So has Apple finally answered the question: what if the iPad was more like the Mac? Yes—with caveats. iPadOS 26 doesn’t collapse the distinction between the platforms, but it gives most people who use the iPad for more than just casual entertainment the thing that they’ve long wanted. The iPad is no longer defined only by what it can’t do.

The issue (CVE-2025-43300), which stems from Apple’s image processing framework, “may have been exploited in an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals,” according to Apple.

Apple describes this vulnerability as involving the processing of a malicious image file, which could result in memory corruption, and notes that the issue may have been exploited in an “extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals.