GoKawiilWe’re about 3 weeks out from when Apple unveiled iOS 27 to the world at WWDC26, and it’s still safe to say: this is an incredible update. It’s incredibly performant, and besides some small quirks and a little battery drain, it feels much more usable than iOS 26.5.
While iOS 27 does support every device that ran iOS 26, the same isn’t true for iPadOS. A number of older iPadOS 26 devices will not be receiving the iPadOS 27 update, which I think is quite a shame – and Apple should mitigate this one way or another.
iPadOS 27 device support
iPadOS 27 drops support for all devices with an A12 or A12X chipset, including:
While yes, these devices are all 6-8 years old and Apple definitely provided a long software support lifespan to them – most people can agree that iPadOS 26 isn’t a great place to leave old devices.
I think there’s two ways Apple could realistically address this.
Allow iPadOS 18 downgrades
This would be the easiest solution to roll out of them all: just let iPadOS 26 users roll back to a more performant OS.
Right now, Apple unsigns older versions of its operating systems, so it’s impossible to downgrade to older firmware once the signing window passes. Right now, Apple only signs iOS 26.5 for most compatible devices.
This decision makes sense for security reasons, as Apple ideally only wants you to be able to run the most stable version of iOS. There’s one hole in this logic though: Apple still releases security updates for iOS 18.
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