Apple‘s iPad could have been the star. The tablet was, after all, conceived before the iPhone, but Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs ultimately pivoted to the iPhone, and the rest is history. The iPad became a supporting player in the Apple show.
When it launched in 2010, the iPad didn’t even have its own operating system. It was, for all intents and purposes, a giant iPhone, but one devoted to content consumption, meaning pursuits like reading and video-watching.
Even after it got its own platform, iPadOS, in 2019, and some quite startling power (the M4 chip launched on the 13-inch iPad Pro), its platform updates at each Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) were generally met with yawns, if not some frustration.
In the afterglow of an Apple WWDC 2025 keynote that unexpectedly made the iPad the star of the show, I spoke to two people, Kurt Knight, Apple Senior Director of Platform Product Marketing and Sebastien Marineau-Mes, Apple Vice President Software Engineering (System Experience), with intimate knowledge of the transformative nature of iPadOS 26, which will arrive first as a public beta in July and in full this September.
Skating where the puck is heading
One could argue Apple dug its own…er…situation by constantly nudging the iPad in the direction of productivity, first with its own iPadOS, then with a supporting Apple Pencil, and eventually even a keyboard and trackpad.
“This is a journey we’ve been on for a long time. It’s not something that happened with one release,” said Kurt Knight.
There’s no question that consumers appreciate the iPad for what it was, a touch-first gorgeous slab of metal and glass that, with one tap, let an app take over the entire experience. But change, which Apple has arguably engineered, has been in the air.
“We also saw, as people used iPad, more and more, and as the iPad hardware got more and more powerful, people wanted to do more and more things, and they increasingly wanted to do the types of things, say, they’re used to doing on their Mac,” said Knight.
With iPadOS 26, all iPads that can run the platform update gain decidedly Mac-like features, including truly flexible multitasking and windowing, a dock, menu bar, far more responsive and precise mousing, background tasks, and an updated file system.
It was such a shocking – and I’d argue welcome – announcement that there were audible gasps in the keynote audience, comprised of developers, analysts, and perhaps more skeptical journalists.
I was curious, though, about how Apple did this without destroying the iPad’s familiar and beloved tablet-ness. As you might’ve guessed, it was not easy. There were, Sebastien Marineau-Mes told me, a lot of open questions.
The effort to keep the iPad essence
“How do we maintain the simplicity of iPad and yet bring more and more of these productivity features and capabilities to it, and do it in a way that’s coherent? That was one of the, I think, key elements of the journey,” he said.
The other challenge was translating macOS productivity features to iPad. “How do you make multitasking and windowing touch-first instead of mouse-first?” said Marineau-Mes.
Unlike the Mac or even iPhone, both of which know their place, this platform update would require the iPad to live in two worlds: to both embrace accessories like a keyboard and trackpad, but still operate like a tablet.
“A good part of the journey,” recalled Marineau-Mes, “was understanding how we have a single model that can span, that will continue and really push the boundaries of what you’re able to do with iPad.”
Apple did not, for instance, simply port the macOS windowing system to the iPad.
“A lot of the work went into optimizing the windowing system. In fact, we redesigned the windowing system, the way that we manage multiple apps on iPad, to give us that scalability across different apps with multiple windows to bring that scalability to the entire iPad product line,” said Marineau-Mes.
Managing multiple windows, essentially, on-screen multitasking, is no small feat, either, especially once you go below the surface and start addressing system resources on a platform originally designed to do one thing at a time.
“I think the challenging technical work that really had to do with how we manage memory and processor resources, and really dedicate them to the apps that are most important in the moment when the user is working with different apps, and that was again a key ingredient that enabled this model.”
Apple also confirmed, though, that the system is smart enough to know when to release resources, such as when you flick an app or slide it off-screen.
The long game pays off
Apple developers, Apple confirmed, do not have to jump through any hoops to make windowing and multitasking work on the iPad for their apps.
“One of the things that we focused on in the last few years is making sure that apps were resizable, third-party apps were resizable, which is really important now in this world of where you can already resize every app,” said Marineau-Mes.
There are some new APIs, though, like the one for apps that asks, “Can you tell me when I’m being resized so that I can optimize my layout once the user is set?” Developers can choose the elements that appear as a window is resizing or leave the choice to iPadOS 26.
Playing the iPad platform development long game has its benefits.
“One of the payoffs of all of that work,” noted Knight, “is that all of the new multi-windowing features now work across all supported devices.”
And, yes, that’s right down to the iPad mini, although I joked with the Apple execs that trying to squeeze a bunch of windows onto that 8.3-inch screen just because you can seems almost counter to productivity.
One of the payoffs of all of that work is that all of the new multi-windowing features now work across all supported devices.
Kurt Knight, Apple Senior Director of Platform Product Marketing
“It’s really a dynamic system based on the memory and compute that we have, and not every app is equal in terms of how much they consume,” explained Marineau-Mes.
Apps you’ve opened but are not using aren’t necessarily closed. When you tap on the window or slide them back into view, “we kind of rehydrate it and get it running, and the system is really dynamic, where it tries to give the memory and the CPU to the apps that are most important to the user, in that moment,” added Marineau-Mes.
On the other hand, an iPad with a slower CPU or less system memory might balk at running the same number of windows as an iPad Pro.
No matter what you’re doing, though, iPadOS 26 will let you see which apps are consuming system resources in the Background Tasks live activities. It’s a small, blue window that’ll sit in the upper right corner, and is also not something that exists on the Mac. I pressed Marineau-Mes and Knight on whether that feature would ever make it back to the Mac platform.
Deflecting a bit, Marineau-Mes said, “We took the concept of the Mac we learned from it, and built it on iPad with what we think is a great model for iPad.”
Knight was a bit more direct, though he made it clear this was not a comment on the future of any platform, “Absolutely, we will do things on one platform that inspire us and educate us for what we can do somewhere else. And so we are constantly bringing up the learnings from one place to the next, and there’s things that start thinking is great for one platform that we realize we can bring over somewhere else. I mean, we absolutely do that.”
Beta leaves the door open
Even though iPadOS 26 fundamentally changes the iPad we’ve all known for 15 years, Apple did build in a control panel fail-safe that lets you toggle between multi-window mode and the more traditional iPad experience. It’s also early enough in the beta process that more changes could be forthcoming. There’s at least one I’d like to see.
I told Knight and Marineau-Mes that when I finally got an up-close look at iPadOS 26, I was concerned that the new menu bar is a little too small. I almost have to squint to read the text.
Knight described the menubar as “great for touch, and one that can work well with a more full windowed environment that people like and hide when you don’t want it.” I agreed, but still worried about the visual size.
Turns out that the size is intentional in that Apple developed it to work seamlessly right within the top of the status bar. That is a pretty small space, and maybe it’s not set in stone.
“We’ve been hearing positive feedback about it, ” Knight added, “Obviously, this is the beta period, where this is exactly the time that we’re looking for feedback, and we’re going to continue to make adjustments based on everything we’re hearing.”
So who knows, by launch time, you might have a larger iPadOS 26 menu bar or at least the option to choose a bigger one.
Apple was also intentional about adopting usage metaphors from the Mac. It’s not your imagination that screen gestures for managing windows come directly from the Mac.
This is the beta period, where this is exactly the time that we’re looking for feedback, and we’re going to continue to make adjustments based on everything we’re hearing.
Kurt Knight, Apple Senior Director of Platform Product Marketing
“Yeah,” answered Marineau-Mes, “because you also have [an optional] trackpad…and we’ve designed for consistency.”
Ultimately, iPadOS 26 brings the iPad as close to the Mac as possible without actually becoming a Mac. There’s a chance that so much productivity prowess could make choosing between a Mac and an iPad difficult.
Apple Global Marketing Director Greg Joswiak suggested to me during a separate discussion, and without facetiousness, that people buy both.
It makes more sense than you think when you consider Knight’s comments about iPad users.
“I don’t think of the different modes [of iPad usage], as for different people, I think of it for different use cases. I think the most pro among us still want to just sit back and you know, scroll through the Web, read a book, watch a movie, play a game,” said Knight.
A Mac user might not get all that from their laptop. But, similarly, there’s still a certain level of productivity that you can’t get unless you own a Mac. Of course, the productivity gap between device classes has narrowed significantly with iPadOS 26 and likely might do so more in the future.
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lance.ulanoff@futurenet.com (Lance Ulanoff)
