Published on 24 September 2025 by Andrew Owen (4 minutes)
Let’s address the transparent elephant in the room first. I don’t love Liquid Glass. It’s fine on my iPhone. The corners are too rounded on my 6.8 inch CarPlay display. If you have regular icons on your desktop on an iPad Pro, it’s a disaster. The transparency goes too far and the background icons blend into the foreground icons. I tried switching off transparency. It looks horrible. I tried permanent dark mode. Still not great. I made the icons big. That helps a lot, but it doesn’t fix it. I did finally come up with a solution: only have icon groups on your home pages. Then there isn’t so much color in the background to clash with the foreground icons. And now I can live with it. Having solved that problem, I moved on to making my iPad dock closely resemble my Mac dock.
The icon clash is less of a problem on the iPhone, because when you zoom to a group the display is only three icons wide. I tried the mode where all the icons look like they are glass, but it’s not for me. I also tried the zoomed icons where the descriptions are removed, but then groups lose their captions. I can live with the extra rounding on CarPlay because I can now have HERE WeGo maps in split screen view. I really don’t love the extra rounded windows on macOS. It’s converging with iPadOS, but the widgets reminded me of Dashboard in macOS 10.4 (and I wasn’t a fan of them then). But now that VirtualBox supports ARM64 on Mac I can live with the minor annoyances.
Overall though, iPadOS 26 is great. The only feature my nearly seven-year-old iPad missed out on was extended desktops (which require an M-series processor). It still can’t edit 4K video either, but besides those two things, it can do anything a new iPad can. I’ve usually managed to get a decade out of every Mac I’ve owned, but I wasn’t expecting to get that kind of life out of an iPad. But over the life of the machine, where you might expect it to slow down and be less capable, the opposite has been true. This was certainly helped by AltStore PAL and Apple’s more relaxed attitude toward emulation. I’ve been using the iPad as my main device outside my day job since 2018, but this latest update makes it an even more compelling solution. Need to build some software? Use a build server. Or you could run macOS 10.1 (complete with Aqua transparency and widgets) in the browser and remind people that Windows Vista copied Apple.
Say goodbye to Stage Manager. Any app can now run in a multi-tasking window. You can finally have the YouTube app running in the background while you’re doing something else (instead of having to open it in Safari and pop-out the video feed). Windows get the familiar traffic-light buttons for close, minimize and resize. You can drag a very Mac-like menu bar down from the top of the screen. And if you have an M-series iPad, you’re no longer limited to screen mirroring on an external display. Also, if you use an external pointing device (I recommend the Magic Trackpad) you now get a pointier cursor in place of the old blob.
One of the earliest complaints from Mac users had its own initialism: FFF (“Fix f—ing Finder!”). In this iPadOS release, Apple has finally fixed the Files app. It now works much like Finder on macOS with more files on screen and resizable columns. Folders are collapsible with custom icons and colors. You can set default apps for various file types. And files are now generally easier to access.
The Preview app comes to the iPad, enabling you to view and edit PDFs. It can also scan documents, which may make Genius Scan obsolete for some users. It can auto-fill forms and export PDFs and images in other formats.
Also available on macOS, the Braille Access feature works with a supported Braille display to enables note-taking, document-reading, access to Live Captions and so on. There are also other accessibility improvements including vehicle motion cues and the ability to share accessibility settings with other devices.
Apple will continue to iterate on Liquid Glass, and the problems will eventually be resolved. Enabling users to set their preferred transparency level would be the quickest fix. But if you can ignore the shortcomings of the window chrome, there’s never been a better time to buy a refurbished M-series iPad.
