Today, Apple announced the release of iPadOS 18 during its busy WWDC keynote. This is the next major version of iPad software, and it will be available in a developer beta later today and free to all users this fall.
Here’s what iPadOS 18 is bringing to the iPad later this year.
Customizable home screen, control center and more
The iPad doesn’t have to wait to get many of the new customization features coming to iOS 18.
In iPadOS 18, you can customize the icons and layout of your Home screen with much more flexibility and tools than ever before. You can place apps anywhere on the screen without following the standard grid rules from previous versions of iPadOS. You can also change the colors of all your icons with a single theme tweak.
Control Center is also more configurable than ever before. Control Center now offers multiple pages of content and enables third-party controls for the first time, and you can customize which controls are available (and their size) directly from Control Center itself.
App improvements: tab bars and in-app animations
Apple highlighted how iPadOS 18 will include a number of improvements to the way iPad apps work. An example is the new tab bar found at the top of various apps for providing navigation buttons. The tab bar can turn into a sidebar menu if you need more options.
Another change is the addition of animations through various elements in apps.
Calculator finally comes to iPad
Apple has finally done it: the Calculator app is finally coming to iPadOS.
For whatever reason, Calculator, like Weather before it, was neglected by Apple for years because it wasn’t relevant to iPad users. Now, iPadOS 18 ends its absence in iPadOS
As you’d expect, Apple’s Calculator app looks a lot like its iOS companion, taking advantage of the iPad’s larger display to put more buttons and controls on screen at once. It also supports dynamic resizing when multitasking on iPad. Whether you use Stage Manager, Split View or Slide Over, you can make Calculator the best format for your needs.
Math Notes is Calculator’s main feature, a way to write and do calculations more naturally, and it’s available in both the Calculator app and the Notes app.
AI features galore, perfect for the M4 iPad Pro
iPadOS 18 benefits from the same set of AI (or ‘Apple Intelligence’) features that come to iPhone with iOS 18. Things like photo generation, Genmoji, intelligent notification summaries, the reborn Siri, and more will all be available on compatible iPads when iPadOS 18 ships.
Following the May introduction of an M4 iPad Pro and M2 iPad Air, many expected powerful new features in iPadOS 18 that would better take advantage of the iPad Pro’s M4 chip.
While iPadOS 18 doesn’t include any significant changes to the way iPadOS fundamentally works, nor does it enable the dream of running macOS virtually, its many AI-focused features will definitely benefit from the M4.
The M4 contains a Neural Engine that can process up to 38 trillion operations per second, making it the perfect chip for AI, according to Apple. So iPadOS 18’s suite of ‘Apple Intelligence’ features will be more powerful on the iPad Pro’s M4 than on any other device.
Handwriting updates with Apple Pencil
When using the Notes app, the Apple Pencil now offers more writing power thanks to the Smart Script feature.
If you’re not a big fan of the way your handwriting looks natural, Smart Script allows you to tweak it for a nicer design. That’s right, Apple will automatically improve your handwriting to look exactly the way you want it. You can even paste copied text into Notes in the style of your chosen handwriting.
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