Stage Manager On Your Mac? Just Nope

Since WWDC much of the conversation about updates Apple announced have focused on Stage Manager for the iPad or the new MacBook Air. One of the features included in macOS Ventura is also called Stage Manager and, there's no other way to describe this, it's a dog.

Window management in macOS has traditional been decidedly average. As of today you have a few options for positioning of your programs on screen. Apple offers a split-screen mode, which allows two apps to share the screen. A full screen mode, from which you can three-finger swipe from app to app horizontally to aid multitasking. Anything else requires manual drag and drop of application windows to size and space them as required. Windows does things so much better it isn't even funny.

For a long time now Mac users have been doing two things. First, adding utility software like Spectacle, Rectangle or Magnet to give a better approximation of what Windows does; and secondly asking Apple to fix this shortcoming.

Apple introduced Stage Manager for the Mac and addressed the issue in a completely unintuitive way. 

Use Stage Manager for window management and you'll only see a benefit if you work with many open windows covering a small part of the screen. That's not a use case which seems popular outside of Apple's marketing department, which always portrays Macs with a handful of apps open on the screen. In the real world people generally work their apps full screen or side by side. Stage Manager adds lots of things you don't want, whilst not addressing the one thing you do want. That is, you want a second dock added to the left of your screen to manage your stages. Stages which mostly mimic the functionality of virtual desktops - an existing feature of macOS. Mission Control just manages this so much better. Even the current CMD+TAB app switching functionality, is less clunky and easier to use.

And to make things worse, Stage Manager still limits the way that you position windows - every use in the keynote video involved manually resizing windows within the reduced screen space available in the stage.

Whilst there's some time for Apple to refine the feature before Ventura gets released later this year, I can't help but feel that this is going to be a feature which gets used a couple of times before being consigned to the dustbin of history. On iPad its a necessity in order to enable external screen support. For Mac it just seems so unnecessary.