iPadOS 18 tips, tricks & secrets
iPadOS 18 makes your iPad smarter, smoother and even more you. Here’s what’s new
Written by Carrie Marshall
Thought iPadOS 17 was pretty great? Then you’re going to love what happens next. iPadOS 18 takes the power and personalisation of iPadOS 17 much further, enabling you to make your iPad truly yours – and if your iPad could handle iPadOS 17 then it’ll work with iPadOS 18 too. iPadOS 18 comes with a host of new features that will turbo-charge your texting, power up your photos, make your gaming experiences even more awesome and make your smart home more helpful. Again and again you’ll discover – in ways big and small – that iPadOS 18 takes everything you like about using your iPad and makes it even better.
Which devices will work with iPadOS 18?
iPad Pro (all models)
iPad Air (3rd generation or later)
iPad (7th generation or later)
iPad mini (5th generation or later)
Image credit: Apple Inc
There are actually two iPadOSes. The initial iPadOS 18 release in September 2024 didn’t include Apple Intelligence, which is coming to the UK in December as a work-in-progress beta in iPadOS 18.2. Unfortunately, if you’re in the EU you’ll need to wait a little longer.
Apple Intelligence is Apple’s take on artificial intelligence and it makes Siri smarter, adds cool new tools and makes iPadOS even more fun. You’ll be able to get Apple Intelligence to summarise Messages and Mail, to create illustrations and even help your writing in apps such as Pages. In this tutorial, we’ll focus on the finished features in iPadOS 18: the useful improvements, the really handy new features, the more powerful personalisation and the improved accessibility. Let’s discover what iPadOS 18 can do for you. iPadOS 18 brings new ways to customise the Home Screen and Control Centre.
The smart stuff
iPadOS 18 is the cleverest, most customisable iPadOS yet
Apple Intelligence is Apple’s take on the artificial intelligence (AI) advances that are currently dominating the tech world. When it arrives it will deliver impressive new features: writing tools in Pages, summarisation tools in Mail, image creation in Messages, and a much smarter Siri that’s more knowledgeable and capable of handling more kinds of requests.
Apple Intelligence isn’t the same thing as ChatGPT, although access to that is also coming to iPadOS 18. Apple is clearly wary of giving people unfettered access to the full generative AI features that have led to faked photos and all kinds of copyright infringement. So, for example, the picture generation in the forthcoming Image Playground app won’t let you generate anything dodgy. However, you will be able to use ChatGPT to create and illustrate on your behalf, for example by helping you write a letter or story or illustrating an idea.