iPadOS 26 Changes Everything

0:00 Almost all of my videos are short tutorials on how to use your iPhone and iPad. That's sort of been the channel's bread and butter. But today's video is more of a showand tell. No need to take notes. Just sit back and let me tell you why I think the new operating system, iPad OS 26, may actually be an incredible turning point for the iPad. Hi, my name is Rich. I made a video last week that covered a few cool upcoming features in iPad OS 26. I've continued to play around with it since then, and I'm coming to the conclusion that some of the more shiny features, like Apple's liquid glass interface and a couple new apps, while really nice, are not the things that are making a difference for me. You know, it always seems like each

0:46 year Apple drops some new feature that makes the headlines, but turns out to be something I rarely, if ever, use. But this year feels really different. I know many YouTube videos are now claiming the iPad is finally a laptop replacement. Well, maybe. But like everything else in life, it depends in this case on the way you use it. But with this new operating system, at least for me, there's a basket of smaller features that'll absolutely make using the iPad a better experience. Some of those features are aesthetic in nature. Others are just plain practical stuff. Today, I'm going to show you a couple of new interesting lock screen features, the new menu bars and how they reveal so much hidden information, including key commands.

1:32 We'll look at the very practical new phone app. I'll cover some pleasant new aesthetic changes to messages. I'll show you how to double tap an app for full screen mode. Thank god that's finally here. We'll open up the much improved photos app. And finally, I'll show you how most of this stuff works on the base iPad. Stick around. The first thing I want to show you is just a couple of new lock screen features. I've got my iPad Air here, and you know, if you just kind of swipe down from the top, you can um get to your lock screen. But if you'll notice this kind of liquid glass thing, that's kind of a neat little feature. I don't know that it makes much difference in how I use my iPad, but the lock screen has changed. So, I'm going to come down to the lock screen, and you

2:19 can see you can edit and finally make the clock a lot bigger and do some other things with it. But I want to show you one other thing. We're going to just create a new um lock screen, a new home screen. I'm going to tap on that, and I'm going to go to photos up here, and I'm going to tap on all. And I'm going to find a photo in here that'll work. Here's one. This is from a video I made uh on the iPhone. And if you'll look, it's just a nice picture. But if you go down here, you can tap on this little icon right here, and that says generating spatial scene. So now all of a sudden, you get this parallax feature with it. So I don't know if you

3:06 can see that, but as I move it around, it's almost like it's a 3D image. kind of weird how it does that, but it's a really cool little feature, and I wasn't expecting that. Um, and that's one of the new ways you can set up uh a lock screen. That's kind of cool. But there's another feature here, too, that is really handy. I'm going to tap on this to create a a new one. And I'm going to go to um oh, photoshuffle. And I'll just tap on photo shuffle. Photo shuffle up there. And I'm just going to tap use featured photos. And if you'll notice, I get a photo here of Justin when he was a baby. But I can

3:52 just tap on it and it'll change to a different photo. And I can tap on it again. And here you can see the clock changes. That's when I was in Chicago. Here's at the county fair. And here you can see the clock behind Rhonda there. And you can just sort of tap your way through and it will sort of adapt to to the photo that you're looking at. It's a cool little way to just kind of tap through and find out which photo you want to use for your lock screen and your home screen. I think that's pretty cool. Next up is the menu bars and that new feature that Apple has added. talked about it a little bit in my last video, but I've been playing with it even more. I'm just going to I'm going to open the

4:38 reminders app here. And I've got reminders in here. And normally, you know, if you remember reminders, you can go to your inbox or focus area, what whatever list that you have. In the past, when I'd make videos on reminders or Apple Notes or something like that, and I'd use a a feature in the video, uh, I'd often get comments like, "I can't find that feature on my iPad. How did you do that?" And that kind of stuff. Well, that's because those things were kind of hidden, but now they live up here in the menu bar. And to get to the menu bar, you can just swipe down like that. And now you have a new menu bar. Now, I'm going to use the Apple Pencil just because it's easier um to show you what what's going on here. But here, you can see you can get to

5:24 settings. If you go to file now, you can do all of these things. New reminder, new list. I mean, all of the functionality of reminders is showing up here. You can edit. Look at all the different options you have in here. And I never knew that reminders could do half of this stuff cuz it was always hidden. Uh here's an example of just, you know, use areas as columns like that in the way you view stuff and go back to a list. And there's just a lot of different little things that you can do. But what is really cool is if you go over here, you can see maybe because it's very dim on my uh iPad. I'm hoping that Apple will make it a little brighter. But

6:11 right beside this where it says new reminder, if you tap command N, you can add a new reminder. So if you're using a keyboard, you know, Apple's Magic Keyboard or some Bluetooth keyboard with it, you can now use these key commands to just create stuff and fly through using the program. Um, I knew some of these key commands, but I didn't know half of them. And I much prefer using a key command than to have to, you know, use a mouse or tap with a pencil or something like that. So, that's going to be really handy and that's just something that Apple has put in here in the new iPad OS 26. It's a a really cool little feature and I think it's going to be one of those things that make using the iPad so much better. You know, in the past, if you connected

6:57 your iPhone to your iPad, you could answer telephone calls on your iPad. Um, but they have now actually created a phone app for the iPad. And it's not that I want to use my iPad to make phone calls all the time, but you know, sometimes I am working on my iPad and it would be handy to make a call. And they've created an app for that. And I'm going to tap on this and I'm going to show it to you. So, you have a whole list of recent people who've called you. If you'll notice, I'm exposing a whole bunch of different numbers here, and I don't really care because all those are spam scam numbers. And I hope everybody who watches this video calls those numbers back. I hate all that spam stuff and I'm sure you do too. But now you can

7:45 go in here and you can send a text message. You can make a phone call directly from your iPad. You can use FaceTime and you can even send an email right from the app. And that's just going to be a very practical uh use case for this app. I think it's going to be handy. You can actually go to into edit and you can edit contact information as well. So, you can jump sort of over to your contacts, makes make changes that are saved in your contacts app uh right from the phone app. So, I just think that's going to be a really cool little feature and this is going to be one of those apps that just sort of sneak in under the radar that are going to be worth

8:31 having on your iPad. Okay, the next thing I want to show you is just the sort of aesthetic changes that have come to messages. This isn't life-changing or anything like that, but it is kind of a cool little feature. If you open up messages on your iPad, um, you know, you can have a a whole bunch of messages like this. Here's some text from Lindsay and me. But, and that all looks normal. That's how it would normally look. But if you go over here and you tap on their name, now you get a bunch of information over here. here. Now, I've blurred this out so that you don't see her phone number, email, and home address, but that's what's over here. Some contact information. And right from messages, you can make a phone call, you can do a FaceTime call, or you can just tap on

9:16 the email button and send an email anytime uh that you want. And that's again right within the messages app. But here's the little uh thing I want to show you. So, if you can see this right here, again, it's very dark. I'm hoping Apple will make this a little bit brighter in the next iteration of the of the software. But this says um backgrounds. And if you tap on the background, you can now add a background to your text messages. So, I'm just going to tap on water. And if you tap yes, now you get water as a background. And you can add different backgrounds to different people. If you don't want it there, you can just go back to none. like that you can add. They've got some

10:02 choices in here. Like that's a sky choice right there. Evening sky with clouds. Or, you know, maybe you want just a color, something like that. Or maybe you just want none. And that's just an aesthetic change that kind of makes using messages a little nicer. I think I'm going to like it. Plus, the functionality of being able to get around into the contact info easily is pretty cool. So, this next little feature is something I ran across just on my own. I think I discovered it by accident cuz I don't think I've seen any videos on it on YouTube or any even Apple mentioning it. But, you know, if you open up, you know, I'll open up the calendar app and as as you know, you can kind of grab that handle and you can

10:48 just move this thing around any way you want and you can grab up here at the top and you can move it. used to not be able to do that. But if you want it full screen, all you got to do is just tap up here like that and it suddenly becomes full screen. And if you want to go back to the way it was, you can just double tap and now you're back that way. Before what I was doing was going up here and you know, well, it disappeared on me there. I would have to go over to the little stop lights right there and minimize it or do something there. tap and hold and find a size for it. Like here's a full screen right there. And that's, you know, you can do that and that's fine. But man, being able to just double tap and make it bigger or smaller

11:34 seems to be a neat little feature. Glad I found that. I don't know about you, but the Photos app really went over the cliff last year. I couldn't figure anything out about it. I had a lot of of viewers asking me to do videos on the Photos app, and I just couldn't find very much good to say about it. I I made a couple videos on it, you know, how to sort of maneuver around in it, but man, it was a pain. So, this year, um, they've sort of updated that, and I do think they've made it better. So, let me show you what I mean. I'm going to open up the photos app, and immediately over here, you have a sidebar. So, you have your entire library here already at the top. You have collections that you have at the top as well. And that becomes a whole bunch of different things over here. if

12:21 you uh want to view them that way. But what I like about this is that we just have a sidebar to get to things. So if you want to go to pinned photos, you can go to favorites like that. You can go to recently saved. You can actually get to a map of where your photos came from. You can take a look at videos, stuff like that. And and that's just really handy. It's over here on the side, too. You're not having to dig 27 levels deep like you had to with the last version of the photos app. And I just think that's really cool. You know, you can get to your albums here if you've created albums, which I have. There's Cooper and my grandson Justin and Scout. Um, you can get to those easily. You can get to

13:07 any albums that you've shared with anyone. And you can get to media types over here, too. And it's not that I use this stuff all the time, but I do use it every once in a while. And before it was just so hard to find that it just drove me nuts. But now I can just go straight to videos, you know, I can go to panoramas, just things like that. And I just think that is really cool. And I I'm going to end up making a video uh on the photos app soon because this is just a really new and much improved way to view your photos and to find stuff uh in the photos app. So, the last thing I want to show you is just how most of these features actually go to the base iPad. The iPad I was using before was

13:52 the M3 iPad Air from last year. So, it's got a powerful chip in it, but this is the 299 base iPad here. And almost all of these functions work um the same way. You get the phone app here. You get the photos app with all of the same functionality that I just talked about. You know, you get screens um just, you know, that move around and do exactly the same thing as the more expensive iPads. Um you know, you get the same features just like that. You know, the tap to go to full screen. You get the preview app. Um, the same as on the big iPads, the more expensive iPads. You get all of the

14:38 organizational setup. So, I think that Apple has now taken the the base iPad and really made it a powerhouse. There's there's very few things that distinguish this iPad from the more expensive iPads. Um, you know, there's some some Apple Intelligence features that don't make it here, but right now I'm not messing around much with Apple intelligence, but this has just become uh just a killer iPad. And if you have the base iPad, uh then you're you're set to go, I think. And I also think this is going to make the base iPad a much more attractive purchase going forward. I know none of these features in and of themselves are mind-blowing, but taken together, they

15:24 really do make using the iPad a better experience than ever. Okay, if you made it this far in the video, let me know in the comments below if you think any of these things will make a difference in how you use your iPad. Okay, that's a wrap. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video.