How iPadOS 26 Changes the iPad Mini

So the first public beta of iPadOS 26 is finally here for iPad. And just like iOS 26, MacOS 26, and everything else in Apple's ecosystem, everything's getting a redesign under Liquid Glass. Everything's rounder, everything's glassier, and everything's more transparent and blurrier. So when they did announce iPadOS 26, the whole story was about Liquid Glass, just like how it was for iOS. Personally, I'm not a huge fan like a lot of other people. I don't think the super Liquid Glass mode looks that great with all the icons like that. And just like a lot of other people, I did clown it a bit on threads. But I do like that we have more options. This is just pretty optional. You don't have to go with the fully Liquid Glass look. So you might think what Apple advertised for Liquid Glass might be ugly, but honestly, it gives you more options. So I honestly do like that. So Liquid Glass is like the headlining story for iPadOS 26 and iOS 26. But for the iPad Mini, there are a lot of new features that totally changes like how you can interact with the iPad Mini series. So basically, all the multitasking systems that were exclusive to the iPad Air and the Pro's are now on the Mini's too. And it's not just for the latest iPad Mini 7. It's also coming to iPad Mini 5th Gen and on. So that's about three iPad Minis and a couple of years back. Of course, split screen was always available on the iPad Mini. But what's coming here is finally stage manager. So stage manager was only exclusive to the Air's and Pro's, whatever had the M series chips. So it turns out you didn't really need a M series chip to do all that multitasking. You finally have it here on not just the iPad Minis that are considered underpowered, but also on regular iPads too. But even with stage manager for a small screen like this, I feel like stage manager does take up a bit more space than you really need to. So I really like the new windowed apps option. So basically, with this mode on, you can resize any app that's full screen into smaller windows and you can basically have as many windows open as possible. I know there should be a hard limit for how many apps you can have open at the same time, but I didn't really run into it yet. So I'm guessing it's a lot. What's really cool is that every app remembers how they've been resized. So every time you reopen the app, it goes back to the size that you had an app. So if you have a full screen app and you close a full screen app, it'll go back to being a full screen app. If you close a smaller windowed app and you close it, then when you reopen it, it'll come back to that same size. What's really great about having stage manager and windowed apps on the iPad Mini now is that there's a lot of apps that didn't support split screen multitasking. But now this lets you force resize any app that didn't support before. So weirdly, there's a lot of iPad apps that don't support native split screen multitasking like the YouTube app and even settings. So this this lets you resize anything, including the settings and YouTube. So if you had an iPad Mini and you always struggled with multitasking while having the YouTube app open, now you don't have to struggle with that. You can resize any app and then have it windowed and open a bunch of other apps so you can watch videos and do other things at the same time. So not only does iPadOS 26 make the iPad Mini a lot more fun to use, just in terms of daily entertainment, it also makes it a lot more productive. So I like writing scripts on the iPad Mini because it's so small I can carry it with my foldable keyboard. But I didn't like that I always had to play around with split screen multitasking, which felt really restrictive when I was writing scripts and organizing for YouTube videos. Now everything can be open as a window and kept as a window so I can easily write scripts and get notes from other sources. And if you do have a bunch of windows open and you're not sure what apps are open and what's where, then you can just swipe up to go to the recent apps and get a whole view of all your open windows. And with this, Apple also added the traffic lights that are on macOS as well. So just like macOS, it comes with the X, the minimize and full screen. So the X actually does close the app. So when you reopen it, it's refreshing it. Then for minimize, it just places the window back into your dock and then you can reopen it again and you're resuming what you've been doing. Then, of course, the green button just makes the app full screen again. Honestly, this setup makes more sense than how it works for macOS. So yeah, that's a nice option. And iPadOS 26 also has the mini bar just like macOS. So you just swipe down from the top or put your mouse cursor to the top and it'll pull up the mini bar. By the way, the cursor is now an actual pointer. It's not a circle blob that's just blobbing around. It's a cursor that has a lot more precision and control. So it's a lot better if you use a mouse. Anyways, for the mini bar, it reveals a bunch of new controls. I don't think a lot of the apps are optimized for this mini bar. It doesn't show a ton of options, but it's basically a way to get you to the app settings on every single app in a consistent way. So I do like this a lot. I feel like iOS's settings are kind of fragmented on where they're situated. So having this mini bar makes it a lot more unified. So the files app got a ton of hype for getting a bunch of new features that are becoming more like macOS. Folders are now taggable and customizable with their own colors and they're collapsible so you can easily see what files are in what. And you can set the default app for whatever file type you want open. And if you do use a files app a lot, what really helps is that you can finally pin your favorite folders down in the dock so you can easily open them. But I think the biggest winner here is that the preview app is finally available on iPad, just like macOS. So with just a tap, you can easily preview files like PDFs, images and other things like that really easily, just like how you can with macOS. So all this makes files a lot more convenient to use and a lot more closer to how we would like it on macOS. But the weird thing is still how files in the photos app are still separated. So if an image is saved into your files folder and it's not in your photos app, yeah, it won't appear in the photos app. So you still have to go to the files and save it as image. Then it will appear in your photos app. So that fragmentation is still weird. So when I'm editing a photo or video on my iPad mini, that's a little weird. I don't know if the files in my files app or the photos app. So that fragmentation is still there. So there's a lot more hidden and low key features that get added with iPadOS 26 for the iPad mini. But the features I mentioned in this video are pretty major for the iPad mini because it was the only iPad that was still behind and still like the old idea of an iPad. iPadOS 26 basically makes it on par with the Pro and Air in terms of feature set and productivity. And as you can probably tell, if you do use your iPad as the little laptop, so you bring a keyboard and mouse with it, this update makes that a lot more useful and more productive. So honestly, it's a little bit weird that Apple really pushed liquid glass as like the biggest differentiator during their announcement. But these multitasking features are really what I've been looking for on my iPad mini. And I think really changes what this thing is. This is the first public beta, so there is a ton of bugs. And it does lag, especially with all the new liquid glass animations and blurring effects and things like that. I wouldn't advise you installing this if you just want a stable device. But if you want something new and you want to just try the new multitasking features, I recommend trying it out. It really changes what this thing is. And I'm sure a lot of the lagging and animations will be fixed by the official release in September. So stay tuned for that. So those are all my thoughts about iPadOS 26 for the iPad mini. Let me know in the comments your thoughts about iPadOS 26 and if you'll be installing the public beta on your iPad. Make sure to subscribe to the channel if you like this video. And I'll see you guys in the next video.