I have installed iPadOS 26 on an Air 5th generation device with the minimum 64GB RAM. I use it almost exclusively in places where I have easy access to WiFi, so the app-swapping scheme utilized via iCloud works well. (Apps are offloaded to save memory as needed.)
Figuring I’d go for broke as long as I was in an early adopter mood, I decided to let Apple Intelligence install even though it’s still marked “beta.” Mistake.
Even with over half of RAM available, the module wanted another 7GB or so of space. And the only way to get it appeared to be removing my own content.
This left Intelligence in a weird halfway zone: it could neither finish installing nor be uninstalled, and all but 500MB or so of RAM was still occupied.
I ended up turning to the iCloud backup I made right before installing OS26, wiping the iPad as though I were going to sell it, and starting over. All appears to be well, and a clean copy of iPadOS 26 installed as part of the “hello” bootup.
I have no opinion one way or the other right now about whether Apple Intelligence would be useful on this iPad, but I do recommend:
- Always, always, always back up your device before an OS update. I’m using the daily backups to iCloud, but this special full backup made recovery painless.
- Be mindful of the space you have and the space you need. Apple Intelligence needs a lot of storage space because of the requirement for it to live on a local device rather than depend on a cloud server. It would work fine on my 256GB iPhone, but it’s a no-go on my iPad.