iPadOS on the iPad Air 2: Old tablets can still learn new tricks

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Enlarge / Add a Bluetooth keyboard to an iPad Air 2 running iPadOS 13 and you've got a surprisingly capable device for browsing and shooting off emails and Slack messages. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Starting today, iPads run something called “iPadOS” rather than iOS, but the change has more to do with branding than functionality. Apple’s tablets might get a few more keyboard shortcuts and some multitasking features; maybe they’ll diverge more in the future. But for right now, iPadOS is still fundamentally iOS.

That means, as with iOS, Apple is in total control of what hardware can run the new operating system (unlike the Mac, where you can occasionally get around Apple’s restrictions and run new software on unsupported Macs or hardware that isn’t Apple’s at all). The original iPad Air and the iPad Mini 2 and Mini 3 have all been dropped, because of their slower Apple A7 processors and (more importantly) their 1GB of RAM. Today, the iPad Air 2 and the iPad Mini 4 are the oldest, slowest tablets that run iPadOS 13.

The Air 2 was Apple’s first iDevice to include 2GB of RAM and the first iPad to support multitasking features like Split View that were introduced in iOS 9 (the first iPad Air got a more limited subset of those features, but its 1GB of RAM wasn’t enough to support two apps running side by side simultaneously). It was arguably over-powered at the time of its release, but its forward-looking specs have helped it bridge that gap between the full-screen, one-app-at-a-time model that still existed in iOS 8 and the still-limited but generally more computer-y iPadOS experience.

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