The latest iPad Airs and iPad Pros breathed fresh life into Apple’s tablets just as they seemed to be getting stale. Love them or hate them, the new Pros and Airs are pretty damn powerful, with the M4-powered tablet being practically just as capable as the most recent baseline MacBooks, but with the extra benefit of a beautiful OLED touchscreen. Now’s the time to get even more intimate with all your iPad is capable of.
If you are thinking of buying one of the new iPads, we have a beginner’s guide for you. If you want to know how to get the most out of the new Apple Pencil Pro, we have a separate review for that. But what if you’re truly trying to get the most out of your tablet? There are a few cool features and options that will make your app-based experience a little bit easier or, at the very least, a bit more interesting.
For better or worse, iPadOS is its own unique specimen sitting in the center of Apple’s self-contained software terrarium. It exists somewhere between iPhone and Mac, though in its effort to be a jack of all trades, it loses out on some of the ease of iPhones and the versatility of Macs. You’ll notice the power of the new iPads when you run games or intensive apps but not so much during regular day-to-day usage.
However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t a whole lot of interesting things you can still do with the Apple tablet, much of which has to do with the benefits of the latest version of iPadOS, 17.5. The new chip has more AI processing power under the hood, but there’s not much functionality to use that, at least not yet. We’re very interested in seeing what Apple has in store for WWDC, where we’ll likely catch the first hint of iPadOS 18.