PadOS 26 on the iPad mini shows us what’s next for iPhone: true multitasking, a macOS-lite mode, and deeper platform convergence.

Apple today released the third public betas of iOS 26 and iPadOS 26, allowing the public to test the updates ahead of their September launch.

I've spent a month with the new iOS 26, iPadOS 26 and macOS 26 Tahoe developer betas. Apple has just released the first public beta for all of these devices — after a month with the updates, here's why you should probably install it.

Apple’s latest developer betas make the iPhone quieter and quicker while the iPad grows up with real windowing, on-device smarts, and a privacy posture that lets you work rather than wrestle.I have lived on iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 developer betas through for the last few months ever since their unveil at WWDC 2026,

PadOS 26 beta 5 is now available to download, continuing to improve upon the multitasking features that will make the iPad a real laptop replacement.

The Stage Manager multitasking experience Apple introduced with iPadOS 16 in 2022 was a major step towards making the iPad’s software suitable for power users — but it was rather buggy at launch and not as flexible as iPad power users were hoping for.

It was one of the best-received pieces of Apple news I can recall. At the company’s WWDC conference last month, it announced that its iPadOS 26 software upgrade would give the iPad a powerful new interface closely modeled on the one offered by the Mac. The response can be fairly summarized as finally.

Window tiling is one of the more interesting additions to the iPad in iPadOS 26, but it might not be much of an upgrade over Stage Manager.

I installed the iPadOS 26 beta on my 13-inch iPad Air, and it seems Apple is finally delivering what the iPad has been missing.

Apple’s newest iPad software, iPadOS 26, isn’t officially out yet, but it may bring the iPad closer to replacing a traditional laptop. It’s not the solution for everyone, but it’s