iPadOS 26 - 35+ New Features & Changes!

0:00 iPad OS 26 beta 1 is here and this is one of the biggest updates to the iPad in recent memory. So in this video I'll be showing you more than 35 new features and changes found in the software of iPad OS 26. Okay, so we have to start off with the obvious, the liquid glass redesign. Right, once you install iPad OS 26 on your device, you will see a massive change in pretty much every UI element on the device. Every app icon has been updated with a new glass look. Some of them have more drastic changes like the camera app icon. Also on the lock screen, you can see that this looks quite a bit different with the glass numbers there for our time. And if you go into the home screen, we have a new bouncelike animation when you go from

0:46 the lock screen into the home screen. Also, if we hold down on our home screen and go into edit, which you can see these buttons are different as well, just like in iOS 26. So, if we go into customize right here, we have the option to customize our app icons. So, you can set this to be always on dark mode or auto. And then we also have the clear icons as well. So, if you want to set your icons to be clear, you can do that. You can make them either light or dark in the clear variant. And then, of course, you can tint your icons as well. And you can make them larger with this little element over here in the upper right corner. Also, fun fact, in iPad OS 26, you can now fit up to 23 icons in the dock. So, if you want to put a ton of icons down there in the dock, like it's a Mac, you can now put up to 23 of them down there. But that is not the

1:32 only time I'm going to mention Mac OS in this video because iPad OS 26 is more like Mac OS than ever before. And you'll really start to see that with the brand new redesigned windowing system for multitasking. So, if you swipe down to go into the control center, you'll see first off, we have the new UI here for the control center. It looks all new to match the glass-like redesign everywhere else in the OS. And we have this button right here. If you press that, it will invoke the new windowing system. Or you could also press and hold on that if you want to go into stage manager, for example. I'm personally not a fan of stage manager, so I will stick to the new windowed apps mode. So when you invoke that, nothing will change at first, but when you go ahead and open up an application, you'll notice that we have this new interface here. And you

2:17 can just continue opening up applications and resizing their windows with this little grabber right here. And check out how responsive everything is. This is so much more responsive than I expected for a first beta. And you can kind of stack these windows on top of each other as well. So I'll put YouTube right here, for example. I can kind of stack that. We'll just go ahead and put notes. And we'll kind of stack that as well over here on top of it. You can see there's not near as many bounds. There's not near as many limits as there were with stage manager. So, it's not trying to create space for you. It's allowing you to stack as many windows on top of each other essentially as you want, which is nice. And again, much more like Mac OS. You could also drag these as well. So, you want to pull and drag a window. You can do that down there from the dock as well. It will open it up in full screen. And you can kind of just

3:03 minimize it or resize it to your liking right here. And you could also do kind of a flicking motion as well. So if you kind of flick these over from side to side, they will go into their place. So that is really cool. That's kind of a new little motion that Apple was showing off. But it gets much better because if you see right up here in the top left of all of these windows, we have these three little buttons. And they might look familiar. They might look like Mac OS because they are. If you tap on that, it will expand that view. And you can see you can close, minimize, and make full screen. These are the stoplight buttons that we have on Mac OS and they work perfectly here in this mode. And even when you do go into full screen, you'll see that they still exist over here in the upper leftand corner of that window. And also, if you tap and hold on

3:49 the little green icon right there, you'll notice that we now have the ability to do squares. We can do like the fill and arrange and move and resize just like we can on Mac OS. If I do the four squares, for example, it will put these apps into their four squares just like on Mac OS. And you'll notice that we also have this little grabber right here. So, we basically have split view in this mode as well, which is pretty cool. Now, we do not have slide over anymore. So, rest in peace, a moment of silence for slide over. That is not here in this mode any longer. But if that was not Mac OS-like enough for you, we have even more because also when you go into an application and you swipe down, you will see that we now have a new menu bar like on Mac OS where we have file, edit,

4:34 format, view, window, and help just like we have on Mac OS. And the cool thing is this also applies this kind of just changes based on the application you're in. So we'll show the different shortcuts you have. You can see all that applies specifically to notes. Like if we went into Safari for example, we don't even have to be in full screen. If we're just right here and we kind of swipe down from the top, you can see it shows Safari is active right there for this menu bar. And if we go to file, you can see that we have different options because we're in the Safari application. You even have your history. You can reopen the last closed tab. You have your bookmarks, your window. Pretty much everything is just like Mac OS with this menu bar. Now, you might notice that I'm not getting a lot of reflections on my display, and that's because I'm using a nanoexture display. But if you don't have a nanoexture display, you might

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6:06 you can get the best deal by using my link down in the description below. There's also a 100-day satisfaction guarantee. There's also a new app expose view, which again is very similar to Mac OS. So, if you're in this windowing mode, this new windowing system, if you go down to the bottom of the screen, you kind of pull up and hold like you were going into the app switcher, it will give you this new app expose view that will show you all of your currently opened applications in this new interface. And when you're in this mode, if you tap on the home screen right here, it will take you to the home screen and it will kind of scatter the windows apart. So it gives you the ability to open up a new application without any of the distractions of any of the other windows that are open. So for example, if I wanted to open up the

6:52 new preview application, I can tap on that and you can see it now allows me to do that. And I can do the same thing anytime I want to open up a new application without having to worry about all the windows and being overwhelmed. I just tap the home screen and then I can go in to like chat GPT for example and it opens up in full screen. And of course I can minimize that and make it smaller to go along with all of my other applications. And by the way, you don't have to be in the app expose mode. You can just tap on the home screen from anywhere to pull up that view. You can see it's a little bit laggy right there, but you can just tap the home screen from anywhere. Now, I do also want to mention the settings for this. We're going to go into our settings. If I can find it. There it is. So, we're going to make this full screen. We're going to tap on the green button to make that full screen. and we're going to go into here and we're going to go down to our multitasking and gesture section because here is where you can see the new windowed apps

7:39 section. I'm going to start using the pencil so I don't get my screen all smudged up. But anyways, you can see that right here we do also have the option to close all windows after swiping home. So if you think that when you go home you want to get out of all windows and just kind of start fresh, you do have a toggle for that. Also, there's a toggle to automatically show and hide the dock. So you can turn that off if you do not like that. That is enabled by default. Oh, and by the way, if you're using the trackpad on the Magic Keyboard, it's no longer a circle cursor. So before it was like this little clear circle. Now it actually shows as if it were a real mouse like on the Mac. Now, there's also an interesting new multitasking feature when it comes to downloading large files from Safari or exporting videos in Final

8:25 Cut Pro or exporting a photo in Lightroom where you can now run those tasks in the background while doing other tasks. So, for example, I'm downloading a big file right now. We'll go out of here. You can see it's still living up here in the status bar. It has a live activity for the download right there. That is not new, but we can actually go into other applications and perform different tasks without worrying about that download slowing up. The files application finally gets a good update with iPad OS 26 because it finally has real file management features now. So, if you go into your iCloud drive or really anywhere inside of your files application, we have our files right here. We'll go ahead and cancel this Safari download. And you can see right here, we actually have our

9:11 date modified and our kind. That is not new. But what is new is that we can now resize these windows just like we can in Finder on Mac OS, you can resize these to the size of your liking. Also, if you tap on these three dots, this little ellipsus over here, you can add different filtering options. So, if you want to filter by the size, you could add that in there as well. And once again, you can resize these little filtering options just like Finder. And we can add in iCloud status as well. If you want to see your iCloud status, we can make that really small and make the size maybe a little bit larger right here. And you can see that we can sort it by the largest size as well. And if you look at the folders in the files application, we have a little arrow next to them because we can now collapse the

9:57 folders to see the contents inside. So, if we tap on that little arrow right there, it shows us the files, the contents inside of that folder without having to fully go into the folder like this. And here's another cool feature. So, if you go into one of your files, we'll just go into this PNG file for example, we'll just go into this one right here. If you press and hold on a file inside of the files application, we have this open with section where you can choose what application you want to open up that specific file type with by default. So, by default, a PNG file opens up inside of the preview application. But if you want to change that to open up every PNG file in Photoshop or Procreate, I can do that right here. You could also change this from the get info screen. So, if you go to get info on a file and you go down

10:43 here, you can see under information, we have always open with and it shows preview and you can change that right there. This is very similar to what you see in Mac OS and it also shows the exact location of that file right there. But that's not the only change with folders because if you go up here to the top, you'll see this really strange looking folder that is pink and it also has a crying emoji in it. That is new as well. So if you have to press on a folder right here and then you go down to customize folder and tags. This gives you the ability to go to tags right here and change the color of that folder. So if I want to change it to yellow for example, and we'll deselect purple and then go back, you can see it changes it to yellow right there. You can also add an emoji to the inside of that folder.

11:29 So, we'll just do the little We'll just do this one right here, the starry eyes. And you can see that is what it looks like now in our Finder. There's also a feature that I use on Mac OS all the time that has finally come to iPad OS 26. And that is the ability to add folders to the dock. So, if I go to my downloads folder, for example, and if I haptic press on that, if you go down here, you will see that we have the new option to add to doc right here. So, if I go to add to doc, and we pull up our doc down here, you'll notice that we now have our downloads right here. If you tap on that, it will show you your latest downloads in your downloads folder. That is super convenient. And you could add any of these folders that you would like to. So, if you want to add documents there as well, we can go ahead and do that. We'll go to add to

12:14 and then we'll go to add to doc right here. And now that will be added to our doc alongside our downloads. If you hover over those or tap on them, it will show you you have your documents and your downloads right there. We now have a new preview application. So this is the same preview that we've had on Mac OS for quite some time. So this has now come to iPad OS. And this is going to be the best way to open, edit, and mark up PDFs and images. And this is designed to work with the Apple Pencil as well, which is great. So, you'll see your recents right here. You also have browse. You can, you know, uh, scan a document right here. You have all these different options, but it will load in your recent, which is nice. So, if I pull up this NDA, you can see kind of what this looks like in here. And it's really easy to autofill and kind of mark up right here as well. So, this will be

13:01 much better than doing this through notes. But that's not the only new application because we also have the new games application. And so this is also on iOS 26 and of course Mac OS 26 as well. But this is the new games app on the iPad. Really nothing brand new in here. It's just a new app and everything's kind of just joined together in one section. So we have the home right here where you can see what your friends are playing, some of the games that you've recently played. Arcade, you have play together and you have library here as well where you have events and you also have achievements along with some of the other games you might want to play. Now, there's also an interesting new feature in iPad OS 26. It's also in iOS 26 as well, but it's called local capture. So, if you go into your control center right here, and we're going to search for local capture. So, if we type in local right there, you

13:47 can see this is local capture. So, you can invoke this right here from the control center. And it says capture your own audio and video during the call to save and edit later. And you can choose where you want that to save to. So, this is pretty cool. If you're maybe doing a podcast on your iPad or something like that, you can hook up a device through the USBC port, the Thunderbolt port, and you can capture that audio and save it when you're in a call, whether you're on Zoom, FaceTime, Teams, or something like that. And also when you're in a call or a FaceTime, if you go up to the FaceTime controls right here under audio and video, you can see you have a new UI here, a new menu where you can choose a microphone that you want to use if it's not the same as the system, which is the iPad. And by the way, as you can see,

14:33 the FaceTime application has been revamped on the iPad as well, very similar to what we see on the iPhone with iOS 26. Now, we also have the screenshot features that we see on iOS 26. So, if we go ahead and invoke this for a screenshot, you'll notice up top here that we do have the option to switch to the thumbnail view if you would like to. So, I don't like that. I like this new little way of doing this here. So, we do not have the visual intelligence features on the iPad, unfortunately. At least not yet. But you can see that we do have the new interface right here. Also, if you tap on the plus, we do have the new magnifier back. So, you can magnify something in your screenshot now, which is nice to see that make a comeback. And of course, you have some really slick little animations here in this section as well. You can see that animation up top right there. And of course, when

15:18 this kind of comes in, you can see the smooth animation there as well. And we do have the check mark right there if you do want to save this to files, photos, or whatever. That's not new, but that is right up there. And if you want to change any of those settings related to screenshots, if you go into your settings, general, we have a brand new section here for screen capture where you can change from full screen previews and also you can change the format from HDR to SDR or rather SDR to HDR since SDR is the default option. The camera application also gets a nice redesign very similar to what we saw in iOS 26. You can see that we have these options up here. also video and photo. Those are the only things that you see at first, but you can kind of swipe over here to go through the different modes. And of course, if you tap on these menus right

16:04 here, it will kind of expand them like so. And the photos application also gets a slight change from what we had in iPad OS 18. So, library and collections are now separate. So, anytime you take a photo or a screenshot, it's going to always show right down here at the bottom, so there's no confusion. And then we do also have the collections section where you can see all of your different collections and you can collapse these if you would like to. You can also of course change the order of them by tapping right here and you can reorder. And of course we also get the redesign in the messages application on iPad OS as well where we have the different backgrounds. We have our polls that we can vote in. Of course, you do also have the indicators, the typing indicators for those that are typing inside of a group chat. And we also have the live translation. If we go into here, you can see we have the automatic

16:51 translate and the notes application. The math notes feature has been improved with iPad OS 26. Also, when you go to a graph right here, this little icon is different than it was in iPad OS 18. And if you tap on that, it will show this interface that shows the uh the problem that was solved with this graph right there. And if you tap on the ellipses right here, we also have the glyph icons to the left. This little interface, this little menu looks better than it did on iPad OS 18 as well. And while we're in the notes application, I also want to show you how I drew this right here because I used a brand new pen called the Reed calligraphy pen. This is the virtual read calligraphy pen. It's right here in the middle of these two. You have your options for your different strokes right there. And I really like how this one writes. Also in the notes

17:37 application, if you go to the share sheet right here in a note, we now have a new option to export as markdown. So you can now export a note in markdown. And you can see you will be able to save that to files or save to Dropbox or anything like that. The image playground application has received a nice update with iPad OS 26 and iOS 26. I'm somebody who uses image playground predominantly on the iPad instead of the iPhone, so I like this. But anyway, when you go into here, you can see that we have different styles now. So you have a Genmoji and chat GPT option to choose for a style for your image playground. And when you go into chat GPT, you can go even further to make it an oil painting, watercolor, print, anime, or vector. So you could do all of that right here and it will go into chat GPT to create that

18:24 image for you. So you can combine different things. You could add, you know, the suggestions down here. You could add people from your camera roll. You guys know how it goes with image playground, but it's much better now. And you have new options for animating those images in the image playground app. Oh, and also there's a new app icon for image playground as well that looks a lot better than it did last year. The shortcuts application now has intelligent actions thanks to Apple intelligence support being added. So if you go to create a new shortcut, we have a brand new section here for Apple intelligence where you can use specific models. So the cloud model, the ondevice model or chat GPTs models, you could use any of those. And you do also have some other actions down here as well. If we go back and if we go into the gallery over here, we do also have the option to

19:10 use pre-selected or kind of pre-made shortcuts here from Apple using the models from Apple Intelligence and or ChatgPT. And then if you go into your settings and go into the privacy and security section, we have a brand new section for blocked contacts right here. This used to live inside of messages. Now it's inside privacy and security and it's better laid out as well. And we do also have new parental controls just like we have on iOS and Mac OS. And I may as well mention this because this is probably more applicable to iPad OS than iOS. So, if you go into the privacy and security section and then down to the bottom to security, we have wired accessories. So, by default, it's set to automatically allow accessories to connect to your iPad when unlocked. But

19:55 if you don't want that, you can change right here to always ask before allowing accessories to connect to your iPad. Or you can have these other options here as well. And we also have the same customization that you see on iOS 26 right here on the lock screen. So, if you haptic press down here and you go to customize, you can see that you can change the size of the time right here. And if you tap on it again, you can change the weight of that font. And of course, you can change the font style as well. If you don't like the default font style, you can change that right there. You can also change it from glass to solid. I like the glass look, but you can change that there if you would like to. And of course, you have all your widgets that you could add over here on the left hand side. Also in the music application, we have the whole new redesign here like we saw in iOS 26

20:42 where we have pins over here on the lefth hand side. And also if we go into our notification center or our lock screen and we tap on the album artwork, we get that full screen album artwork and it's also animated here with iPad OS 26. And you'll notice how up top our time and our date shrinks down and it looks like that when you have the animated album art going really, really cool. We can see the clouds moving right here. So, that is a look at the new features included with iPad OS 26. And again, this is a much more Mac OS like update than anything we've seen in the past. And I am personally a big fan of it. We still have a ways to go, but this is a great step in the right direction. So, let me know what you guys think about iPad OS 26 down in the comments

21:27 below. Are you happy with it? Are you not happy with it? Let me know all your thoughts down there in the comments below. And of course, if you enjoyed this video, as always, I would appreciate if you gave it a thumbs up. Also, be sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on future iOS, iPad OS, Mac OS, all those good videos coming in the near future. But anyways guys, thanks for watching and I'll see you