iPad Pro (M5) Review: No Other Tablet Even Comes Close

I can’t think of another tablet I would prefer to use over the iPad Pro, at least not one of those wonky devices sporting a shelf with a full speaker setup or a tiny projector for some reason. That doesn’t matter if I’m using last year’s iPad Pro with M4 chip or Apple’s new refresh with M5 chip powering this light, slim, and still-powerful tablet. It’s prettier than the rest. It’s more portable than most other devices with its thin frame (and yes, it’s still a slimmer frisbee than the iPad Air). And to hell with it, is there really any competition for tablets at this point that isn’t some oversized Samsung Galaxy device?

Apple’s 2025 iPad Pro is everything I said about last year’s model. So what’s truly changed other than the new GPU capabilities of the M5 chip? A new wireless modem, while a nice little upgrade (one that cements Apple’s demand for all in-house hardware), surely doesn’t change when and how you use the iPad Pro on the go. Neither does fast charging or enhanced storage read and write speeds. Well, all iPads now run on an updated operating system, iPadOS 26, which finally has app windowing support. There are even smaller upgrades that matter, like 12GB of RAM in the base iPad Pro models. Even if we didn’t see those small enhancements, this is the best the iPad has ever been, and one that’s infinitely more usable.

That still doesn’t mean everybody needs the iPad Pro model. The big upgrade in the M5 chip compared to the previous M4 is its more powerful graphics performance. How much that matters depends on the app. Based on my experience, if you’re thinking about upgrading from the iPad Pro with M4 chip, you really don’t need the new model.

If you’re thinking of moving up from a 5-year-old device, the real selling point is still that better-looking screen. The iPad can only ever be an iPad; it shouldn’t be your only device. It starts at $1,000 for the 11-inch model and $1,300 for the 13-inch version, both with 12GB of RAM. But as soon as you start configuring for more storage and more RAM (available with higher storage options), the “Apple tax†for upgrades starts adding up real fast. Cellular models with Apple’s new 5G modem are an extra $200. 1TB of storage will have you spending an additional $600 over the base 256GB.

At the point where you’re spending thousands on an iPad, I would suggest you check your priorities. You’ll want to make sure whatever you’re buying is actually worth it. You may end up much happier with an iPad mini, saving yourself hundreds of dollars just by scaling down.

Tandem OLED is sublime

Apple’s messaging has changed. Whereas Apple once tried to use its near-annual iPad Pro refresh to entice users still beholden to their pre-M-series tablets, now the company wants to swing over everybody still using iPads with the M1 chip from 2021. The M5 chip is indeed leaps better in performance than the 5-year-old M1. But again, the performance only matters if the apps you’re planning to use your iPad Pro for benefit from it. Watching Netflix or reading ebooks isn’t worth forking over $1,000+ if that’s all you’re using a tablet for.

Whereas MacBooks and MacBook Pros are using the same mini LED screen every year, the switch to the new organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display technology was what truly sold me about the iPad Pros with M4 chip. The latest iPad Pro models use the same OLED, which has better contrast and black levels than you’re probably used to. The screen also uses two layers of OLED on top of each other—called tandem OLED—which pushes brightness to 1,600 nits of peak brightness in HDR, though in reality, you’re mostly going to be looking at content at just 500 nits. That’s good enough for both indoors and outdoors, so long as the sun isn’t shining directly on the display. The screen also isn’t as reflective as some other glossy OLED models I’ve used recently, like Lenovo’s Legion Pro 7i gaming laptop. I could sit by a window and feel perfectly fine browsing and testing. You can also spring for a matte “nano texture†display model that cuts down on glare, but reduces color vibrancy, though that’ll cost an extra $100.

As far as making your iPad your lone media and entertainment device, it’s capable enough despite its thin size. The tablet has a total of four speakers blasting out of the two shorter sides, so you should hear your content whichever way you hold it. The sound won’t make your jaw drop, but it’s plenty loud considering its skinny profile.

Apple made some major strides with the iPad Pros with M4 chip—ironically making its most expensive tablet thinner and lighter than an iPad Air and still packing a better OLED screen than any MacBook display. (The iPad Pro only makes me want an OLED MacBook even more.) The multitasking updates to iPadOS 26 make it easier to have a browser up alongside Instagram, but with the limitations of the screen size and support for only one external monitor, a 13-inch MacBook Air with an M4 chip at the same $1,000 starting price is a better value than an 11-inch iPad Pro on its own, no matter how you slice it. (Plus, you don’t need to pony up an additional $300 or $350 just to get a Magic Keyboard.)

Same design with small feature tweaks

My review unit of the iPad Pro was the 13-inch model, complete with 5G connectivity and 1TB of storage. With the $350 Magic Keyboard attachment, my test combo costs $2,100. That’s a lot for a tablet. Hell, it’s a lot for any laptop with or without an Apple logo on it. At the very least, you can expect the new iPad Pro will feel very nice in hand. The iPad Pros with M5 chip are the same shape and weight as the 2024 models. The 13-inch iPad Pro is 5.1mm thick (the 11-inch is barely any thicker at 5.3mm). For perspective, that’s only a little thicker than three quarters stacked together. The iPad Pro is light enough that you could walk around town with it, even with the Magic Keyboard attachment, and not feel like you’re carrying anything in your backpack.

The new iPad Pros stick the 12-megapixel “Center Stage†camera on the landscape side, whereas previous models forced users to hold the device in portrait mode to center themselves on the screen. The only issue with that is if you’re planning to use an old Apple Pencil, it won’t magnetize to the new iPad Pro. Only the Apple Pencil Pro and Apple Pencil USB-C work with the new iPad Pros and iPad Airs. It’s been more than a year to get over the sting of Apple outmoding its own products, but if the company is hoping legacy users will upgrade, it should have included compatibility.

Then there are the expected basics, like the 12-megapixel wide rear camera, which you’ll have so little reason to use daily. It’s useful for scanning a document, but if you’re looking for iPhone 17 Pro-level cameras to shoot your next short film, you’re going to be disappointed. Photos look flat and dull; the digital zoom on anything beyond 1x will appear grainy. Low-light shots are equally depressing. Just stick to your phone camera.

The most recent Magic Keyboard accessories for iPad have all been solid, made even better thanks to the full-height function row. I can occasionally pretend the iPad Pro is a Mac, even though it certainly isn’t. The iPad Pro with M5 chip can connect to a single external display at 4K resolution and 120Hz refresh rate, or a 6K monitor at 60Hz. Connecting it with an external monitor will, for one, limit your ability to charge the device. The single USB-C port supports both USB 4 and Thunderbolt connections, so you may be limited if you only have HDMI, though you may still get power passthrough with Thunderbolt 4 or 5 on a device like Apple’s Studio Display or Pro Display XDR. Otherwise, it will not be nearly as clean an experience as it would be on a laptop.

Apple is obsessed with designing more and more components in-house. That vertical integration strategy means new iPad Pro users will have the option for a C1X 5G modem that first debuted with the iPhone 17 lineup. Apple promises to heaven and back that its wireless connectivity is faster and less power-dependent than the iPad Pros with M4 chip. There are few tests I’m equipped to do to verify any of Apple’s claims. Instead, I took the tablet on a road trip from New York up to Vermont. During that time, I used the iPad Pro’s 5G as a hotspot for a FaceTime call inside an Apple Vision Pro. This wasn’t your ordinary 2D FaceTime video call; I was connected to three other people also wearing Vision Pros and joining with their Spatial Personas, the life-like 3D avatars generated by the headset. I only experienced a single moment where the FaceTime dropped during 30 minutes of use. As always, 5G speeds are heavily dependent on your carrier coverage, location, and surrounding environment. At the same time, the new iPad Pro had barely lost any battery during that call and was only down to a little more than 60% from full after that call and three hours of web browsing with the device on my lap.

This year’s M5 chip refresh is so minimal, Apple threw in storage with 2x faster read and write speeds (compared to the iPad Pros with M4 chip) as a major selling point. This will enable faster data transfers to and from SD cards or portable SSDs, but you’ll have to travel around with a dongle to make it usable.

Finally usable as an occasional laptop

Ever since Apple put its Mac-level silicon in iPads, the Pro-level tablet has felt like an extension of the Mac without the same sense of freedom you find on a traditional desktop operating system. I spent a lot of time playing around with the iPadOS 26 update already on the iPad Pro with M4 chip. You can read my full review and separate explainer where I dive into what’s changed. Plugging away on the iPad Pro with M5 chip is a practically identical experience. Once you’re deep into it, the software update will make Apple tablets feel like an entirely new device, even if that doesn’t change how and when you use an iPad.

The big change is there’s no more such thing as Split View (though Stage Manager remains an option, even if you’ll likely eschew it). Instead, you can resize apps and have them overlap just like you would with app windows on a desktop OS. You can also tile windows by holding the green expand button in the “traffic light†on the top left of each app. The easiest way to organize your screen is to flick an app to the left or right side, letting you expand or contract each with a single gesture.

Swiping up from the bottom of the screen will reveal all your open apps, should you want to get rid of a few or rearrange them. After a few hours of relearning, it will start to feel natural. But even still, it’s not as easy as just using a laptop. The thicker bezels around the screen and 4:3 aspect ratio will make even the 13-inch iPad Pro feel small. You’ll need to shrink your apps to fit more than one on screen at a time. The iPad Pro with M5 chip could be your one and only device for working full-time, but it would be a worse experience than if you used a regular clamshell laptop or a 2-in-1 device like a Surface Pro that runs a proper desktop OS.

M5 is the slightest performance upgrade in years

The M5 is the same silicon Apple’s packing into the new entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro, so it should be good enough, right? What you should care about more is how much of a performance boost you’ll get if you plan to upgrade from a past iPad. Every year, the M-series silicon improves, but with less oomph with each iteration.

The M5 chip includes a 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU, the same configuration as the M4 in the iPad Pro from 2024. In Geekbench 6 CPU tests, the new chip scored around 470 points higher in single-core and 1,655 points higher in multi-core tests. The M5 chip is better at running through multiple tasks than before, which means in apps like video editing and rendering, you’ll experience some faster times. It’s still not a major change over the previous generation. However, if you judge the processor compared to the iPad Air with M3 chip or iPad Pro with M2 chip, the new iPad Pro with M5 chip shows an uplift of 27% and 38% in multi-thread benchmarks, respectively.

How these improvements play out depends greatly on what apps you plan to use. In the 3D rendering app OctaneX, it takes the M4 chip around 50 seconds to render the Screws 3D model. The M5 chip handles the same image in 40 seconds. That’s not a significant jump in performance. For some users, faster rendering times could cut wait times down significantly. You’ll only see a big difference if you jump from the 2022 or 2023 models to the latest iPad Pros. An iPad Air with M3 chip can handle the same task in 1 minute and 8 seconds. That tablet starts at $600 for the 11-inch model. Maybe you won’t mind the slower speeds if your wallet can stay a little thicker.

In 3DMark graphics benchmarks, the iPad Pro with M5 chip seems leaps better than an iPad Pro with M2. At the same time, it’s one of the most marginal  GPU upgrades Apple has ever released. Comparing M4 and M5 with Apple’s most recent update to iPadOS, the newer device performed only 200 points better in 3DMark’s Steel Nomad Light test and barely any better in the Wild Life Extreme benchmark.

The new M5 microarchitecture should make the tablet better for apps using hardware-accelerated ray tracing. The technology makes light behave and interact much more realistically than traditional lighting technology, though it’s extremely GPU-intensive. The M5 chip showed significant gains in 3DMark’s Solar Bay Extreme test by close to 1,000 points. The only problem is, you won’t find that many apps making use of ray tracing. This month, Apple announced Remedy’s Control would be making its way to iPad as well as Mac, and even the Apple Vision Pro with M5 chip next year. (It’s been a long wait, considering the game is six years old and I saw it running on the Mac in late 2024). Control makes use of ray tracing, though there are currently no good apps to truly push the M5 chip to its limits, considering I can’t even play Cyberpunk 2077 on iPad, whereas it runs very well on a Mac with decent specs.

Apple wants you to imagine the real improvement is in AI performance. Every GPU core in the M5 chip contains its own AI accelerator, which—according to Apple—translates to twice as fast video upscaling compared to the M4. Maybe this would mean Apple’s inevitable AI upgrade would run better than on past tablets, but I’m not holding my breath for any chatbot. Apple Intelligence is still mostly meh and the revamped Siri is not coming out until next year after its failed rollout. Maybe those few AI image cleanup capabilities in Adobe Premiere or Photoshop will run a little faster than before. You’ll only run these processes so often; the increased AI speeds are hardly the selling point Apple makes them out to be.

It’s gonna last a very, very long time

Despite its thin and light design, the iPad Pro with M5 chip has surprisingly strong battery life, but it’s far from an “all-day†device if you plan to use it as routinely as you may on a Mac. Using it continuously during a full day, running through multiple apps, benchmarks, and games, I went down to around 10% after about seven hours of continuous work. That’s very, very good for a tablet. If you’re using it with lighter loads or more sporadically, the iPad Pro with M5 chip could easily last long enough for you not to have to reach an outlet until the end of each day.

However, in those times you are stressing the battery, the new promise of fast charging could be what helps set the iPad Pros with M5 chip apart from Apple’s other tablets. Apple promises you should be able to get to 50% in 30 minutes. Apple supplied its adaptive 40W brick that can go up to 65W if necessary. At near empty, the tablet jumped to 55% in just under 30 minutes with the screen turned off. In the end, I wouldn’t worry about battery life with the new iPad Pros, at least when you first buy it and the battery is as fresh as it ever will be. When the battery inevitably starts depleting faster than before, hopefully, the small improvements to repairability introduced in the iPad Pros with M4 will continue with the M5, which means replacing the battery is a bit easier.

When I say the iPad Pro with M5 chip is “the best iPad,†what I’m saying is that it has everything you would want from a big touchscreen, and none of the other iPads come close. That was true before with the iPad Pro with M4 chip, but as the M5 replaces the previous best, it comes around the same moment when iPadOS 26 makes the ecosystem so much more usable for more than watching Netflix or using only one productivity app at a time.

But then, you have to remember just how much you need to pay for an iPad Pro compared to the current or future MacBook Air that will house a similar chip, run it at a slightly higher wattage, and use the more open macOS. The iPad Pro with M5 chip is still a device whose real benefits can only be felt by very specific users. But even if you’re the type who needs a powerful tablet, the real reason you’ll want to upgrade is that OLED display. With enough refreshes, eventually OLED’s delights will start to wane, but my god, does it still suck you right in.