Video demo shows iPadOS 18.2 with working Bluetooth & Wi-Fi running on unsupported iPad (6th generation)
by Anthony Bouchard · iDownloadBlog.comVideo demo shows iPadOS 18.2 with working Bluetooth & Wi-Fi running on unsupported iPad (6th generation)
Anthony Bouchard ∙ December 26, 2024
Earlier this week, we shared a story about how palera1n team developers Nick Chan (@riscv64) and @mineekdev successfully ported iPadOS 18 to the natively unsupported iPad (6th generation). With this feat, it joins the iPad (7th generation) as one of only two checkm8 bootrom exploit-vulnerable devices capable of running Apple’s latest firmware.
At the time, all we had as a teaser was a screenshot showing the iPad (6th generation) About page in the Settings app, showing that it was indeed an iPad (6th generation) and that it was running iPadOS 18. But there remained many questions, including whether all the native drivers would work, and it seems that more recent teasers are now answering those questions.
In a post shared on social media platform X (formerly Twitter) on Wednesday, Chan shared a Home Screen screenshot of the iPad (6th generation) running iPadOS 18 with the palera1n jailbreak installed on it. But more importantly, the post noted that Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are now fully working on iPadOS 18.2 (apparently, they weren’t before.
Great news indeed, but as the jailbreak community can often be fraught with skepticism and additional questions, it may come as no surprise that Chan decided to share a video teaser to YouTube on Thursday, which we’ve embedded below for your viewing pleasure:
As you may have noticed, the performance isn’t all that great, and that’s to be expected when trying to run firmware on an unofficially supported device. After all, the iPad (6th generation) was never intended to run iPadOS 18, even though it has the same A10 Fusion chip inside as the officially supported iPad (7th generation).
A lot of the iPadOS 18-specific features, including the new Calculator app, are demonstrated in the video. Despite the lagging, the features are indeed fully functional.
It’s worth noting that the iPad (6th generation) was running iPadOS 18.0 in the original teaser, and that now appears to have been upgraded to 18.2. Both firmware versions are susceptible to the palera1n jailbreak, so that’s a moot point, but still interesting to see that even a newer iPadOS 18 update works with this hack without any significant issues.
We aren’t sure yet if Chan plans to release a public means of installing iPadOS 18 on the iPad (6th generation), but if we had to guess, it’s likely a complicated procedure. After all, one would be loading an unsupported operating system onto their device by way of a bootrom exploit, and we’re almost certainly sure there’s no GUI for such a task as of right now.
Would you rock iPadOS 18 on an iPad (6th generation) if you could? Tell us why or why not in the comments section down below.