There’s also a new Files app that makes it easier to access all the files saved on your iPad, or in iCloud, so you can quickly open documents you have saved on other computers. And you can add files or folders to your dock. It’s not perfect; I wish I could see drives or save to the desktop like on a Mac, but it’s fine.

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.

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.

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

But once I started using the iPad Mini, I found myself defaulting to the 9.7” iPad with its keyboard as my main productivity device. I found that in this case, a 90/10 rule kicked in.