2025-09-18 02:59:00
Our iPhone buying decisions, which Apple product we would change colors, how often we manage storage space, and our current headphone situation.
2025-09-17 22:00:00
Dan and Moltz discuss what they’re looking forward to on Friday and general reaction to Apple’s new operating systems.
2025-09-16 23:45:51
In macOS 26 Tahoe, Apple has updated how it manages encryption keys in FileVault, the feature that protects your Mac’s data volume by encrypting it. Users with existing choices won’t be immediately impacted, but eventually everyone will need to use the new approach—which I think is an improvement. But if you rely on Apple to hold on to your Recovery Key for you, it’s time to start considering a new strategy.
The modern version of FileVault first appeared way back in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. (The first version of FileVault only encrypted your Home directory.) Today’s FileVault provides both boot protection and disk protection: you have to enter an account password before the operating system loads, and passing that stage unlocks an encryption key that provides access to the otherwise fully locked-down startup volume’s contents.
When you set up FileVault, macOS generates a Recovery Key for you. Normally, you decrypt the disk by logging in with your password, but if the portion of your drive containing login data becomes corrupted, the Recovery Key is the only alternate path to decrypting your data. This is a really rare failure, but if it happens, there needs to be an alternate path to recovery. That’s the Recovery Key.
Previously, you had two choices for how to store that key: You could view it once, ever, and be sure to write it down (or more properly, stick it in a password manager). Or you could opt to use iCloud escrow, where the key was stored as part of your data on Apple’s servers without strong security—anyone with Apple Account access could retrieve it from a locked Mac. Apple has changed the iCloud option in Tahoe, boosting security and changing how it’s accessed, which I am sure it did for better overall security and privacy.
However, this change means you are much more responsible for managing a critical recovery component with FileVault active. There’s some nuance to this, as I discuss ahead.
People used to be paranoid about someone stealing the contents of their hard disk drive. Maybe it was a fear of actual theft—someone stealing a computer from a business or home—but the big bugbear was you leaving a laptop behind or having it stolen from you while out and about. Only truly endangered or overworried people thought a criminal or government agent would enter their home and try to siphon their data—and, sometimes, that did occur!
The solution to this, in part, is full-disk encryption (FDE), where your entire drive is encrypted. This requires cleverness: some kind of post-boot but pre-full-operating-session mode had to be developed where a disk could be mounted and encrypted the first time, and then prompt for a key and be decrypted on subsequent boots and restarts.1
Encrypting an entire drive could be incredibly slow. However, this tedious operation typically happened once. After the entire drive’s contents were first encrypted, reading and decrypting or writing and encrypting provided a speed hit, but not much. (Spinning hard drives were already so slow that it was hard to notice the difference.) Some drive manufacturers even built FDE into their hardware, which sped things up until chip makers built encryption circuits into their CPUs, at which point operating systems could handle the whole thing speedily. Add the shift to SSDs into the mix, and fully encrypted drives read and write nearly as fast as fully exposed ones.
Ultimately, Apple decided to encrypt its computers’ startup drives all the time, first with the T2 Security Chip for later Intel models, and then as part of all M-series Apple silicon Macs. FileVault for those models is a boot-protection system; the encryption comes free and cannot be disabled.2
On Apple silicon Macs, FileVault offers operating-system-based FDE with a clever twist. With FileVault enabled, you no longer start up into macOS—it might seem that way, but that’s not what happens! Instead, the low-level boot process presents a screen that looks exactly like the login window—the macOS startup screen. When you enter your account password, the boot program validates it against a special data store, then unlocks your user data volume and boots the system seamlessly.3
Here’s how it works:
The next time you restart, now with FileVault enabled, you can only log in with an account that was set up with FileVault—those are the only ones that will be listed—though that might be all of your accounts. Once you choose an account and enter its password, the next stage takes place.
The boot process’s FileVault component validates the password against its cache. It uses that to unlock the encryption key for the startup volume, passing that along with authentication for the macOS account to the primary macOS system.
This hidden and mildly complicated handoff just works—until it doesn’t. The data that the boot partition accesses can be erased or its data corrupted. Who knows why! Or, more improbably, you have forgotten the password for any account that would let you log in—perhaps you hadn’t used that Mac for a while and failed to make a note in a password manager of the account’s password. But then you would find yourself without a way to unlock your startup volume.4
Apple prepared for that by creating something called the FileVault Recovery Key. This special key can unlock the drive’s encryption key when all else fails. But how can you ensure you always have that Recovery Key?
When setting up FileVault, you used to be presented with two choices:5
Use your iCloud account to store the key in escrow. However, the key is not end-to-end encrypted, so there was always the slight potential that the key could be recovered by anyone who gains access to your Apple Account and unlocks that escrow.
Neither choice was great; I always opted for the first. Apple apparently now agrees, perhaps because we are in a time of heightened government and criminal exfiltration of private data, often without warrants or judicial oversight, even in democratic nations. The company hasn’t said this, but I can read the writing on the wall.
Now the key can be shown after it’s first created, which makes it easier to retrieve it without cycling FileVault off and on to regenerate the Recovery Key. And, instead of using basic Apple Account encryption, protected just by a password, the Recovery Key is now stored in your end-to-end encrypted iCloud Keychain and accessible via the Passwords app.
The loss of Apple Account-based iCloud escrow means that you have to pay more attention to where the Recovery Key is stored. If your password can’t unlock your Mac, you can’t just log into your Apple Account: you need access to another trusted device, if using iCloud Keychain; or you need to have written down or stored the Recovery Key in a password manager that you can reach.
I was surprised in updating Take Control of Securing Your Apple Devices for Tahoe (see below) to find FileVault’s interface had changed! It had been static for years. Once I scratched at the surface, I saw what Apple had done:
In Tahoe, when the key is generated, it’s not shown and then discarded. Rather, it remains permanently available. Just click the Show button and use Touch ID or enter your account password, and it’s displayed again.
You can also find the Recovery Key in Passwords. With iCloud Keychain enabled, you can access it from other devices. At this writing, Passwords in macOS shows a complete entry with details including the Mac’s serial number (blurred for privacy in figure), while Passwords in iOS and iPadOS has a rudimentary entry that identifies it as a new Recovery Key password type but lacks identifying details—it contains only the Recovery Key.
I don’t believe this new approach provides any less security. If someone approached your unlocked Mac or another of your devices, they would still require your fingerprint for Touch ID, face for Face ID, or knowledge of the password used to start up the computer or device in the first place. Sheer proximity doesn’t let them magically extract your FileVault Recovery Key.
I appreciate that you can now recover the key without turning FileVault off and on, as well as access it from other devices with the protection of end-to-end encryption. This makes the whole approach friendlier, if boot protection could be described that way.
But it also puts key retention more fully in your court. If you formerly used iCloud escrow storage and turn FileVault off and back on, or are required to after a reinstallation, take special care that the Recovery Key is either in iCloud Keychain, in another pasword manager, or even written down securely and in a safe or other secure area. In any case, ensure you can access the key if your Mac won’t let you start up into your account.
My book Take Control of Securing Your Apple Devices explains FileVault in great depth, along with a lot of other highly useful information for keeping your iPhones, iPads, and Macs secure when in your possession or not, as well as protecting your passcode and passwords. A new edition came out just days ago with updates for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS 26!
[Got a question for the column? You can email [email protected] or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
Update: I discovered through a post by software developer Jeff Johnson after this column was published that Apple had added iCloud Keychain syncing! This isn’t noted in documentation, nor did I (nor colleagues I consulted) see the startup screenshot Jeff did. This column now incorporates that information. Thanks, Jeff!
sudo fdesetup validaterecovery at the command line, pressing Return, entering your account password, and pasting in the key. If it’s accurately stored, you see true; otherwise, false. ↩
2025-09-16 05:40:19
Apple’s new operating systems have arrived and we’ve got thoughts about iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe, and more. We also catch up on what we’ve learned since last week’s Apple Event.
2025-09-16 01:40:01
After a pretty big overhaul a few years back with watchOS 10 and a more modest update in watchOS 11, I’d describe this year’s update—now numbered 26, after the upcoming year, like the rest of Apple’s platforms—as more focused.
Sure, there’s a new Liquid Glass design that aligns with the rest of the company’s platforms, but the vast majority of big new features focus on a single app—Workout—which gets not only its own UI overhaul, but also a big new Apple Intelligence feature, Workout Buddy.
watchOS 26 isn’t without its tweaks and enhancements, though how much they help you may depend more on which Apple Watch you’ve got, as well as the ins and outs of how you use your watch every day. And, of course, there are a few features debuting across Apple’s platforms this year that show up on the Apple Watch too.
Like the rest of Apple’s platforms this year, watchOS 26 gets a new Liquid Glass look. You’ll see this most prominently on the Photos watchface, where the numerals of the digital clock are now refractive. It’s a look. I’m not sure I love it on the Apple Watch, but bear in mind that my daily watch, on which I installed the beta, is a Series 7 with a screen that lacks the nicer wide-angle OLED display of the Series 10 and later, so your mileage may vary.
Given the size of the numerals on the screen, I sometimes found them harder to read when against a bright or varied background. My usual watchface is a rotating set of photos of my wife and kid, which can have a lot of fine detail—I made a separate Photos face with landscape pictures, which ended up faring better (and definitely had cooler layering effects for the numerals).1
You’ll also see the new look in other places throughout the OS, such as notifications, the Smart Stack, and Control Center. Apps like Music and Podcasts pick it up too, though it’s pretty subtle (not something you can always say about the design on other platforms). Even the numeric keypad you use to unlock your Apple Watch has gotten a sheen of glass.
As with all of Liquid Glass, one of the challenges is that it can seem somewhat distracting: for a stated goal of getting the UI “out of your way,” it all too often seems to yell “Look! Look how cool I am!” And on the watch, where the UI is rarely overlaying actual content, I have questions about how much that stated goal really applies.
For all of that, Liquid Glass is generally less prominent on the Apple Watch, given the more limited screen size and content. The transparency also seems to have been toned down throughout the beta process, which has ended up with a more modest set of options here. And if you don’t like it for the clock on the Photos watchface, good news: you can easily switch the tint to any color you like.
Sometimes it feels a bit like Apple has one of those machines they pick lottery balls from, and every year it picks a ball to decide which app is going to be lavished with attention. This year it’s Workout’s turn. Not only does it get a big new Apple Intelligence-powered feature, Workout Buddy, but it gets an extensive redesign that reminds me of the overhauls seen by Fitness and Weather back in watchOS 10.
The stacked “cards” of workouts have been replaced by a full-screen model, though you can still cycle through the available options by using the Digital Crown or by swiping up and down. Rather than burying functions behind one of those three-dotted More buttons, as it previously did, Apple’s now divided them up into several different icons at the corners of the interface: in the top left you’ll find options to customize your workout view; in the top right, options for your workout such as goals or routes; in the bottom left, media options; and in the bottom right, notification settings, including Workout Buddy. And of course, there’s a big button right in the middle to start your workout.
While I may not be a die-hard exercise fanatic, I have long used the outdoor walk and outdoor cycling workouts, and lately I’ve been trying to run more regularly with the Nike Run Club app, so let’s say I dabble. I like some of the new features, in particular the ability to have a workout start playing a certain playlist—and keep in mind, that this is specific to a type of workout. You can have it start playing your running playlist for outdoor runs, or your podcast queue—or nothing—for outdoor walks. It can choose music it thinks is appropriate for the workout you’re doing or you can specify the audio you want. And, in the latter case, you’re not limited to Music—media from the Apple Podcasts app is also available, as is audio from third-party apps that support the requisite API.
I do think the different types of workouts require a few more taps than they used to, but I appreciate that you can create and store different workouts and then launch any of those at a tap, whether distance-, time-, or calorie-based, as well as more complicated workouts like intervals, pacers, or race routes.
And then there’s Workout Buddy. This feature compiles and analyzes fitness data from your previous workouts, compares them to your current workout, and then gives you feedback using one of three synthesized voices.2
Look, I may be a bit biased: as I said above, I’ve been using the Nike Run Club to get back into running recently, and it offers Guided Runs recorded by a real live human coach.3 I’m going to say, flat out, that a synthetic voice that keeps you updated on your progress is no substitute at all for a real person. While a human coach can offer thoughts and even emotional support, Workout Buddy is far more focused on metrics. It peppers those with occasional bits of encouragement, it’s true, but overall it’s closer to a spoken notification—there’s no soul there. Sorry, robots. You’re not quite ready to dream of electric sheep yet.
That said, I don’t want to discount that some people may find value in it. Perhaps it will help you avoid looking at your watch to see how far you’ve gone. Perhaps those little bits of encouragement are all you need. And, as always, Apple’s feature could be an on-ramp for people who might otherwise never try something like this, and could prompt them to check out other options.
But there are some limitations to the feature that might also impact people: for one, it requires an Apple Intelligence-capable iPhone to be near your Apple Watch during use, so you’ll need at least an iPhone 15 Pro or later in order to use it. It also means you’ll have to carry your iPhone with you on your workout, which might be a non-starter for some folks. (Personally, I prefer to run with just my Apple Watch and AirPods Pro.)
Starting in watchOS 10, the Smart Stack redesigned one of the main aspects of the Apple Watch experience. No longer were you limited to either small complications on the watchface or a full-blown watch app.4 Instead, you could scroll down to view a variety of widgets that apps could offer, including Live Activities that showed up when appropriate.
In general, I’m a fan of the Smart Stack widgets. For me, they strike a nice balance of providing more detailed information than a complication without having to launch a whole app. watchOS 26 adds a few small improvements to the Smart Stack to try and make it more useful.
First, there are Smart Stack hints. These take the form of a little icon that pops up when watchOS detects you doing something where you might want to open an app. For example, if you open the Camera app on your iPhone, you’ll see a little icon prompting you to open Camera Remote on your Watch—no sound, no haptic, just an unobtrusive icon.
But here’s the first headscratcher. Tapping that icon does not open the Camera Remote. Instead, it scrolls you down into the Smart Stack to a full widget that you can tap to open the Camera Remote. I suppose that this is in line with it being a gentle hint, but it feels as if I’m being prompted to do a thing; it shouldn’t take two taps to do it.
The next frustration is that, in my time so far with the watchOS 26, the Camera Remote is the one Smart Stack hint that I’ve gotten to appear reliably. (I did encounter the Backtrack hint while I was traveling with a bad cell network, but not at a time and place where it was particularly useful.) Apple says that the system uses “improved prediction algorithms that fuse on-device data and trends from your daily routine” to surface suggestions, but so far, I guess I don’t do anything regularly for the system to provide hints.
The other tweak to the Smart Stack is equally small, but more welcome: some widgets with multiple types of data on them are now more configurable. The prime example here is the Weather widget, which defaults to three gauges showing temperature, wind speed, and air quality. Personally, I rarely care about windspeed, but I do care about the UV index; now I can just swap that in, rather than having to add an entirely separate Weather widget for it. The Home widget similarly lets you choose a specific accessory or scene.
I’m not sure how many other widgets take advantage of this particular format and thus will offer these configurations, but even just offering it in the Weather widget is a tangible improvement for me.
As with most years, Apple’s rolled out a few new watch faces with watchOS 26. While they were shown off in conjunction with the newly announced Series 11, they’re available on earlier watches as well.
Flow offers a colored blob that floats around behind Liquid Glass numerals. This is…not my favorite, not least of all because I find the default typeface (styled “I”) nigh indecipherable at times; the other option (cleverly named “II”) is better. It’s a bit like a lava lamp. It offers configurable colors, and the option to have the colors in the background or in the numbers themselves, but no complications.
Exactograph is the other end of the spectrum: a busy multi-dial face that turns seconds, minutes, and hours into three concentric circles of tickmarks. It’s a bit intense, and then it gets more weird if you tap on it, at which point it explodes either the second hand or the second and minute hand wayyy out, as though the smaller circles are gears traversing their circumference. It’s an odd one, but certainly eye-catching. You can choose from the exploded or non-exploded views in a variety of color palettes, plus there’s room for four complications around the edge.
There are two additional watchfaces available to specific models: the Ultras get a Waypoint face that shows nearby points of interest, and the Hermès watches get the Hermès Faubourg Party, with whimsical animated characters. Having neither of these models, I can’t speak to them personally.
It’s at this point become rote to be disappointed in Apple not opening up watchfaces to third parties. The company has at least updated some older watchfaces to support the ticking second hand in always-on mode enabled by the latest displays, which is something, but hope for the ability to make our own watchfaces continues to be a pipe dream for now.
One feature coming to iOS 26 was announced as part of the new Apple Watch Series 11/Ultra 3/Apple Watch SE debuts, but it actually works on watches going back to the Series 6: Sleep Scores. Taking a further step in the realm of sleep tracking, this feature lets you know about the quality of your sleep on a 0-100 scale.
While I do have some questions about the utility of a 100-point score (“Hey Jim, how are you?” “Not great, Bob. I only slept a 57 last night. You?” “I got a 62, Jim. Eat it!”), the broader rankings—Very Low, Low, OK, High, and Excellent—do at least provide a good snapshot. I also appreciate that it breaks out what contributes to the score, including duration, your relative bedtime, and the quantity and length of interruptions ot your sleep.
Moreover, the score is based on information that’s already been collected if you wear your watch for sleep tracking, which means that you can see a retroactive history of your sleep score; I was able to see some of mine going back to my last bout of sleep-tracking in February 2024.
The information is available both as part of the Sleep app on the Watch and on the Health app on your iPhone or iPad.
In addition to a few of the features available across several Apple platforms this year—Call Screening and Hold Assist in the Apple Watch, Live Translation and backgrounds in Messages—there are a handful of other features that come to the Apple Watch.
After a decade of absence, Notes finally comes to the Apple Watch. You can view existing notes, add a new note with Siri or via the keyboard, and trash or pin notes. But while you can interact with certain elements—most significantly checking off checklist items—you can’t edit the content of your notes. That’s probably fine since pecking out changes in the onscreen keyboard would be a pain.
There’s a new gesture, Wrist Flick, which lets you quickly dismiss a notification or mute calls. It’s a handy feature for those times you can’t tap the watch—like when invariably I get texts while washing dishes—but it’s only available on the Series 9 and later (not including the SE) and the Ultra 2.
For those absolute monsters who don’t mute their Apple Watch, a new automatic volume adjustment feature promises to detect the noise level of your environment and tweak your watch’s volume so that you don’t get a loud DING when you’re someplace quiet. Or you could just leave your watch on silent like a good person.
Apple added another health feature alongside its recent watch announcements: Hypertension alerts. Not unlike the way Apple does sleep apnea detection, this feature will work over time, tracking your blood vessels’ response to your heartbeat and using an algorithm that Apple has developed based on its health studies. If it detects evidence correlated with hypertension, it can let the wearer know and suggest they take their blood pressure and consult a medical professional. The feature, which is pending FDA clearance, works on the Series 9/Ultra 2 and later. It’ll also require 30 days’ worth of data, so no chance of testing this out quite yet.
Even Apple has realized that the watchface situation has gotten overwhelming, so it’s reorganized the Face Gallery (which you see when you add a new watchface) into categories, including new, health and fitness, photos, clean, data-rich, and more.
For users of Live Listen, you can now view a live transcript of what’s being heard right on your Apple Watch, including the ability to jump back ten seconds if you missed something. It’s an impressive piece of technology, hopefully helpful to those who need it.
While this year’s Apple Watch update might be on the smaller side, there are definitely things to like about it. Liquid Glass feels more tasteful here than on some of Apple’s other platforms, and it’s simply not as prominent.
Unfortunately, this year’s biggest feature, Workout Buddy, is something that may put off more users than it entices, but as always, it will be interesting to see how the general populace reacts to it.
But the smaller features sprinkled through the platform might end up being the most meaningful. Between Smart Stack improvements, the appearance of Notes, and the new Sleep Score feature, there are a lot of targeted improvements that users will appreciate.
Not every year needs to be a blockbuster revision of everything that comes before. Sometimes quality of life improvements are worth it just for that: improving your life’s quality. And for a device that often goes everywhere with people, which they wear right on their body, improving the quality of life can have a meaningful impact.
2025-09-16 01:20:18
iPadOS 26 is one of the biggest updates in iPad history. There’s a new design that changes the look and feel of the whole interface, yes, but also the introduction of a whole raft of productivity features that lift the iPad closer to the Mac—for those who want to use it that way.
It’s like a weight has been lifted from the soul of the iPad. It remains a very nice device to use in full-screen mode with all the simplicity attendant to that mode. But via a single tap, it can also transform into a multi-window, multitasking device that’s appropriate for the Mac-class hardware underpinning today’s iPads.
The iPad no longer feels like it’s trying to live up to the promise of being the Future of Computing; with iPadOS 26, it’s more comfortable being itself.
Apple is introducing a new design language across all its operating systems for the ’26 “model year,” and that means iPadOS has picked up a whole new look around the idea of “liquid glass.” Basically, Apple has updated a lot of its controls to match the metaphor of sliding glass overlays that distort the content behind them to provide an effect of depth and the illusion of an actual material. I think it’s probably best on the iPhone, but the metaphor works pretty well on the iPad, too.
At its best, when elements are animating and flowing into and out of different groups with liquid animations, it can be beautiful. In other contexts, the controls can be hard to read because they’re too transparent—though Apple is doing a lot of work to enforce legibility by dimming backgrounds or making controls more opaque as needed. I expect it will evolve over time to smooth things out, but I have found it entirely usable and sometimes even enjoyable.
There’s also a new icon format that spreads across Apple’s operating systems this fall. Going beyond previous attempts at allowing user customization, this approach uses vector graphics in specific layers to create glassy effects (of course), generally attractive dark and light mode icons, a tinted icon style that’s much nicer than the previous attempt, and a new desaturated “glass” icon view.
I think I prefer my icons old-fashioned, but I could see scenarios (wallpapers with very bold, bright colors) where the new approach to icon tinting would tempt even me to switch.
One big side effect of the new OS design is that the developers of your favorite apps are going to spend a lot of their time updating their apps to adopt the new design. And because it’s new, that means there are bugs and quirks and areas where Apple hasn’t properly anticipated the needs of those developers. As a result, third-party apps may look and feel a little weird for a while. There’s also the knock-on effect of developers spending time adopting the new design instead of building new features, so expect your favorite apps to maybe not get as many flashy new features for a little while.
Apple’s goal with this design is to make it look cool to the casual user, and I think it does look pretty cool. Also, in practice, I don’t think it’s particularly affected the usability of iPadOS—things look different, but they pretty much work the same, and that’s comforting.
There’s been a lot of discourse over the summer about this design, and we all owe app developers large amounts of empathy and understanding as they try to figure all of this out. But for the average user, the new design is navigable. You might like it or not, but it’s not going to stop you from using your iPad.
iPadOS 26 will be remembered as the update where Apple declared bankruptcy on all its previous attempts to do windowing and multitasking on the iPad, and released an entirely new windowing system that has been unabashedly inspired by the Mac.
In earlier eras, Apple reluctantly accepted multitasking by introducing Split View and Slide Over, and then later Stage Manager, which created a windowing system that was not Mac-like at all. Windows couldn’t be resized freely, or placed freely, or overlap other windows in the wrong way.
Apple is over it. Go ahead, put those windows wherever you want (even hanging off the side of the screen), resize them to any size, put other windows on top, and even control them using the three familiar stoplight buttons in the top left corner. It works more or less the same as the Mac, and it works on all iPads that can run iPadOS 26, even the iPad mini. It also works on external displays, and I admit to forgetting more than once that I was even using iPadOS when it was attached to my Studio Display.
There’s a limit to the total number of active windows you can have open at once, but I certainly never felt constrained in my use on a 13-inch iPad Pro, or even on that 27-inch Studio Display. If you’re an inveterate window-keeper-opener, you might feel differently, but it all seemed perfectly normal to me. Apps that have been built for prior forms of iPad windowing work well with the new system.
There are plenty of ways that iPadOS stands ready to assist you with window management, too. Stage Manager is no longer a windowing system, but just an optional window-collection utility like it is on the Mac. You can click and hold on the green stoplight button (yep, those familiar Mac elements are now part of iPadOS) in any window to be offered a set of tiling options, just as on the Mac. And a full suite of keyboard shortcuts will move windows around, too, from Globe-F to toggle full screen to more esoteric ones like Globe-Control-Right Arrow to tile your window on the right half of the screen.
If you’re not using a keyboard, you can also flick windows with your finger to manage them. Flicking to the top makes them go full screen, and flicking to the sides will tile them on half the screen. Windows remember their previous position and size, so if you drag a window back out from a tiled position, it goes back to its previous state. Double-tapping on the top of the window will also toggle between full screen and a floating window.
And there’s more. Swipe up a little from the bottom (either on your trackpad or with your finger) and Exposé kicks in, showing all your current open windows so you can pick the right one to bring forward. Swipe a little further up and you get access to your home screen, including widgets. (You can also click on the wallpaper to do this.) The windows all slide to the sides of your screen, so you can bring them back with one tap, or swipe up again to hide them entirely. You can also tap on an app in the Dock to bring up all its open windows.
It’s really a flexible set of controls that works well whether you’re using a keyboard and trackpad or your fingers. Not only does this all work well, but it will be instantly familiar to Mac users. After a decade of Apple resisting the Mac as a model for iPad multitasking, it’s finally given in to the obvious: the Mac is great at this, and if Apple can’t come up with something better for the iPad, then it should implement the very best windowing interface in the world. The iPad isn’t becoming the Mac, but it’s built a windowing system that works really well, and that’s thanks to the Mac.
And if you don’t want to use windowing on your iPad? Well, the feature is turned on and off with a single button in Control Center. Just as I use my iPad with the Magic Keyboard only a small portion of the time, I use my iPad in multi-window mode a very similar portion of the time. The rest of the time, it’s in single-window mode and works just fine.
I’ve heard from some fans of Split View and Slide Over, two original iPad multitasking features that have been killed in iPadOS 26. While I understand their frustration, it’s quite easy to tile two windows in iPadOS 26, at which point you’ve basically got Split View.
The loss of Slide Over, however, strikes me as an oversight on Apple’s part. It turns out that a lot of people use Slide Over as a simple way to keep an app hanging around for quick access, a very simple form of multitasking, and multi-window mode is overkill for this use case. I understand why Apple killed Slide Over: it was very easy for novice users to accidentally enable the mode and pretty non-trivial to deactivate it. (Perhaps Apple should consider a new approach that lets users dock an app off the side of the screen, as you can with a picture-in-picture window.)
In iPadOS 26, Apple has also changed the pointer it introduced in 2020. The old primary pointer was circular, and implied a level of precision similar to that of a fingertip. The new pointer is shaped like an arrowhead, similar to the one found on the Mac. The implication here is that iPad apps can receive more precise input when driven by a pointing device, and I don’t mind it. Just as before, the iPad pointer is free to morph into other shapes depending on context—for example, it’s still the existing I-beam cursor when editing text.
Speaking of the Mac’s influence on the iPad, it extends beyond windowing to… the menu bar. That’s right, after teasing us with the possibility for four years, Apple has finally decided that apps in multi-window mode can offer a menu bar. It only appears when you’re in multi-window mode, and then only when you activate it by moving the pointer to the top of the screen, swiping down with a finger, or typing Command-shift-slash to search an app’s menus. And it’s centered, which is… not quite Mac-like, but close enough.
Currently, the contents of that menu bar are mostly the things that were previously on offer when you held down the Command key to see what keyboard shortcuts were available, but app developers now have access to an API that lets them offer more complex sets of menu items.
I love this idea. For years, I’ve been using iPad apps that are sometimes almost as dense and full-featured as their Mac equivalents, and frequently find myself baffled about just where a certain feature might be hidden behind an icon, inside a tab, or down at the bottom of a scrollable pane. Organizing functions in menus is another classic Mac feature that really does make sense for complicated software—and even for relatively simple stuff! It just takes a little bit of a mental shift. But within an hour of installing the first iPadOS 26 beta, I found myself invoking a feature of an iPad app from the menu bar.
In fact, I think Apple should go one step further and let users opt to keep the menu bar visible all the time. The status bar items on the top left and right of the screen are basically the same height, so why not? Perhaps in the future, Apple could also give users more control of what appears in the status bar, following its own lead in allowing Control Center items on macOS to be arbitrarily added or removed from the menu bar itself.
If there’s been a recurring theme in my attempts to use the iPad as a productivity device, it’s been that things that take no thought or time on the Mac often take a great deal of thought, time, and possibly the addition of expensive accessories to accomplish on an iPad, if they can be accomplished at all. There are a bunch of small features in iPadOS 26 that add up to the lowering of numerous barriers that once caused iPad users to stumble when the Mac allowed them to run.
For years, those of us who do audio or video work have lamented that iPads (and iPhones) are unsuitable for a lot of podcasting/video work because they aren’t able to record audio or video locally while also participating in a call over an app like Zoom. In iPadOS 26, Apple has solved the issue by adding support for local background recording.
It’s a relatively simple interface: Choose your input microphone, turn on local recording in Control Center, and your call will be saved when you’re done. It won’t work when you’re not actively using a microphone (and optionally, a camera), so the feature can’t be used for snooping. In all of my testing, it’s worked quite well, though I wish it offered a systemwide gain adjustment. (I found that one popular microphone, the Audio-Technica ATR-2000, was ridiculously overmodulated on iPadOS 26, even though it works fine on the Mac—and there was no way to fix it.) But beyond that, it just works—and means that podcasters can just bring an iPad or iPhone and a USB microphone and get their jobs done.
Ever since the introduction of the Files app, Apple has been slowly tiptoeing toward the idea that some iPad (and iPhone) users might need to manage files in a filesystem the same way that Mac users do. The Files app in iPadOS 26 has been upgraded to feel more, shall we say, Finderesque. As someone who lives in List views, it’s a relief to see that Apple has let the columns in this view be customizable, so I can sort my list by creation or last-modified date, while seeing the type and size of the files, just the way I like it. Files also displays folders with a disclosure triangle, which you can click or tap on to expand and see the contents inside that folder. Again, not a revolutionary idea—but it wasn’t there, and now it is, and that’s progress.
Another huge feature that Mac users take for granted, but wasn’t really a part of iPadOS before, is the ability to open files in specific apps and to set default apps for file types. To assign all your files to a specific app, just select one, choose Get Info, and choose a default from that panel. This, combined with the arrival of the Preview app on the iPad, has really changed how I work. It’s so much easier to double-click on a PDF and then do the same with a Markdown file and get to work, making the “classic” oblique app-centric iPad approach — launch each app, navigate through a bespoke file picker, repeat — feel archaic.
There’s also a major improvement when it comes to long file copies, especially ones happening across a network: they generate a progress window that can be made into a Live Activity, allowing you to leave Files while you keep tabs on the progress of the operation.
This is part of a larger upgrade to iPadOS that allows apps that perform lengthy, finite tasks to do so in the background. Previously, apps with lengthy exports—Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Ferrite Recording Studio are good examples—had to be kept in front until they were done with their jobs. That sort of single-mindedness would never fly on the Mac, where you can always switch to another app while you’re doing an export (or file copy). That ends in iPadOS 26, and the first time I exported a podcast edit from a version of Ferrite that supported this feature was almost magical. What do you mean, I can do more work while the export is happening? It’s so delightful for something so commonplace and frictionless on the Mac to reach that same level of frictionlessness on the iPad.
With iPadOS, Shortcuts takes a huge leap forward with the introduction of the new Use Model action, which lets you tie in workflows to Apple’s on-device and Private Cloud Compute AI models, as well as ChatGPT itself. Over the summer, the Six Colors staff built several automations using this feature, and while the results can be somewhat random and take some effort to process, they can also enable the creation of workflows that were previously impossible using Apple’s existing tools. Shortcuts also now includes pre-baked Apple Intelligence features, like Writing Tools summaries.
These models will transform some automations. Let me give you an example: When I write on my iPad, I still need to upload images to my server to be displayed along with the article. I built a workflow in Shortcuts to do the job, but given the inscrutable hidden filenames of items in the Photos library, I had to build in a step where I see a preview of my image and give it a filename.
I rebuilt this workflow in iPadOS 26 using Use Model to pass the image to Private Cloud Compute and ask it for two responses: a text description of the contents of the image and an appropriate filename. While I had to add some validation to avoid weird responses, the results were instantaneous: I no longer need to name the files, because Private Cloud Compute does the job perfectly well. Uploading images from my iPad just became much easier, and that’s just my first step.
Of course, relying on cloud-based services can come with some drawbacks. Late in the iPadOS 26 beta cycle, Private Cloud Compute just stopped working with my Shortcut. I was able to resolve the issue by switching to ChatGPT. Later, I was able to switch back, and it worked. Why did it stop working for a few days? Who knows.
This points out a larger issue with Shortcuts in general. If Private Cloud Compute returns an error, there’s nothing I can do about it—Shortcuts doesn’t offer error handling, so I can’t design my shortcuts to switch to ChatGPT if Private Cloud Compute fails. As clever as Shortcuts can be, the app itself should be a lot better and its syntax more capable. In that way, the addition of the Use Model command has just made me more aware of all the ways that Shortcuts feels like it’s frozen in amber.
There are a few notable app additions in iPadOS 26. Most notable is probably Preview, a longtime Mac favorite that’s finally making the move to the iPad. I’ve written a lot of this review in multi-window mode with both a text editor and Preview open, and it’s just a pleasure to use compared to using the previous stock choice, Quick Look mode inside the Files app. It feels really good to see a PDF in Files and tap to open it in Preview.
Preview’s a great utility for viewing PDFs and other files, and on the iPad, it gets access to mark-up features that are especially useful to users of the Apple Pencil. I’m sure dedicated PDF marker-uppers have their own preferred apps to do the job, but as a person who very occasionally has to mark up a PDF, the ability to just jump in with the Pencil and start to mark up the document is really nice.
The Journal app, which was introduced by Apple in 2023 but only on the iPhone, has come to the iPad and the Mac this year. I never really used the Journal app on the iPhone, because for me the iPhone is the device I use when I’m out and about—and too busy for something like journal entries. The iPad, on the other hand, fits perfectly in my life for those more laid-back, contemplative moments. I’m glad the app has made the move… but seriously, what took it so long? It took two OS cycles to put an iPhone app on Apple’s other platforms?
This version brings the addition of a Phone app to the iPad for the first time, which is good, since you’ve been able to make or take phone calls (via your iPhone) for a while now, but the interface was deeply weird. The Phone app interface in iPadOS 26 takes some getting used to, but it’s good to have all that stuff in one place, and it’s a good reminder that all of Apple’s devices are pretty good at using your iPhone to make or answer phone calls if you need to.
The new design is one of the least interesting things about iPadOS 26. This is an update that dramatically improves the iPad as a tool to get things done—if you want to do those things. Apple’s new windowing system is great, embracing all the things that make the Mac work without forcing it on people who don’t want it. The improvements to Files, support for local recording, and the new background tasks Live Activity help create an iPad that just feels more ready for professional productivity tasks.
Not everyone wants to use the iPad in a professional productivity context, and that’s fine. But if Apple’s going to keep selling the iPad Pro at prices higher than a MacBook Air and approaching that of a MacBook Pro, with the hardware of those computers inside, it needs its software story to match up. I know it seems hard to believe, but iPadOS 26 may end that narrative once and for all.
