-tune the position of windows – rather than ‘snapping’ them to half a screen or full screen with keyboard commands, as in Split View – feels archaic and inefficient.”

In a statement provided to TechCrunch, Apple said: This is an especially big year for iPadOS. As its own platform with features specifically designed for iPad, we have the flexibility to deliver iPadOS on its own schedule. This Fall, iPadOS will ship after iOS, as version 16.1 in a free software update.” As Apple says, it can be flexible with this – there’s no real reason why the releases have to be together. But it does suggest that serious work was required after the initial betas.

Profile image of Dan Grabham Dan Grabham Editor-in-Chief

About

Dan is Editor-in-chief of Stuff, working across the magazine and the Stuff.tv website.  Our Editor-in-Chief is a regular at tech shows such as CES in Las Vegas, IFA in Berlin and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as well as at other launches and events. He has been a CES Innovation Awards judge. Dan is completely platform agnostic and very at home using and writing about Windows, macOS, Android and iOS/iPadOS plus lots and lots of gadgets including audio and smart home gear, laptops and smartphones. He's also been interviewed and quoted in a wide variety of places including The Sun, BBC World Service, BBC News Online, BBC Radio 5Live, BBC Radio 4, Sky News Radio and BBC Local Radio.

Areas of expertise

Computing, mobile, audio, smart home