Like iOS 26, iPadOS 26 adopts Apple's new Liquid Glass material, for an interface that's glossy, shiny, and more transparent than before.

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.

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.

Apple’s iPadOS 26 public beta is rolling out now, here are all the new features available in the iPad’s next major software update.

Stage Manager? Yes. Menu Bar controls? Of course. Expanded window tiling? That, too. iPadOS 26 has just tranformed the cheapest iPad for me.

We’ve been playing around with the developer betas of Apple’s latest software, and now that we’ve spent time with iOS 26, Liquid Glass and more on actual devices, we have thoughts. From representation in Genmoji and Live Translation adventures to Apple Intelligence musings,

PadOS 26 public beta 1 is now available to Apple Beta Software Program members - here are a few of the best features you need to try.

We took some time and tested macOS 26 and iPadOS 26, so if you’re on the fence about downloading those public betas, here’s a rundown of all the best (and work-in-progress) features we’ve used so far.