iPadOS 26 is probably the biggest change to the platform since its inception. Some features have been scrapped, and some big ones have been added.

First off, big visual aesthetic change. And I’m here for it. This is like Windows Vista (which was beautiful) with dark mode. The liquid glass design is so. damn. classy. Yes, there are several hard to read menus and pop ups like control center. The readability in general needs work. But that is the point of a beta.

As you can imagine, I installed iPadOS 26 developer beta 1 as soon as it became available. I’m happy to report that over the last 2 days of heavy use, I’ve experienced only one respring and one application crash. For a developer beta, this is very stable.

Battery life hasn’t been great, but that is the case with every update. I’m sure that by the time the public release goes live this won’t be as much of an issue.

Since upgrading I’ve been using my iPad Pro a lot. Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way – the new windowing system. Gone are slide over and split view (in the traditional sense). Now, by default, every window can be resized and moved freely around the screen. Stage manager is an optional add on to this – it allows you to have multiple desktops with these freely resizable and moving windows.

The behavior of the desktop is pretty much what you’d get from macos. And that is a good thing. It is familiar, intuitive, simple, and makes sense. When I showed my wife she says “this is how it should have always been.”

You can still tile windows by hovering over the traffic light buttons or long pressing them. This opens a menu that allows you to specify how you want to tile your windows. This works great.

To my point – this fixes the iPad. The issue with the iPad has always been its unintuitive workflow. That was the main thing stopping me from using it full time. But now it works like a desktop – I can actually use this.

Yeah the new design is nice, but the biggest functional upgrades for me come from how the windowing system works. Stage manager is no longer a compromise to put up with – it serves as the multiple desktops implementation.

The iPad working this way just makes sense. We’re years away from the time when iPads were low powered devices. These things can keep up with most modern laptops without breaking a sweat. It is about time we got to properly use the power they offer.

Also, background processing for apps like video editors? What a blessing.

Apple is slowly turning the iPad into a viable every day computer. I think ultimately the iPad will cannibalize mac sales. This seems inevitable. But Steve did say, you either cannibalize yourself or let a competitor eat you.