What's an iPad for? The answer might be changing. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Novosavo.

Apple's new iPhone. Apple's new iPhone might be getting all the attention, but the iPad deserves some love too.

It was 15 years ago that then CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone's bigger cousin,

launching an entire new category in personal electronics.

His vision was for a lean-back device, something used mostly to consume content, read, surf the web,

watch movies. Now with the latest versions of Apple's mobile operating systems, the tablet that

started at all is evolving into something different and perhaps something more useful. At least

that's according to Craig Grinnell, who got early access to iPad OS 26

and wrote about the system's laptop-like qualities in Wired magazine.

Essentially, it's kind of like the Mac.

The windows, you can move them wherever you want.

There's not this weird snapping stuff going on,

this lovely little gestural stuff as well that's stolen from the Mac

in terms of its functionality. And the thing is, it's flexible. That's the thing that's really good

about it. You aren't locked into this really opinionated way of using Windows, which Splitview did,

but also Stage Manager did. It feels like a proper grown-up computer interface again. And that's

really exciting if you're doing more than the real basics on an iPad, if you want to use it with a lot of

different apps. You experimented with the early version of iPad OS 26 for a week. How did it go?

So this was kind of an extreme thing. The thing is it was actually pretty good.

Most of the things I came up with were my Mac isn't a vanilla install. There are things on it that I do

rely on. I use utilities like this one called Better Touch Tool, which is great for shortcuts.

And I have all of these system-wide shortcuts that

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