Going into 2025, I really wasn’t expecting much to happen with the iPad outside of the expected hardware updates and maybe some improvements to Stage Manager. To say this year blew away my expectations is an understatement.

A lot of interesting things happened in iPad-land this year. A lot of it was good, some of it concerning and there are still things that iPad users continue to wait for, going into 2026.

Here’s a look at the notable iPad-related events in 2025.

March

iPad (A16)

Before its major redesign in 2022, the standard iPad followed a predictable annual update cycle. That rhythm broke in 2023 and 2024, making the March 2025 update feel long overdue.

The industrial design remained the same as the 10th generation, right down to the same color selection. Part of me wouldn’t mind seeing a rotation of colors the same way the standard iPhone gets new colors yearly. But on the other hand, some years those colors aren’t great, so maybe it’s better we stick with the same bright and vibrant colors we’ve had for a few years.

The biggest surprise with this release was that Apple chose to release this iPad with a chip that doesn’t support Apple Intelligence. The apparent requirement of 8 GB of RAM to support Apple’s AI features, rules out the A16 chip and its 6 GB of RAM. That may not mean much now, with the current state of those features, but down the line it could be a real shortcoming.

The other big change with this iPad was the jump from 64 GB of base storage to 128 GB. This is the first time in years that I’ve felt like I can confidently recommend the base iPad SKU for most people. 64 GB was simply not going to cut it in 2025 and really hasn’t been cutting it for years.

iPad Air (M3)

The iPad Air has typically had an update cadence somewhere between 12 and 18 months, but it was still a nice surprise to see it get a spec bump in 2025. There really wasn’t much to this, Apple swapped out the M2 chip for the M3 and largely called it a day.

The M3 brings Apple’s newer GPU architecture to the Air, including hardware-accelerated ray tracing, dynamic caching, and mesh shading. It also adds hardware AV1 decode support, which should slightly improve battery efficiency when streaming video from services like YouTube.

Magic Keyboard for iPad Air

Alongside the iPad Air update, we got a “new” Magic Keyboard that is specifically for it. I put “new” in quotes because it’s essentially a revision of the previous-generation iPad Pro Magic Keyboard.

This keyboard gains a function row but loses backlit keys. It also only offered in white, removing the black option that was available with the previous generation.

Other than those changes, the key Magic Keyboard experience remains the same. With the clearer product naming, it should be easier for new buyers to figure out which keyboard works with their iPad.

iPadOS 18.4

iPadOS 18.4 was supposed to deliver the most ambitious Apple Intelligence features yet, including a more capable Siri with onscreen awareness, personal context, and deep App Intents integration.

It wasn’t completely surprising when Apple announced they were delaying this set of features. They are particularly ambitious, especially for a company that doesn’t appear to have a core competency around large language models.

I’ve never been a particularly heavy Siri user. I don’t use it for much more than setting reminders and controlling home devices. On one hand, it’s concerning that Apple seems unable to ship these features, but it’s also concerning that someone in technical leadership was so confident they could pull this off that they were willing to pre-announce them. It seems like if this is really as hard to do as it appears, it should have been nixed in the ideation phase.

Were there pressures from management to deliver something big as part of the initial Apple Intelligence feature set? We’ll never really know. But it does raise some questions about both technical and marketing leadership within Apple.

If these features do ship in 2026, they’ll be under heavy scrutiny, and I can’t see them possibly living up to the hype that’s been built up by both Apple and the community.

May

Google’s NotebookLM Gets an iPadOS Upgrade

Google’s AI-powered research tool is great for students or anyone performing research-related activities. In May, the iOS app was updated with a proper iPadOS interface, including proper multitasking and resizing support.

Xogot: Godot Development Environment Comes to iPadOS

In May, the iPad gained a truly native game development environment with the release of Xogot, a full-featured Godot game development app optimized for iPadOS, developed by Xamarin co-founder Miguel de Icaza and Xibbon Inc.

Xogot brings the popular open-source Godot game engine to iPad with a touch-friendly interface, 2D and 3D editors, and an integrated debugger.

The app embraces iPad conventions (touch, keyboard/mouse, Stage Manager, external displays) and lets users export and share builds via WebAssembly, all while maintaining compatibility with the desktop Godot editor. This marks one of the most capable third-party development environments to arrive on iPadOS.

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