Out of curiosity I installed the 6th public beta of iPadOS 26 on my iPad Air 3 and, as expected, it‘s quite slow. Nearly everything seems to react with some delay, e.g. after tapping, wait for up to half a second for the UI to start it‘s „opening app“ animation, then add at least another second compared to OS 18 for the App to load, if it‘s not still in RAM, or wait for a second for the screen rotation to follow the physical rotation, there’s stuttery animation,…
I have seen no real function-breaking bugs so far, battery life seems ok-ish in relation to the more demanding OS. So the iPad still does everything it did before, and more. Finally having scaleable windows is great, even when limited by 3Gb of RAM - it‘s even one of the things that doesn‘t feel as slow as others, UI-wise. But, apart from that, OS 26 on an Air 3 imho breaks the immersion of a device that moves with the touch of your fingertips - it now feels more like an old, underpowered windows-machine - and the half-baked liquid glass look doesn’t help with that either.
I‘m not sure if this should have been released for the Air 3 in the first place. It’s a nice demo of ipadOS 26, but personally I‘ll go back to 18 and use that for the remainder of the hardware’s life.
I have seen no real function-breaking bugs so far, battery life seems ok-ish in relation to the more demanding OS. So the iPad still does everything it did before, and more. Finally having scaleable windows is great, even when limited by 3Gb of RAM - it‘s even one of the things that doesn‘t feel as slow as others, UI-wise. But, apart from that, OS 26 on an Air 3 imho breaks the immersion of a device that moves with the touch of your fingertips - it now feels more like an old, underpowered windows-machine - and the half-baked liquid glass look doesn’t help with that either.
I‘m not sure if this should have been released for the Air 3 in the first place. It’s a nice demo of ipadOS 26, but personally I‘ll go back to 18 and use that for the remainder of the hardware’s life.
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