iPadOS 18.3 is now available to the general public. Somewhat surprisingly, this point update is light on new features and doesn’t bring any new Apple Intelligence features. It previously seemed like Apple was adding new AI features every quarter.

Apple Intelligence Tweaks

Apple Intelligence Automatically Enabled for New Users

After a few months of having to deal with waitlists, Apple apparently feels confident enough in the quality of Apple Intelligence to automatically opt-in users that are upgrading. To opt-out, you’ll need to go into Settings -> Apple Intelligence & Siri to disable Apple Intelligence.

Manage Notification Summary Settings From the Lock Screen

Notification summaries on the Lock Screen how present an option to quickly turn off summaries for that app. This presents a quicker way to disable this feature than having to dig through the Settings app

Updated Styling for Summary Notifications

Summary notifications are, for many, the most visible part of Apple Intelligence. Apple’s models take the contents of multiple app notifications and try to helpfully summarize them for you. Now, iPadOS will better distinguish between an actual notification’s content and a summary notification by making the summaries italicized.

News and Entertainment Notification Summaries Are Temporarily Unavailable

After a lot of bad press around bad news article summaries, Apple has chosen to temporarily disable summaries for these categories of apps. The company says it intends to re-enable this behavior in a future software update, presumably after some improvements have been made.

Bug Fixes

Calculator Equals Sign Fix

The calculator now repeats the last operation you performed when you tap the equals sign again. The calculator is so new on iPadOS, I question the “again” part. I’m not sure if this was ever really a feature for us, but it’s fixed now. Apparently.

Keyboard Disappears When Typing To Siri

This release also includes a bug fix for an issue where the keyboard may disappear when typing to Siri.

Missing Features?

Earlier in the iPadOS 18.3 beta, there were reports Apple was adding the promised HomeKit support for robot vaccuums in this release. There’s no mention of this feature in the final release notes.