I’ll be perfectly honest: my older iPad Pro 12.9-inch from 2018 is still working great. I use it all the time for web browsing, light gaming, and even Zoom calls on occasion. Updating it to iPadOS 26.6 for the new multitasking features, however, made it feel a little sluggish.
Whenever I would maximize a window, or drag an app up to Side View, it definitely lagged a bit more than it used to.
With a quick drop into Settings, I was able to toggle three of them off and now my iPad feels much less laggy, even with the new iPadOS. Here’s what I found.
|
Configuration |
Maximize Window |
Split View |
|---|---|---|
|
BAR on, Reduce Motion off, Reduce Transparency off (true baseline) |
9 seconds |
8 seconds |
|
BAR off, Reduce Motion ON, Reduce Transparency off |
1 second |
2 seconds |
|
BAR off, Reduce Motion ON, Reduce Transparency ON (final) |
1 second |
2 seconds |
Why This Still Matters
Software ambition outran the hardware it runs on
Apple still supports this 2018 device on iOS 26, making it a pretty great device even today. Unfortunately, the new OS is likely tuned to newer GPU and RAM amounts, headroom the A12X didn’t come with. It’s not hypothetical, either, as you can see by the results above. A full nine seconds to maximize windows, and eight to move an app into Split View is a long time to wait when you’re trying to multitask.
The instinct might be to just replace the device with a newer one, but we all know how expensive devices have become. The idea here is to make it useful and snappy again without replacing or factory resetting it.
Turn off Background App Refresh
Stop every app from working while you’re not looking
This feature lets suspended apps check for updates or new content in the background. On older hardware like mine, the idea is that it stresses the A12X’s limited RAM, which can cause the user interface (UI) to lag a bit. It can also affect your battery drain.
Hop into Settings > General > Background App Refresh, and toggle it off completely. You can always go back in and enable an app or two if you need them to refresh in the background, but for my testing, I just turned it all off.
Turn on Reduce Motion
Cut the animations your old GPU still has to render
This setting will change the zoom/slide transitions to cross-fades and will stop the parallax features for your wallpaper and icons. It matters more on older hardware because the A12X’s 7-core GPU struggles with the more modern compositing work with the newer OS. It’s easy to turn on, too. Just head into Settings > Accessibility > Motion > Reduce Motion.
For me, this toggle did the most work. Combined with the Background App Refresh toggle as above, maximizing a window on the iPad dropped from taking 9 seconds to 1 second, while putting an app in Split view dropped from 8 seconds to 2 seconds. You might also find some benefit on older iPhones doing this, as well.
Turn on Reduce Transparency
Cuts the visual noise Reduce Motion doesn’t catch
This feature replaces blurred or translucent layers in places like Control Center, app switcher, and keyboard with a more solid color, which can improve contrast and readability. You can get to it at Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Reduce Transparency. Go ahead and turn it on.
This one didn’t move the needle for me on my iPad in terms of maximizing or putting apps into Split View, but it did help with the rendering of Control Center and my keyboard, which makes it more of a readability win rather than a speed fix. Still useful, though, even on an older iPhone.
An eight-year-old chip is still an eight-year-old chip
No amount of Settings toggles will make an A12X into an M-series chip, of course. These fixes just strip out some visual and background work the hardware wasn’t ever equipped to handle in the first place.
The main finding here, though, is that at least two of the toggles produced pretty amazing results. Taking window maximize time from eight to nine seconds to one or two is quite a difference. Reducint Transparency may not speed your iPad up, but it’s worth doing it for the readability alone.
If you’re interested in speeding things up even more, you can try freeing up some storage space, which could help your device work just a little faster.
If nothing else, my older iPad feels a lot quicker and responsive, which is always a plus when I’m using it for regular, everyday tasks. The less I need to wait for a window to maximize or make a little more room over for a second one, the better.