iPadOS 26
The weird thing where it turns your normal photos into a parallax hologram is just incredible – slightly broken but when you see it in action, it actually is amazing.
I went ahead and installed the developer preview on my iPad.
Holy crap guys (non-gender specific), that glass effect is incredible when you see it in person. The new reader mode which will read the screen for you when you make the gesture is pretty solid, and the new voice clone is really nice.
The journalling app finally let you use the pencil so that you can write, and there's now a dedicated phone app for handling all of the phone calls that are being piped in from your iPhone.
One of the big features is that preview, the app, has been imported from the desktop. Apple seems to think that this is mainly going to be for annotating PDF files, but it's also an incredibly good way to grab a picture or a screenshot, and then crop it and add text or captions or other items – or just resizing an image without having to send it to the Photos app.
Even better, the ambient background sound list got a major upgrade: More rain sounds, steam, boats, busses and trains and a "babble" option to add a coffee shop vibe... Plus an EQ so you can tweak it for bass or treble and smooth out those jagged audio parts.
On the phone side, which I haven't tried because I need my phone to be 100% working, they added a call screening option.
This is very different from a scammer or spam blacklist. It means if somebody calls you the phone will say to them "who are you? Why are you calling?" - then it will use the dictation system to turn that into text and then display that to you so that you can decide whether you actually want to pick the call up.
In addition with the already existing presets for saying I'm busy, or that I am uninterested in taking this call, or the ability to just hang the fuck up, this is going to take a lot of anxiety out of receiving phone calls. I need to dig in and see if there is an auto responder for When you have your device on do not disturb.
This is also going to wreck the shit of the entire scam and spam robocaller industry!
Right now, the developer Preview is buggy. Which you would kind of expect. I wouldn't recommend putting this on something that you really needed, but yes this is going to be a really good operating system update.
