YouTuber unboxes what seems to be a pre-release version of an M5 iPad Pro

Signs point to a relatively mild upgrade from the 16-month-old Apple M4.

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[itfa]

It's always amazing to me how many of these Apple still moves each year considering market saturation and how unimpactful spec updates are these days.

 

[da70be2450c38c31]

It's somewhat unusual for there to be a leak of a full retail apple product ahead of launch.

I bet their security folks are frothing over this given how tightly they normally control these things.

 

[dmsilev]

It's always amazing to me how many of these Apple still moves each year considering market saturation and how unimpactful spec updates are these days.

Most people are upgrading once every several years, so a few generations worth of relatively small iterations adds up.

 

[UnicornsRule]

It's always amazing to me how many of these Apple still moves each year considering market saturation and how unimpactful spec updates are these days.

If you trade in whenever a new device comes out the price isn't that bad. It's also very easy to migrate to a new Apple device so if you like Apple and have the money to upgrade it's worth it.

It would be interesting to see how many devices are new users compared to trade-ups.

 

[Aelix]

Still seems weird that they debut the new chips in an iPad.

 

[olePigeon]

Most people are upgrading once every several years, so a few generations worth of relatively small iterations adds up.

I'm not one of them for sure. My M1 Pro still feels as snappy as the day I got it when I moved from a Core i5. I'm approaching 5 years, and I still feel like it'll last me 5 more. Apple Silicon is crazy good compared to what I had before. I can only imagine what an M4 Pro will be like when work sends me the 5-year replacement.

 

[LlamaLaBama]

It's always amazing to me how many of these Apple still moves each year considering market saturation and how unimpactful spec updates are these days.

I check the secondhand market for these, it's absurd how well they retain value past some necessary depreciation.

 

[da70be2450c38c31]

It's always amazing to me how many of these Apple still moves each year considering market saturation and how unimpactful spec updates are these days.

There's probably a few different scenarios.

There's the folks that must have leading edge and they upgrade right away.

And there's folks like me that have a pretty old iPad and will probably upgrade to this.

And maybe... there's a few that with the new iPadOS 26 stuff are choosing this over a new laptop?

 

[barich]

It's always amazing to me how many of these Apple still moves each year considering market saturation and how unimpactful spec updates are these days.

I've got an M1 Pro, and have no need to upgrade for performance reasons, but it's like the only device I still actively use that doesn't have an OLED display. I'd kind of like to replace it for that reason, but it's a good chunk of change for some more contrast.

 

[gmerrick]

If you trade in whenever a new device comes out the price isn't that bad. It's also very easy to migrate to a new Apple device so if you like Apple and have the money to upgrade it's worth it.

It would be interesting to see how many devices are new users compared to trade-ups.

I'm betting most of these are upgrades. A new user would need to be dropping 1750CAD (75monthly) for a promax 256gb variant or close to 3000CAD for the 2tb version.. holy shit that's expensive. Not including apple care. For the more price concious, the 17 is only 1150CAD or 50CAD a month. These prices are right from Apple Canada.

Upgrading via your cellular provider will likely provide much savings on the device.

 

[Missing Minute]

If you trade in whenever a new device comes out the price isn't that bad. It's also very easy to migrate to a new Apple device so if you like Apple and have the money to upgrade it's worth it.

It would be interesting to see how many devices are new users compared to trade-ups.

What does Apple do with devices people trade in?

 

[Juggernaut_408]

Is this guy Russian? If so, this is not the first time we see new products coming out first in Russia. Guess those sanctions are working wonders…….

 

[motytrah]

It's always amazing to me how many of these Apple still moves each year considering market saturation and how unimpactful spec updates are these days.

Apple supports those tablets for a long time. Some of the models get 6,7, even 8 years of support. And if you're using it casually for games and browsing you likely aren't noticing anything missing. Especially if you had one of the faster Pro models.

I think people with cellular modems notice quicker. As the radios go out of sync with what the carriers offer.

 

[motytrah]

Is this guy Russian? If so, this is not the first time we see new products coming out first in Russia. Guess those sanctions are working wonders…….

I mean it does speak to the supply chain issues of having it all in China.

 

[KoshcheiTheDeathless]

I thought that these devices were sanctioned in Russia, and that Apple had suspended sales of all their products and services to Russia back in 2022.

 

[cfenton]

I still have a 2018 iPad Pro with the A12X. I'm pretty picky about slow devices, but for normal tablet stuff mine still feels fine. I'm sure if I was doing work with it beyond basic Office stuff I'd get more from an upgrade. For now, I'm planning to keep mine until the updates stop.

 

[icwhatudidthere]

I still have a first gen 2018 iPad Pro 11 and with iPadOS 26 it's fully usable. Most of the "pro" apps that Apple envisions are creative apps so my use cases are still relegated to Macs. But now that iPadOS 26 gives that iPad a full windowing system, I'll have to try it out again when hooked up to a monitor for productivity type stuff which I also preferred to do on a Mac.

I honestly can't think of anything I'd need an M5 iPad Pro for yet. I also have an M1 iPad Pro that I got for cheap from Woot and it's still more than enough.

 

[equals42]

The 12GB of RAM will be nice. (Not going to splurge on 1TB to get 24GB or whatever.) More RAM might reduce the browser reloads a bit when I multitask. The lack of anything else mentioned like additional front camera positions was interesting, but maybe the Russian guy was too preoccupied by power adapters.

I probably wouldn’t upgrade from the M4 for this though, except that I need a new iPad since my kid broke his M1 screen a could months ago. The cost of a screen repair was ridiculous. I guess he’ll get my M4 and I’ll get 12GB of RAM.

 

[jhodge]

I still have a first gen 2018 iPad Pro 11 and with iPadOS 26 it's fully usable. Most of the "pro" apps that Apple envisions are creative apps so my use cases are still relegated to Macs. But now that iPadOS 26 gives that iPad a full windowing system, I'll have to try it out again when hooked up to a monitor for productivity type stuff which I also preferred to do on a Mac.

I honestly can't think of anything I'd need an M5 iPad Pro for yet. I also have an M1 iPad Pro that I got for cheap from Woot and it's still more than enough.

Same - we have an original iPad Pro 9.7" that's still doing its thing just fine. Thus far, my entire iPad purchase history is: iPad 2 -> iPad Pro 9.7. I also have an iPad mini 6 that was given to me as a bonus, but if I didn't I would have >15 years of iPad use from 2 devices. Hard to beat that sort of value.

 

[Hard Thoughts]

I’m relying on machine translation here but that video was somewhat awful to watch.

Anyway, the performance bump is more or less in line with the a19 generation vs the a18 on the phone which is a good thing.

An upgrade from the m4 is going to be quite unnecessary but m1? More than double.

Definitely not much for simple day to day tasks but games and large spreadsheets will be happy.

 

[TimeToTilt]

There's probably a few different scenarios.

There's the folks that must have leading edge and they upgrade right away.

And there's folks like me that have a pretty old iPad and will probably upgrade to this.

And maybe... there's a few that with the new iPadOS 26 stuff are choosing this over a new laptop?

Also iPads get dropped and break and replacing the screen is not cheap. Kids lose them etc. It's not like a laptop, even if the hardware is still good, there's all kinds of weird attrition in that market that doesn't happen with other devices really

 

[sfbiker]

I still don't understand the use case for the iPad pro - it has the CPU of a laptop and priced like a laptop, but runs IOS and is less versatile than a laptop.

What would prompt someone to need an iPad pro instead of, say, an iPad Air which also has a slower, but still laptop class CPU but is half the price?

 

[TimeToTilt]

What does Apple do with devices people trade in?

Refurb and resale. They sell a lot of them through Amazon.

 

[Hard Thoughts]

I still don't understand the use case for the iPad pro - it has the CPU of a laptop and priced like a laptop, but runs IOS and is less versatile than a laptop.

What would prompt someone to need an iPad pro instead of, say, an iPad Air which also has a slower, but still laptop class CPU but is half the price?

For me it was the speakers and display.

 

[johnsonwax]

Still seems weird that they debut the new chips in an iPad.

So, the iPad Pro sells in quite large numbers - generally as much or more than any base M series Mac. A lot of Apple's product cadence is tied to fab availability at TSMC as the iPhone and A series get priority there. The base M series processors go into a range of different products - the high volume iPad Pro, MBA, iMac, and Mac Mini. So Apple can build up some M5 inventory from an early high volume run and then fine tune that later (which is why the Air comes at the end of the cadence). The M5 is also binned for these products.

When you get to the Pro/Max, and the MBP is usually the first-out-of-the-gate Mac because it's the real flagship of the Mac lineup, the design always comes after the M5 is done and is sometimes incongruous with the M5 in terms of cores, etc.

So the base M series chip is always designed first, is always produced first, but Apple doesn't want to lead the Mac lineup with the Air. So the iPad Pro (which is the same price as the MBA) makes the most sense to lead with - it's going to soak up more of those base chips than any other product and because it's a binned product and because yields at the start of a production run tend to be lowest, that's a sensible alignment and doesn't undercut the MBP first-out-of-the-gate place. The unbinned base chips get reserved for the later products, and likely at some point the base processor goes out of production in favor of the Pro/Max, and then later may return to production usually with higher yields and that's when the Air is released.

But from Apple's perspective the iPad Pro is a more important product than the MBA, and are technologically similar and priced similar. Overall I think Apple would prefer consumers on the iPad Pro over the MBA.

 

[johnsonwax]

So Apple of Apple, to give you the basics and boring refreshes.

May we note that in single thread performance, the AMD 9950X3D has a Geekbench single core score of about 3400 and the M5 iPad Pro is about 4150. That's a better than 20% performance benefit of an iPad over the top of the line gaming CPU.

So yeah, pretty boring.

 

[Brendan McKinley]

So Apple of Apple, to give you the basics and boring refreshes.

There's no need to try and reinvent the wheel every 12-18 months, but you the device manufacturer also don't want people holding off purchasing because they know the SoC/SKU is stale. Obviously if you the customer need something now you buy what's available, but people who are in the "would be nice to have" camp and/or like to keep their devices for as long as possible, would prefer to purchase a relatively fresh device they know will be supported for a long time.

Edit: Grammar

 

[bernstein]

Most people are upgrading once every several years, so a few generations worth of relatively small iterations adds up.

My Macbook Pro is now going strong into it's 14th year! Last year's M4 Pro was the first time i even considered to upgrade (IMHO all those models in between were trash). But for now i'm waiting for more RAM per $.

 

[Brendan McKinley]

Still seems weird that they debut the new chips in an iPad.

Binning and teething issues affecting yields for new SoCs and/or a new manufacturing process I suspect. Starting with a relatively low volume product can help deal with yield issues. Starting with a product that has a greater share of the SKUs featuring a non fully-enabled SoC helps find places to put chips that would have gone in a Mac, but had defects, which of course typically is more common at start of manufacturing. Though based off the article, perhaps the percentage of non-fully enabled is lower this time around.

First rule of chip manufacturing though; find a way to use as many chips off that wafer that you possibly can.

 

[gnasher729]

What does Apple do with devices people trade in?

They become refurbished devices. And then depending on age, they are sold as refurbished, or if you bought a device and returned it because you changed your mind, and I need a warranty repair after nine months, Apple could give me your device instead of trying to repair mine. And then they keep my old device and it gets returned to the factory with thousand others, gets repaired and becomes refurbished again.

 

[Brendan McKinley]

My Macbook Pro is now going strong into it's 14th year! Last year's M4 Pro was the first time i even considered to upgrade (IMHO all those models in between were trash). But for now i'm waiting for more RAM per $.

Out of curiosity are you using OpenCore Legacy Patcher, and if so what macOS version are you running? Or are you just living dangerously on macOS 10.13-10.15? The 17" 2011 MBP, was one of my favorite laptops ever, but the 16" M1 Max finally won me over.

 

[gnasher729]

It's always amazing to me how many of these Apple still moves each year considering market saturation and how unimpactful spec updates are these days.

Some people buy a device and use it until it falls apart. Many are still on their first Mx device.

Some buy a device and replace it once a new one is sufficiently improved. Often 3-4 years. They might not replace M1 with M4 but with an M5.

And some are IMO irrational and just always need the latest and greatest and buy a new one when it is released.

 

[cfenton]

I still don't understand the use case for the iPad pro - it has the CPU of a laptop and priced like a laptop, but runs IOS and is less versatile than a laptop.

What would prompt someone to need an iPad pro instead of, say, an iPad Air which also has a slower, but still laptop class CPU but is half the price?

That 120hz OLED is tempting. 60hz feels bad to me on anything interactive. I've been at 90hz+ on all devices since the Pixel 6, and I think 120hz is my slowest now. I'm just hoping they bring a similar screen to the Air this refresh, like they did with the iPhone 17 this year.

 

[approximate_pi]

Apple supports those tablets for a long time. Some of the models get 6,7, even 8 years of support. And if you're using it casually for games and browsing you likely aren't noticing anything missing. Especially if you had one of the faster Pro models.

Yup, I have the 2020, 4th gen, iPad Air. I'm planning to eventually upgrade to a pro (it was my first iPad, I wanted to try out having one relatively cheaply first), but I suspect I can get another couple years out of the air first.

 

[lczrv]

Still seems weird that they debut the new chips in an iPad.

The iPad usually gets a binned version of the chip, and iPad Pros sell less compared to MacBooks. I assume it makes sense for them to introduce the chip on the iPad while yields are low.

 

[ryanr]

IMO moving the camera to the side on the M4 was a downgrade. If they bring the iPhone’s new square front sensor to the iPad that would help reduce the sting. I didn’t hear anything about cameras in the video.

Dude is really upset about the power adapter for some reason. I’m more upset that Apple still sells non-GaN chargers in 2025, I don’t really care whether they are a pack in item or not. Heck, both single port and non-GaN basically make it useless to me, so may as well not pack in junk I won’t use.

 

[darwinosx]

If you trade in whenever a new device comes out the price isn't that bad. It's also very easy to migrate to a new Apple device so if you like Apple and have the money to upgrade it's worth it.

It would be interesting to see how many devices are new users compared to trade-ups.

Exactly. The latest iPhone every year cost me a couple hundred. Well worth it.