I have a long relationship with Apple's iPad. When it was first released, I drove three hours south to Buffalo, New York, to buy one, having it on hand to write about, which opened doors for me in my career as a tech journalist just days after it became available. It's strange to say that I owe a tablet a debt of gratitude, but here we are. I've owned several iPads over the years. Of late, I've been using an iPad Air M2. It's a 13-inch slab with baked-in LTE and 1TB of storage. It's heavy, overpowered for what I use it for, and yet, not quite enough.
It's great for consuming media. It's super for word processing. But it, along with all of the other iPads—and Android tablets I've used for that matter—have been shit when it comes to multitasking. I need to be able to drift between different windows as I work: type in a word processor like IA Writer, plop my copy into Boing Boing's CMS with Firefox, muck with images in Lightroom, and then resize and export them with Affinity Photo 2. I gave it a try with iPadOS' side-by-side multitasking, and I took Stage Manager for a spin. Nope to both. They may work for some people, but not me. I'm one of those weirdos who want their tablet to do laptop things.
I installed the beta version of iPadOS 26 a few days ago. I was surprised to find that many of the issues that had made the tablet a no-go for my daily work have been resolved. Apple's reps have said that they have no intention of turning the iPad into a Mac. However, they don't seem to have a problem with making it a little bit easier for Mac users to use, rather than a laptop. There's a lot I could blather about here, but let's stick to the big 'uns.
Since I already mentioned Stage Manager, let's talk about that. It's still there, but Windowed Apps is where it's at. It's now possible to open and resize multiple app windows. It feels like working on a laptop, so I'm comfortable with it. I've had six apps open on my iPad's desktop at the same time, and it worked great. Resizing windows is a cinch and, as with MacOS, you've got traffic lights in the top left corner of each window for closing, minimizing or going full-screen, For shits and giggles, I hooked my iPad up to a 15" external display to see what the experience would be like. It was pretty damn solid. It's been a while since I last hooked up to a display; nice to see that there are no more black bars. iOS now utilizes every bit of the display's real estate. That said, I'm not crazy about Apple's Liquid Glass UI. While anything can happen between now and when the full release of iPadOS 26 goes live, as it stands, icons and widgets appear washed out and are somewhat difficult to see. Boo.
One feature I'm thrilled about might not be significant for many people. If you have an iPad with an eSIM, you'll find that you can now use your tablet to make phone calls. I'm planning to run a little experiment this week: forwarding my primary number to my iPad and using it exclusively for text messages, calls, and all other purposes. I already know that my Garmin Tactix will pair with my tablet. If things work out, I'll be able to get notifications on the go, without carrying an iPhone. Given how cumbersome it is to pull a 13-inch tablet out of a backpack with nowhere to set it up, I'm betting it'll go a long way towards cutting down on my screen time.
Of course, there's a good chance that the things I like about the beta may be wiped clean by the final release. Time will tell.
