Universal Control can hide the iPad menu bar

A reader of my book Take Control of iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 had a perplexing problem. I had written of the menus available in iPadOS 26’s Windowed Apps and Stage Manager modes in Settings: Multitasking & Gestures:

With a mouse or trackpad, pushing the pointer to the top edge above the status bar reveals the menu bar.

Yet, for this reader, they were unable to use a pointing device to get the menu to appear in that fashion. The cursor sometimes disappeared, and clicking didn’t help. They had to swipe, like some kind of animal, to have the menus appear. This is less than ideal when you’re using an input device and a keyboard on an iPad, as you typically position it differently than when you’re using it with touch input.

Universal Control settings let you push a pointer through between an iPad and a Mac or two Macs.

We went through some troubleshooting steps, but then it occurred to me that the culprit might be their Mac. That’s right—Universal Control could be the issue! Universal Control is Apple’s name for using a keyboard and mouse or other input devices on a Mac with one or two nearby Macs or iPads. (Follow that link to see the minimum system and hardware requirements.)1

You configure Universal Control on your Mac in System Settings: Displays. Click Advanced, and three Link to Mac or iPad options appear if the feature is available:

Allow your pointer and keyboard to move between any nearby Mac or iPad

Push through the edge of a display to connect a nearby Mac or iPad

Automatically reconnect to any nearby Mac or iPad

With the first setting enabled, the second is the key issue: Push through. I asked my email correspondent if they had this feature enabled and, more crucially, when they clicked the Arrange button at the bottom of the Displays setting, did they see their iPad below their Mac (see figure).

In this configuration, you can push through from an iPad to a Mac without displaying iPad menus. As shown by the arrow, re-arrange your iPad’s display relative to your Mac’s.

The answer was yes. Which is why they couldn’t move their pointer to the top of the iPad and have menus appear: when they did this, they slid through to the bottom of their Mac. I was able to reproduce this, and with some fine motor control, could sometimes get the menu to appear before I slid onto my Mac display.

They moved the iPad to one side of their Mac in Arrange, and the problem went away.

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Universal Control is distinct from Sidecar, which lets you use an iPad as an additional Mac monitor, rather than displaying iPadOS. ↩