We’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 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.
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.
iPadOS 18.7.9 was released just over a month ago alongside iPadOS 26.5, and brings many of the same security patches to older iOS devices. So, it’s not like iPadOS 18.7.9 is an inherently insecure OS that’s unworthy of running on A12 devices that don’t support iPadOS 27.
I can’t imagine the everyday user would bother downgrading their device, but at the same time I don’t see why it shouldn’t be an option for those who want to take it, at least as long as Apple is still releasing iOS 18 security updates.
This would be pretty unprecedented, and I think it’s incredibly unlikely that Apple would choose to add support for devices they already chose to drop, despite the public outcry. Though it’s worth noting: it isn’t 100% unprecedented.
Back in 2022 with Stage Manager on iPadOS 16, many people in the Apple community were upset with the fact that Stage Manager required an iPad with an M1 chip or newer, which at the time, were very few. Later in the beta cycle though, Apple caved, and brought Stage Manager to the 2018 and 2020 iPad Pro models.
It was in a slightly more limited capacity, as those iPads couldn’t support external displays like the M1 models could. Regardless, Apple reversed course on its device support requirements here.
Would Apple do that again? Only time will tell. I’d like to imagine there’s some engineering reason for not wanting to support these older devices, though from the outside, it’s hard to come up with an obvious one.
Maybe full windowing support performs too poorly with the A12 GPU and 4GB of RAM. If that’s the case, I think users would be fine with the feature getting slightly limited – in exchange for their iPad overall feeling much smoother.
Where do you stand on this issue? Do you own an older A12 iPad that won’t support iPadOS 27? Sound off in the comments.
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