Full transcript of “iPadOS 26: THIS is the Update We Have Been Waiting For”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 I just got back from WWDC where iPadOS 26 was announced and I did not expect them to do this. I got about 80% of my wishlist in iPadOS 26. Now the footage you're about to see in this video is developer beta one of iPadOS 26. This video is sponsored by Surfshark. Let's get into it. Now, right off the bat, I just want to address Apple changed the version number of iPadOS along with all the other OS versions. It's now based on the year and it's not the current year it's announced, but it's like the year that it's going to be shipping for for the majority. So if you think about it, iPadOS 26 will come out around September. By the time like automatic updates and stuff kick in for a lot of people, they'll get it October, November.
0:46 So they'll have it for a majority of 2026. Now right off the bat, you're gonna notice the new design. This is called Liquid Glass. As a part of the Liquid Glass design, there's a lot more floating elements opposed to like, you know, static bars with like buttons built into that bar. There's a lot more kind of like floating elements and like it interacts with like the background and objects that are on top of it's, it's a very interesting design. It's not nearly as dramatic as I expected when the rumor said that we were going to get a big redesign this year. I was thinking a lot more iOS six to iOS seven, but I'm glad it's not that big of a jump. This is the thing I expect to get refined the most over the summer. So I'm not going to dive into this too deep. I just kind of want to call it out. It's going to look a little different.
1:32 Now, a part of iPadOS 26 is a whole new multitasking and window management system. When you tap on an app for a first time, it now opens in full screen, but you can grab a handle and resize it down into window size, something similar to stage manager, but this time it's completely fluid and you can move those windows wherever you want. There is no grid and there is no locked off size classes. You can move it to wherever you want and you can make it any size you want. There's also signal light controls for each individual window. The red button closes a window. The yellow button minimizes it. So it still keeps whatever you're working on active, but minimized. The green button makes a window go full screen. But if you long press anywhere on the signal light controls, you get options
2:18 for tiling and organizing your windows. There is a tiling system that is similar to what shipped in Mac OS last year. You can grab a window and push it into the side for a half view. You can push it into the corner for a quarter view, and you can push it up top for a full screen view. Now here's the cool part. This windowing system isn't limited to just like M series iPads. Any iPad that supports iPadOS 26 gets this windowing mode. Uh, when using this multitasking system, there is now an expose mode. So you can hit this button on the magic keyboard or swipe up from the bottom. And you'll see all the apps that are open in that windowing mode. And you can just jump between them. You can also command tab between windows as well. Let's talk about the doc for a minute. So there's a couple of new things with the doc.
3:04 You can add folders to the doc like you can in Mac iOS. So I have my documents folder, my downloads folder, and my video projects folder, just sitting there in the doc. So I can quickly jump to those files. If I want the cursor got updated to, uh, something a lot of people have told me they want it. It's now pointy. It's now a triangle more similar to the Mac where it's much more accurate. The point of it is the clicking point. You're not trying to figure out like the center of that circle on the old cursor. And then there is a menu bar now. Now, this looks very similar to the keyboard shortcut menu. Developers that had all this stuff in there, you will be able to go into the menu bar and you'll see those keyboard shortcuts. But you also be able to tap on those actions in there and be able to trigger things like a paste and match style and stuff like that.
3:53 You can get to this menu bar by either swiping down from the top or pushing your cursor up into the top. This video is sponsored by Surfshark. Surfshark is a VPN service that not only protects you, but your data. With Surfshark, your traffic is completely encrypted from your device to its destination, protecting your privacy. Whether you're connecting to a public wifi network in a is secure. This isn't a "well I have nothing to hide so I have nothing to lose" kind of thing. Data is the new gold and some scary people will do scary things to get a hold of that. Something I really appreciate about Surfshark is they don't keep logs. Keeping logs defeats the purpose of using a VPN. You can even use Surfshark to check out price discriminations based on regions.
4:39 And with Surfshark you can use it to change your location. So say you're traveling abroad you want to remote back into your home country and finish a TV show or say you're in the US and you want to check out what UK Netflix has to offer, you can do that as well. I really like Surfshark. In fact, as a service, I pay for myself. I'm about ready to kick off a whole bunch of summer travel and I have Surfshark installed on all my computers that are coming with me. Go to surfshark.com/lolly or use code lolly at checkout to get an extra four months of Surfshark for free. My thanks to Surfshark for sponsoring this video. So these next two things I did not expect Apple to ever do just because of the nature of the iPad. The first one is background tasks. When they announced this, I was like, what? This is actually, I'm so excited.
5:26 So the way this is, is if you are doing a big file downloads, big file transfers, you will now see a background task happening in kind of the live activity section. So what this means is like, I'm downloading a bunch of files from Safari, like a couple of gigs. This is going to take a few minutes. So instead of having to leave Safari up, I can go into Photoshop and stop, start working on something there. And you'll see that live activity up there and you'll see that still downloading those files. Now there's going to be an update to final cut later in the year. So background renders are supported as well. So you can start a render of a video, close final cut, or just get out of final cut and it'll go up into that live activity. It'll keep exporting your video and you can do other things like work on a thumbnail,
6:12 send some emails or whatever. There's also going to be an API for developers. So an app like Fairlight that does podcast editing, you'll be able to start your export of your podcast, get out of the app, go into something else, and it'll just keep exporting in the background. So exciting. And then speaking of podcasting, Apple specifically called out podcasters. They're adding a way to capture audio and video natively on the iPad. So a big issue with the iPad is it's only supported one stream of video or audio at a time. So if I'm having a call with some people remotely to record a podcast, I also wouldn't be able to record myself in a separate app. Now there's an option in Control Center called Local Capture that you can set up. And this will capture both audio and video.
6:59 So you can use apps like WebEx or Zoom, and this way you can have your call with your podcast hosts, or if you're guesting on a podcast or whatever, and then record that to files or wherever you wanna save that. There's also options to change your audio input, just like there is ways to change your audio output. This is gonna be a huge deal for people like me that just wanna be able to work from their iPads, but had limitations like this hard limitation of not being able to record podcasts. This is going to solve that for me. The Files app got some big updates. It now has an updated list view. It's first, there is collapsible folders, So you can just click the arrow next to a folder and see all the files that are in there. The columns with all the different data in there are now resizable.
7:45 So you can change that. You can click on those and sort by that. Tags now affect the folder color and you can add emojis to folders to kind of help sort them. I don't know if this is for me. I've never been a big tag person, but it is interesting if you do use tags. But the killer files feature is if you right click or long press on a file, there is now an open with option so you can pick which app a file will open with. So it won't just like try and guess because there is a big issue there. Like if you use the emulation app Delta, if you try to use open with on a markdown file, it would try and open it in Delta because there's some emulation file that is dot MD as well. And it just, it caused a whole bunch of issues. So what you can do to completely get around that now is you can right click on it and
8:34 instead of just doing open with every single time, you can go into get info and then you can set a default app to open with that file type every single time. So that way I can default markdown files to always open it obsidian or something like that. There's also now a preview app. This is something I've been asking for for a long time, a native app to deal with PDF documents. You can edit, you can annotate, you can mark all the PDF documents up in here. This is great. It has Apple Pencil support so you can mark up your documents with the Apple Pencil. This is fantastic. I'm so excited this is here. This has been on my list for a very long time. Shortcuts got some pretty big updates as far as actions go. This is something I've been like, kind of like, "Hey, what's going on with shortcuts
9:21 for a while now?" Shortcuts got some Apple Intelligence actions and there is image playgrounds actions so images and shortcuts. There's also writing tools action so you can use writing tools features in shortcuts. But the really cool action now is what's called use model. And what use model is is it's basically Apple's version of giving you a chatbot for AI. So there's three different options of models that you can pick from. There is the local Apple intelligence model that you can work with so it stays on device never goes to a cloud it's completely on So if you're worried about privacy or if you just want to do something really quick and use the power of your computer, use the on-device model. Then there's the private cloud compute model, which goes to Apple servers, but it's the whole secure server thing that they announced last year.
10:09 And then there's chat GPT if you want something even further. So there's three different models you can interact with. Then you get this text box. So you can tell it to do things just like you would with a chat bot. The Apple Pencil got a new tool. It's a read calligraphy pen. So for those people that have like fancy handwriting you can do that with good for you I can't do that, but I wish I could and lastly there are a few new apps coming to the iPad There is the phone app so you can make calls and it uses like your iPhone's number It's just like you know when incoming calls already come in now You can make outgoing calls and you have that nice setup there. There's also the games app so you can play games with other people like see challenges and stuff like that. And then finally, the journal app is finally on the iPad
10:54 and it has Apple Pencil support as well. So you can do handwriting journal notes and stuff like that, which is awesome. I haven't been this energized about the iPad in a very long time. I am so excited about iPadOS 26. I'm not kidding when I say they checked off about 80% of my wishlist, which is a lot for a single OS update. I cannot believe how much is packed into this update. I'm gonna be making a video when the public beta comes out where I'll kind of do a high level thing, but in the fall, of course, I'm going to have my very in-depth and detailed walkthrough for iPadOS 26.
11:50 Yn ystod y blyny
