Which means the iPad no longer sits between two extremes—instead, you switch between them. The iPad is now two devices in one, the iPad that Steve Jobs imagined and the machine that pros have begged for. A touchscreen consumption slate and a windowed productivity machine. An Apple spork.
So, yes, an iPad running iPadOS 26 may still contain the soul of the original iPad, lurking deep in Settings, waiting to be turned on. But the Jobs dream of a focused, elegant third device category between smartphone and laptop is effectively dead.
It’s made capturing, sorting, and finding my lectures so effortless that I can’t imagine going back.
You can now access and navigate trails offline, track your activities and monitor your performance all from your wrist.
Les Amis uses AI to pair users with similar interests and encourages them to join local events offered within the app, such as pottery classes, book clubs, wine tastings, and Pilates.
I think that one thing I could do for [Apple TV+] with this show was just to bring a real, old-fashioned craft of songwriting, which is dying out. That doesn’t mean that there’s not good songs these days, but there are different kinds of songs, far less about the craft, which is a good thing. But it makes me think of something specific: David Bowie and Bing Crosby sang that famous duet (“Peace on Earth”/“Little Drummer Boy”). Well, the story, roughly, behind that was that Bowie walked into this whole thing and was like, “I’m not singing ba rum pum-pum-pums.” And they were like, “Well, what if we made it something— a little bit expanded?” So a staff writer just wrote the half of the song. They call it a mashup, but the song didn’t exist. So the other one, where it says “Peace on Earth,” or whatever, the other they’ve mashed up, the staff writer pulled that out of his ass And that’s the kind of craft that existed in that era, where people who were just writing on staff were writing better than stuff that people make now.
Every company is trying to become an everything company, in other words, which means Apple’s moves here are less about forging new paths than filling gaps in its own omni-conglomerate portfolio (more urgently, perhaps, as its core product, the iPhone, approaches its 20th anniversary).
It shouldn't be difficult to decide whether you want to buy a MacBook, or if you want to buy an iPad. Or both, as Apple likes to remind us again and again.
If this decision ever becomes difficult, Apple has blew it.
With all the new multitasking and windowing stuff thrown in iPadOS 26, and with whatever new Mac devices Apple is planning for, the "No" answer that Apple has previously answered about merging Mac and iPad may continue to be a No, but an asterisk may increasingly play a larger role.
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