“It is a foundational requirement that if you touch the screen and start to move something that it responds,” Federighi told Ars. “Otherwise, the entire interaction model is broken – it’s a psychic break with your contract with the device.”
It’s somewhat a dodge of responsibility, though. In my experience, other tablet OSes and hardware did okay with fluid window adjustment via tap without needing M-chip power. I imagine that what Federeghi’s talking about is the resizing of everything else that happens as you interact with iPadOS 26’s windows. It does look like an approach that will be the best for tablet windowing in the long-run!
Presumably ‘true multitasking’ will be slower and less smooth with the older models. Making it available for those models now, when there is an (expensive) upgrade path to the full smooth experience, is different from releasing it then, when the slowness and friction were the only experience available, as nobody could upgrade and even the best models’ experience wasn’t great.
The first is a reason for people with older models to upgrade, the second risks branding the whole experience a failure, and for such an important upgrade, people will be looking for reasons to brand it a failure. This feels more like a balanced call, than something with a definitely right or wrong answer and Apple were in a rather better place to make that judgement than me…
I’ve read that as many as eight screens will be available in iPadOS 26? So I was thinking perhaps four could have been offered earlier, if the iPad had been a priority.
Possibly: I don’t know, but I do suspect that this sort of decision is more complicated than people think, particularly when only Apple are in a position to know the technical details.
AFAIK, iPadOS 26 doesn’t allow full multi-tasking which would mean unlimited background task execution. It does have a very limited “finish this task and leave a small progress window open” feature, but that is very crude multi-tasking, if at all.