As anticipated, Apple has announced the long-awaited M5 iPad Pro.

The new iPad Pro, alongside the updated Vision Pro, becomes one of the first devices powered by the new M5 chip.

What the M5 Brings

Apple’s press release didn’t offer any direct performance comparisons to the M4, but if leaked benchmarks are to be believed, we’re looking at a 5 – 10% performance increase. That’s par for the course for yearly M-series chip upgrades, and will probably look different for the forthcoming Pro and Max chips.

The GPU introduces Apple’s third-generation ray tracing architecture, offering up to 60% faster graphics performance than the M4. Any applications and tasks that rely heavily on the GPU, like video editing, should see meaningful benefits.

The focus of Apple’s marketing around the M5 is its AI performance. The upgraded 16-core Neural Engine, combined with neural accelerators in both the CPU and GPU, improves many AI workflows. Apple claims up to four times faster AI image generation, for example.

Beyond the M5 itself, the new iPad Pro also brings a few smaller but notable changes.

RAM Upgrade

The base configuration for the iPad Pro now goes from 8 GB of RAM to 12 GB, matching the iPhone Air and iPhone Pro. Unfortunately, the higher-end 1 TB and 2 TB models did not receive a corresponding upgrade, so the iPad Pro still tops out at 16 GB of RAM.

I would have loved to see a 24 GB or 32 GB option. While the M5 does bring a boost in memory bandwidth to 153 GB/s, up to 30% more than M4, it’s hard to get around the limitations of not having enough RAM.

The M5 chip itself supports up to 32 GB of RAM.

Fast Charging Comes to iPad

As someone who charges everything overnight, I’ve never really fretted about charging speeds, but Apple’s press release does note that, for the first time, the iPad Pro supports a form of fast charging.

The new Pro can charge up to 50% in 30 minutes when using an USB-C power adapter that provides at least 60W.

High Refresh Rate Support for External Displays

The M-series iPad Pros have been able to drive up to a 6K display for some time, but now the M5 Pro can drive an external display at up to 120 Hz. It should be noted that 120 Hz support tops out at 4K monitors, which makes sense since the iPad Pro is still using Thunderbolt 3 and not a newer version with more bandwidth.

The M5 Pro also gains support for Adaptive Sync on external displays. Adaptive Sync is a technology that syncs the monitor’s refresh rate to the exact frame timing of the GPU output. It’s usually something you hear more about in PC gaming contexts. Both Nvidia and AMD offer their own versions of this tech, G-Sync and FreeSync, respectively.

Faster Wireless

Like the iPhone Air, the iPad Pro features Apple’s new N1 chip for handling Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Thread. This brings Bluetooth 6 and Wi-Fi 7 support to the iPad line for the first time. The previous two generations of iPad Pro supported Wi-FI 6E.

The Pro also gets Apple’s C1X chip in cellular models, delivering faster and more power-efficient 5G performance than the Qualcomm chip it replaces.

Vision Pro App

This isn’t directly M5-related, but it looks like with iPadOS 26.1 we’ll also see the Vision Pro app become available for iPad. This app has so far only been available for iPhone. The Vision Pro app lets you install apps on your Vision Pro from your iPhone or iPad, add shows to your watchlist, and browse content in the Spatial Gallery app.

Link: Apple Newsroom