iPadOS 26 Beta Update

I’ve spent most of the past couple of weeks using my M1 iPad Pro, and have some follow-up on the iPadOS 26 beta that might be interesting.

Summer has been a good opportunity for going back to using an iPad as my main machine for everything except local development, so when I wasn’t using the Chuwi MiniBook X (which has become my personal travel laptop), I lounged about reading, writing, and remoting to machines on the iPad.

In a nutshell, this is where things are at right now:

• The performance issues I had with the first beta are mostly gone (I’m on the public betas, not the developer ones, so this is 3 versions in).
• I still don’t like the overall UI design and the way it wastes screen real estate.
• I still think the overall design aesthetics are bad. In particular, I loathe the overly rounded windows; they don’t even match the iPad’s screen corner radius and obscure important content in some apps.

Plus anything that places important actions in corners, like a Remote Desktop app, has to fight both the window corners and the stupid floating traffic lights.

That said, for all my non-coding work, I barely missed my MacBook at all, which I suppose is kind of a win for the new windowing system.

For my unconventional iPad stuff (terminal and remote windows), there were some improvements, but we’re still very far from having the kind of iPad experience I would like.

That doesn’t mean it’s all good. Although I have no intention of willingly using Stage Manager ever again, I still detest the way the zoomable “traffic lights” work. They just feel kludgy and fiddly to use with a mouse or trackpad, and the way they jump next to the menu bar for maximized apps still drives me nuts.

The new gestures are, as usual, inconsistent, undiscoverable and confusing as heck, but at least I can tile windows in easily with the keyboard (sorry, with an Apple anointed keyboard).

Multitasking is, as you’d expect if you use the term properly, incredibly hit and miss. I have to keep apps in the foreground for them to finish whatever they are doing, and pulling something back atop the window stack sometimes crashes or reloads that window, which is definitely not how computers should work.

But user multitasking (as in, switching back and forth between windows and poking at them before quickly moving on to something else) is certainly improved, although things still feel inconsistent.

Fortunately, Mail.app is still recognizable and works in mostly the way I’m used to (even if Apple persists in dumbing it down further and further). That alone has been the primary reason why I have not missed my MacBook that much, although Summer is typically a calendaring-free zone and thus a time when I don’t need many of the Mac’s built-in apps at all.

Safari still feels… bad. The toolbars are huge, cluttered and the menus don’t feel anywhere as usable as on the Mac, which I find detracts a lot from the experience of using what is most likely everyone’s primary application these days.

All the other applications are still a mishmash of old and new styling, and although Apple has clearly dialed back the glass effects across the board, they feel far too much like what I’ve come to associate with the mediocre Android look—i.e., full of unsophisticated, ugly rounded pills.

I’m not even going to talk about Settings.

Liquid Glass itself has become somewhat bearable, if only through repeated exposure. I find the “optical” effects cute, but frilly and hardly useful at all, and even after this long Apple still hasn’t fully sorted out legibility.

I am particularly affronted by notifications, which sort of “gel” into place now with blurry, far too transparent backgrounds that make text unreadable during the second or so they’re on screen.

But in general, pretty much all my previous aesthetic criticisms still hold, and I am not happy with it in that regard.

Expect more ranting when I am forced to upgrade my Mac and all this frippery and waste of screen real estate starts happening on my desktop…