There's an unspoken tension in all of Apple's iPad marketing. The company desperately wants to convince you that an iPad can replace a laptop. At the same time, it doesn't want you sidestepping the Mac lineup, so the iPad is deliberately crippled in some respects. You can't customize the OS very deeply, and apps don't have the full flexibility of their Mac counterparts. You can't even install anything without the App Store unless you sideload, or else live in the EU.
If you're bound and determined to make an iPad your primary machine, there are ways of making it behave as much like a Mac as possible. Apple is tweaking this to be slightly better in iPadOS 27. You can install the public beta right now, or wait for the finished version, expected by the end of September.
Quiz
The history of iPadOS
Trivia challenge
From iPad-flavored iOS to a desktop-class OS โ how well do you know the
evolution of iPadOS?
HistoryFeaturesSoftwareAppleUpdates
In what year did Apple officially rebrand the iPad's operating system from iOS to
iPadOS?
That's right! Apple announced iPadOS at WWDC 2019, officially splitting
the iPad's OS from iOS to give it its own identity. The move signaled Apple's commitment to positioning
the iPad as a distinct, more capable computing platform.
Not quite โ Apple unveiled iPadOS at WWDC 2019, with the software
launching publicly in September of that year. Before that, iPads simply ran iOS, sharing the same
versioning and branding as the iPhone.
Which major multitasking feature was introduced with iPadOS 13 at the time of the OS
rebrand?
Correct! iPadOS 13 debuted with…