Testing Apple’s M5 iPad Pro: Future-proofing for Apple’s perennial overkill tablet

It's a gorgeous tablet, but what does an iPad need with more processing power?

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[Frodo Douchebaggins]

I bought my M4 iPad Pro earlier this year and I'd have upgraded to this if I could get the matte screen option on the 256 or 512gb version.

I f'ing hate glossy screens but Apple either misunderstands my finances or the relationship between my hatred of glossy screens, and my self control.

Fortunately, the matte film I applied to my iPad (and iPhone) is pretty good.

 

[hoktauri83]

I got a M4 ipad pro for photo culling & editing on the go, I'd look at this if the battery life was more improved. It handles light work and games pretty easily but serious editing in Lightroom will see a percent or two drop a picture.

 

[Fred Duck]

It’s a gorgeous tablet, but what does an iPad need with more processing power?

I've tried to play Subway Surfers on various iPads including an M2 Air and it always stutters, lags, and freezes. I won't even mention how hot* it makes the device.

Maybe the M5 is the chip that can finally run Subway Surfers smoothly.


* mostly related to heat

 

[MrTom]

Pretty soon they're gonna have to drop the Pro naming and use Mega.

 

[sunnysocal]

Still, it remains unclear why most people would spend one, two, or even three thousand dollars on a tablet that, despite its amazing hardware, does less than a comparably priced laptop—or at least does it a little more awkwardly, even if it’s impressively quick and has a gorgeous screen.

I re-quote your self-quote as an affirmation of my perspective.

 

[abj]

I've been wanting to get back into drawing. Clearly dropping 3 grand on an iPad Pro is a more sensible just that getting a pad of paper and some pens.

 

[Cthel]

I know its a niche use-case, but with Blender coming to iPadOS, and Zbrush already having an app, I could maybe see an argument in favour of a more powerful iPad Pro for a 3D artist who works on the move a lot?

 

[Fabio Volta]

My M1 iPad Pro is still fine, thanks.
The non-OLED screen is actually a plus to me, since it’s still great and possibly longer lasting.
Charging speed is good enough, the only thing I’d like is maybe the extra ram, but for 1k I got quite a list of cool toys I’d buy before upgrading the iPad.

 

[seraphimcaduto]

Frankly it’s portable and you can do 90% of the tasks that you need to get done on it. it is also much easier to kid proof than a laptop and with young kids, that’s a priority.

I can easily sign documents, edit PDFs, and a whole host of other things that require significantly less steps than on a laptop now. as more AAA video games on iOS, the need for a traditional laptop, decreases. if I would rather buy a steam deck or if steam was somehow iOS compatible, I would literally never need another laptop or desktop again, as I can plug into a dock for everything else.

 

[virtu]

I find it amusing that all the tech sites make the comparisons to the previous generation devices. Never mind M4, M2, or even M1, I am upgrading from a second generation Pro with A10X and 4GB of RAM from eight years ago. That ought to be a decent jump.

 

[famousringo]

Love my M4 Pro to death, but the real upgrades were the display and the lighter chassis. Nice speakers, too.

Did I need the extra horsepower? Maybe not, but faster's always better, innit? Especially when you're driving a 120Hz display.

 

[esqua]

I know its a niche use-case, but with Blender coming to iPadOS, and Zbrush already having an app, I could maybe see an argument in favour of a more powerful iPad Pro for a 3D artist who works on the move a lot?

Base m5 gpu will still be a bottleneck though

Edit: just checked on blender open data, the base m gpu got a serious boost since m1 (nearly a 750% difference between m1 and m5 on gpu rendering !)

 

[taliz]

I got myself the base iPad with the A16. No complaints so far.
So many people buy the Pro for no good reason.

 

[mmorales]

I think the comparison with a laptop is kinda myopic in the age of cloud storage and continuity.

If I had just one machine, a laptop is great, it does everything okay. But I have an iPad Pro and a desktop, and that is so much better than a laptop and a desktop. For long form writing, the ergonomics of a desktop are far superior to any laptop. For on the go: giving presentations, taking notes, reading and commenting on pdfs, watching videos, the iPad slaughters both the desktop and a laptop.

I move back and forth btwn my iPad Pro and a desktop many times a day, and the unique capabilities of both make it worth it for me over having just one powerful laptop. It is not what I can't do on an iPad that matters, it is what I can do on an iPad that is awkward on desktop that matters.

 

[Roguewolfe]

As I understand it, every time a chip manufacturer (the actual fab) introduces a die shrink (i.e. going from 10nm down to 8nm down to 6nm transistor size), their customers have two options. The customers, in this case, are companies like Apple, and the fabs are companies like TSMC. So if Apple was making M2 chips on a 7nm process, and TSMC offers them the option to drop to a 5nm process or whatever for the M3 (or an M2 revision), they can use that die shrink to either 1) fit more transistors in the same footprint for more computing power, or 2) keep the transistor count and make the entire chip much more energy efficient.

Historically, Intel chased raw performance at the expense of power use, and AMD chased performance + power efficiency in parallel, and they approached die shrinking from that perspective. I don't know much about Apple's philosophy here, but I am left dumbfounded by their behavior with respect to M chips and their iPad line.

Why on earth have they not used every single die shrink opportunity to chase energy efficiency and battery life for these? And not just from die shrinks, why aren't these a specific low power chip design in contrast to and relative to a Macbook? It's well established that iPads have way more raw compute power than they need. They keep increasing screen refresh rates - that draws more power a wipes out efficiency gains from those die shrinks unless they specifically focus on efficiency instead of raw compute. Why are they not doing that?!? Why don't we have three to five days of battery life for these? That's clearly of more benefit than higher benchmark numbers.

It makes no sense to me, but then again, I don't work there and am not privy to their design philosophy.

 

[SeanJW]

Which brings me to a burning question I've been having as I've been out of the Apple loop for 7-8 years. Can someone explain why they keep supercharging their tablets, yet insisting they still run a phone OS instead of just regular OSX (or whatever they're calling it now)?

Like the massive price/specs would make sense if they were basically a laptop. But as a big phone that doesn't make calls, it seems a little... excessive.

You really have been out of the loop if you didn't notice that it runs iPadOS rather than iOS. The phone and tablet branches of the OS have been distinct for a while.

 

[Frodo Douchebaggins]

You really have been out of the loop if you didn't notice that it runs iPadOS rather than iOS. The phone and tablet branches of the OS have been distinct for a while.

Well, you're technically correct which is the best correct, but for the end user they may as well be the same thing, and are certainly a hell of a lot closer to each other than either are to MacOS.

It's like saying that a Lexus RX300 isn't a Toyota Harrier. The paperwork shows you're right, but…

 

[Readercathead]

Yet again, I am begging Ars Technica and other publications to find people who like tablets to review them. Don’t give them to reporters who love laptops and want the iPad to be a laptop.

 

[MacCruiskeen]

I find it amusing that all the tech sites make the comparisons to the previous generation devices. Never mind M4, M2, or even M1, I am upgrading from a second generation Pro with A10X and 4GB of RAM from eight years ago. That ought to be a decent jump.

That's the same one I have. I think, yeah, I should get a new one, it's not quite keeping up, but then I look at the price, and think, I can wait a little longer.

 

[Cthel]

Regardless of the name, why does it need a special version of Blender that's yet to be released? There's a version of Blender for the M chips (and intel) already. Why doesn't the iPadOS run that (or the iPad run OSX or whatever it's named now)?

Pretty sure that's becausee Blender's UI revolves around mouse+keyboard input. A touch-based UI would have to be radically different.

 

[RickVS]

I can easily sign documents, edit PDFs

I would like to know which PDF editor you use to edit PDFs. I have tried 2 different options, and they always screw up the formatting (for how often I have to edit a PDF Adobe Acrobat is way beyond my financial means).

 

[iquanyin]

for those of us who do art and photography work on ipad, there's never too much processing power.

 

[iquanyin]

But, there are tablets that run regular windows/liunx, and all software available for them (including Blender). If whatever software doesn't work with touch, you hook up a keyboard and pointer. There's a keyboard and pointer in all the above photos of the iPad. Obviously, you don't have to use touch.

some of us don't want to hook up other stuff, we want to simply use the tablet.

 

[Cthel]

But, there are tablets that run regular windows/liunx, and all software available for them (including Blender). If whatever software doesn't work with touch, you hook up a keyboard and pointer. There's a keyboard and pointer in all the above photos of the iPad. Obviously, you don't have to use touch.

Blender are specifically aiming for touch-only use though

 

[SeanJW]

Well, you're technically correct which is the best correct, but for the end user they may as well be the same thing, and are certainly a hell of a lot closer to each other than either are to MacOS.

It's like saying that a Lexus RX300 isn't a Toyota Harrier. The paperwork shows you're right, but…

Except iPadOS has a whole window manager and all sorts of support that the phones just don't get.

 

[deanzaZZR]

I bought my wife a few iPad Minis over the years. The M4 IPP moving to OLED last year finally got me to open my wallet for an iPad of my own. Work provides a M1 Pro laptop and I have a M4 Mac Mini at home so the 11" M4 IPP serves a niche function of mobile content consumption, language learning device with Apple Pen input and as an additional screen (small but lovely) during college football season. I use it purely as a tablet and have not purchased a keyboard.

Is it overkill in terms of performance? Certainly yes. I do plan to have it for many years spreading out the cost.

 

[MijBetas]

I bought my M4 iPad Pro earlier this year and I'd have upgraded to this if I could get the matte screen option on the 256 or 512gb version.

I f'ing hate glossy screens but Apple either misunderstands my finances or the relationship between my hatred of glossy screens, and my self control.

Fortunately, the matte film I applied to my iPad (and iPhone) is pretty good.

I'd love to know more about the matte film you applied...

 

[Frodo Douchebaggins]

I mean, I work in audio and whole-heartily agree. But I just find it a little zany to ask companies to make another version of their software, when they already have a version that works just fine on the same processor. And just thought there had to be a compelling reason behind said zaniness that I didn't know of/didn't understand.

If I made a mac desktop app, and apple came to me and said "we like that desktop app, here's some money to make the same for an ipad" the first thing I would ask is "why don't you just have your ipad run your desktop and save your money?" which I don think is that outrageous of a question.

Well, hang on here, it's not just the processor.

For a long time, the current-at-the-time MacOS, Windows and Linux were all capable of running on an i7 processor for example but developing for those OSes was a wildly different experience in most situations. But for the concept of the discussion I agree, it'd sure be nice to be able to run MacOS applications on iPad in some cases.

 

[famousringo]

Which brings me to a burning question I've been having as I've been out of the Apple loop for 7-8 years. Can someone explain why they keep supercharging their tablets, yet insisting they still run a phone OS instead of just regular OSX (or whatever they're calling it now)?

Like the massive price/specs would make sense if they were basically a laptop. But as a big phone that doesn't make calls, it seems a little... excessive.

Faster is better for all users and I'm not sure why this is hard to understand for some folks. Quick video exports are nice whether you're using CapCut to make a TikTok or Resolve to make a movie. Smooth text scrolling is nice whether it's the news of the day or reviewing code. Knocking out a stable diffusion image for a shitpost in less than ten seconds is fun.

And of course it makes calls. People probably make more calls on FaceTime, Teams, Zoom, VOIP, etc. than cellular these days. Seen more than one Surface Pro tablet priced higher than a base iPad Pro that crashed out on a Zoom call, despite having a 'Real OS'.

 

[Frodo Douchebaggins]

I'd love to know more about the matte film you applied...

Sure.

No financial arrangement, just sharing links for what I have installed:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CDLT8VD5 on the phone

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D4B1JBH1 for the iPad


I did sort of a shit install job on the phone but here are pics of each.

 

[seraphimcaduto]

I would like to know which PDF editor you use to edit PDFs. I have tried 2 different options, and they always screw up the formatting (for how often I have to edit a PDF Adobe Acrobat is way beyond my financial means).

I’ve tried a bunch of them and you know what I end up doing now, I import the document into notability, sign it with my pencil and export it back out as a pdf.

I had the idea while I’ve been on injury leave due to a workplace injury, didn’t want to spend the money of acrobat and decided I didn’t actually need anything other than that for basic stuff. It works remarkably well for a signature for documents and don’t have to worry about my scanner wigging out or a picture picking up weird shadows.

I think I could have done it in the native pages app but don’t quote me on that one.

 

[Penforhire]

I’m surprised Apple did not announce some new hardware “gated” features (beyond the wireless upgrades). It adds to the M4 competitiveness mentioned.

 

[solomonrex]

I'm not sure with those RAM figures, that it's really all that powerful? For what the ipad does, it's overpowered, but in real terms, it's still a middle class niche. 16GB is now minimum on Macs and it's the maximum here, right? And CPUs just keep getting less important by the accumulation of other pieces on the SoC on every device. NPU, GPU, etc.

It's a weird conversation, because along with Windows touch devices, foldables, e-ink, they're all just options in a mature market and no real trend to dominance - outside of desktops dwindling away.