What is this oblong blue thing with a circle arrow? Here’s the picture. thank you. what is it and how do I get rid of it because it’s creeping me out. Txs
[Edited by Moderator]
MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 13.6
This means that the iPad is busy with something. In normal operations, you wont see this icon, but because of a recent glitch in iPadOS it occurs sometimes. It is not something you’ll need to worry about fortunately
The icon indicates that your iPad is performing synchronisation. Appearance of the icon is benign - and will disappear of its own accord when the task completes.
Yours is one of many reports seen in recent weeks. At present, pending confirmation by Apple, this appearance of the icon is believed to have some relationship to post-update synchronisation tasks performed by your iPad after updating to iPadOS 18.x (such as downloading Apple Intelligence LLM models) - or the icon appears while a download is being performed as a background task.
Apple have not yet provided a definitive explanation.
Apple's documentation is often slow to catch-up with new features. Here is another status icon - that appears briefly when connecting some USB-C hubs - that Apple have yet to add to their documentation:
As it’s not clear exactly what operation(s) it represents …
… it’s likely wise — if reasonably possible — to not intentionally power-off or break the comms connection while the icon is displayed.
Apple is astoundingly good at implementing these sorts of “sync” mechanisms, but why knowingly “push it” if we don’t need to.
Blue oblong with a circle with arrows inside
