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The M5 iPad Pro, while a spec bump over the previous model, makes the best case yet for the iPad Pro as a primary computer. Or a secondary computer. Or a simple notepad. Or a desktop. Or a TV. Or a canvas.

Whatever your use for the iPad Pro, the combination of amazing hardware, a stunning design, and a major software overhaul with iPadOS 26 makes for a pretty compelling machine.

The display is best-in-class. The M5 chip features Apple’s fastest performance cores. The storage is up to twice as fast. And all of this fits in Apple’s thinnest computer ever.

The software, on the other hand, is…interesting. iPadOS 26 presents an interesting juxtaposition. The improvements it brings to productivity are undeniable, but I can’t help but look at some of the decisions in iPadOS 26 and not feel like the iPad Pro a little worse to use as a tablet. For long-time iPad users, that’s kind of a kick in the teeth.

As with everything in life, there’s no such thing as perfect, so this review dissects the M5 iPad Pro in three sections, Positives, Neutrals, and Negatives. But before we get to that…

The iPad I Went With

As an enthusiast, and purely for science (of course), I bought both sizes of the M4 iPad Pro in 2024. This was partially because I can’t decide between the two, and partially so that I could upgrade one of them with every release.

This year I picked up the 11 inch M5 iPad Pro. It comes with 512 GB of RAM in the not-quite-as-boring-as-Space-Grey Space Black color. The M5 chip has a nine core CPU with three performance cores and 6 efficiency cores. Just like last year, I went with the cellular option.

I already own a Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil Pro, so there was no extra expense there. Apple’s accessories are expensive, but its nice that you can generally use them for years across different upgrades.

The 11 inch iPad Pro is something of a big iPhone for me, and not in the derogatory way most reviewers mean. Unlike the 13 inch Pro that sits firmly in the “MacBook” spot, the smaller Pro is much more of a companion device comes with me many of places I go. While most people in the office have their phone on their desk next to them, I have the 11 inch Pro, serving as both an iPhone and a notepad.

Positives

Display

The M5 iPad Pro has the same amazing Ultra Retina XDR display as its predecessor. Using tandem OLED technology to essentially fuse two OLED panels together, it remains the best display Apple ships. Period. And yes, that includes your $2000 MacBook Pro 😁.

With the M5 Pro, that display now has a minimum brightness of 1 nit. That sounds like a small thing, but if you’re using your iPad in bed with other people in the room who’ve maybe complained about the screen being too bright in the past, they will appreciate this.

Other than that, the display retains its other standout features like an adaptive 120 hz refresh rate and faster response times. This display kind of ruined the otherwise excellent Mini-LED displays Apple used in prior iPad Pros and the current MacBook Pros for me. I’ve read that Apple displays had slower response times than some of their competitors, but after switching to OLED iPad Pro, it became incredibly obvious when I go back to an older device.

If I have one disappointment with the display on the M5 Pro, is that it doesn’t support Always-On, like the iPhone. If Apple isn’t going to give us the option to turn off the iPad display when plugged into a monitor, it would be great to be able to put it to use with an improved version of the iPhone’s Standby mode.

M5 & General Performance

At this point in the life of the M-Series chips, we’ve settled into something of a familiar pattern in terms of yearly performance gains. A 10-20% performance improvement may not seem super impressive year over year (it actually is), but it quickly adds up. Before you know it, it’s been five years, and the next iPad you buy is twice as fast as your current one.

CPU Geekbench 6 Comparison

Model	Single-Core	vs M5	Multi-Core	vs M5
M1 iPad Pro	2,396	−42.6 %	8,767	−44.0 %
M3 iPad Air	3,155	−24.4 %	12,085	−22.8 %
M4 iPad Pro	3,676	−12.0 %	14,889	−4.9 %
M5 iPad Pro	4,175	—	15,659	—

The M5 is about 12% faster than the M4 in single-core Geekbench scores, and about 5% faster in multi-core scores.

GPU (Metal) Geekbench 6 Comparison

Model	GPU Metal Score	vs M5
M1 iPad Pro	33,868	−51.8 %
M3 iPad Air	45,904	−34.7 %
M4 iPad Pro	54,763	−22.1 %
M5 iPad Pro	70,289	—

In terms of GPU performance, the M5 is a little over 20% faster.

Will you actually notice these differences? In some scenarios, yes, but I wager for anyone on an M3 or M4 powered device, they won’t be enough to really matter.

The most intensive thing I do with my iPad remains video editing, so I like to test video export times to illustrate performance gains. Using Final Cut Pro, here’s how the M5 compares to some of my older iPads for exporting a six minute 4k video.

Final Cut Pro Export Time Comparison (6-Minute 4K Video)

Model	Export Time (m:ss)	vs M5
M1 iPad Pro	03:55:05	−58.2%
M3 iPad Air	03:17:52	−33.2%
M4 iPad Pro	02:57:05	−19.2%
M5 iPad Pro	02:28:35	—

The M5 has a roughly 20% performance lead over the M4 in this scenario, but you can see in real world terms, its about 30 seconds. Is that really worth upgrading to a new iPad. I’d argue no, but hey, it’s your money. Compared against the M1 chip, which is still very capable in 2025, the performance gains become noticeably impactful.

Memory

The 256 and 512 GB SKUs get a RAM boost from 8 GB to 12 GB, which is very welcome, even if I’d like to see the iPad Pro at 16 GB across the board, like the Mac.

Some people think a RAM increase is pointless on an iPad, even an iPad Pro. Its that tired old “nothing takes advantage of the hardware” argument.

Since iPadOS 15, apps have had the option to request access to additional amounts of RAM via an entitlement. This, combined with Virtual Memory Swap, makes it so developers can take more advantage of the hardware (if they choose).

For AI, specifically running Large Language Models (LLMs) locally on the device, the more memory that’s available, the bigger and more capable model you can run. Even though Apple Intelligence isn’t anything to write home about today, it’s likely that Apple’s models will continue to improve over time. Developers embedding their own custom models into their own apps similarly benefit from as much physical RAM as possible.

Faster Storage

In Apple’s press release, they calls out that the M5 iPad Pro has an up to 2x improvement in read and write speeds for storage. Other reviewers have noted that what this really means is that the iPad Pro now uses a PCIe 5.0 storage controller.

This is one of those upgrades I didn’t think I’d notice in day-to-day use, but the M5 Pro really does feel significantly snappier than my M4 Pro when moving around the interface. Final Cut Pro also feels much more responsive than it’s been feeling on my main machine. Some of this could be due to this being a fresh device with a fresh battery but I did restore from an iCloud backup.

Some examples of tasks that will benefit from faster storage include things like moving large video files and various aspects of interacting with large language models (model loading, caching).

Disk Speed Comparison (using Jazz Disk Bench Lite)

Model	Storage	Read (MB/s)	Sequential Read vs M5	Write (MB/s)	Write vs M5
M1 iPad Pro 12.9	512 GB	2680.63	-48.2%	2392.52	-35.5%
M3 iPad Air	128 GB	1484.06	-71.3%	792.57	-78.6%
M4 iPad Pro	1 TB	2572.86	-50.3%	1201.88	-67.6%
M5 iPad Pro	512 GB	5171.72	—	3710.14	—

I list the storage amounts here because sometimes we find out the SSDs in Apple’s computers with are slower than the ones in machines with larger drives. That may be why the numbers for the iPad Air are so much lower.

Beyond the general snappiness of the interface, I haven’t observed any noticeable speed differences I can attribute to the faster SSD with any of the apps I’ve used.

High Refresh Rate Display Support

The one feature that kept me from making my iPad Pro my main personal machine for years was lack of proper external display support. And while Apple addressed that in 2021 with the M1 chip and iPadOS 16, they haven’t improved upon that support until now.

The M5 Pro adds support for a driving a single connected display at a refresh rate of up to 120Hz. Similar to how it felt when going from a standard display to one with Apple’s ProMotion technology, you absolutely do feel the difference. Every interaction on the display feels snappier and more responsive. I tested this feature on my LG OLED gaming monitor that supports up to 240hz. It wasn’t as straightforward to get this working as you’d hope, and I wrote about that experience here.

Its worth noting that even though the iPad Pro can drive a 6k display, high refresh rate support is capped at 4k resolution. I’m guessing this has to do with a combination of the thermal limitations of the iPad Pro itself, and the iPad Pro “only” supporting Thunderbolt 3. Realistically, this is only really an issue if you’re used to using a 5k display, like Apple’s Studio Display. The display scaling “issues” people report with macOS on 4k vs 5k displays feel less pronounced on iPadOS. Text on a 4k display isn’t quite as sharp as it is on the Studio Display, but for some, the higher refresh rate more than makes up for it.

Adaptive Sync

Alongside high refresh rate support comes support for Adaptive Sync. The principle behind this is the same as Apple’s ProMotion. The refresh rate of the connected monitor can dynamically change based on the current content. This contributes to how smooth moving the mouse and scrolling windows can feel on the monitor. It should also, in theory, improve gaming performance on external displays as games can take advantage of this technology, the same way they do on PCs and consoles.

I don’t know of any iPadOS games that even support running on an external display, but any variable refresh rate support they’ve built in to support ProMotion should just work on supported monitors. This is more a future state thing, and I’m hoping Apple is doing something to encourage game developers to support running iPadOS games on monitors at full screen and full resolution. Because right now, that support really isn’t there.

Speakers

The kerfuffle around the iPhone Air having a single speaker reminded me of how good the audio situation has always been on the iPad Pro. And while the M5 iPad Pro makes no changes here, the four-speaker audio system continues to produce surprisingly full and loud audio for a device of its size. The speakers are one of the reasons I’ve moved so much of my video watching from the phone to the tablet.

Of course, they won’t compete with the audio in something like a MacBook Pro, which has more and bigger speakers, but for a device as thin as the iPad Pro, I remain impressed.

Accessories

The M5 iPad Pro supports the same accessories as its predecessor, like the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil Pro. There’s no change or improvement in how these accessories work with the new Pro. So if you are upgrading from the M4 to the M5, you won’t see any differences here, and thankfully you can reuse your existing accessories.

But if you’re upgrading from an older iPad Pro or iPad Air, you’re in for a treat with these accessories. A very expensive treat, but a treat nonetheless.

The Magic Keyboard aluminum top cover lends itself to a very premium feel, even if the rest of the keyboard is made from the same material as the prior keyboard. I will note here that after 18 months of use for both 11-inch and 13-inch keyboards, they have held up better than their predecessors. There’s been little to no fraying along the edges, and the white one doesn’t look dingy or dirty. The addition of a function row has been a nice improvement, even though pretty much every 3rd-party iPad keyboard has had one from the beginning.

The Apple Pencil Pro’s squeeze gesture quickly becomes a feature you wonder how you lived without. It’s a much quicker and more reliable way to switch tools than relying on double-tap alone, which for me, is often difficult to invoke.

Fast Charging

The M5 iPad Pro brings fast charging to the iPad for the first time, allowing it to charge up 50% in about 30 minutes.

I didn’t expect to really take advantage of this feature, but it really came in handy while testing external displays. Turns out, driving a display at 120Hz can really drain an iPad’s battery, especially on the 11-inch model. When testing with the monitor, I was going through the battery in a 2-3 hours.

Neutral

C1X Chip

The best thing you can say about Apple’s C1X chip, which makes its iPad debut in the M5 Pro, is that in everyday use, its unnoticeable and unremarkable.

In the places I use my iPad on cellular, there’s been no noticeable difference. Regardless, I ran a couple of speed tests against my M4 Pro with a Qualcomm modem. The results below are the averages of speed tests I ran (using Speedtest.net) from my home office and my backyard, switching my Verizon eSim between the two of them. These tests were run within minutes of each other (basically as long as took me to transfer the eSim).

📶 Verizon 5G Speed Comparison — iPad Pro (Qualcomm vs Apple C1X)

Model	Home Office Download (Mbps)	Backyard Download (Mbps)	Home Office Upload (Mbps)	Backyard Upload (Mbps)
M4 iPad Pro (Qualcomm modem)	390.0	445.1	14.7	15.5
M5 iPad Pro (Apple C1X modem)	397.3	287.1	27.5	20.7

The C1X came ahead the Qualcomm modem in all my tests except for the outdoor download test. This may be important to you if you are the type of person that does lots of streaming games or media on cellular. But again, for me, I didn’t feel any difference between the two in real world usage.

It’s hard for me to care too much about a modem as long as it functions. Despite the claims of improved power efficiency, moving to their own modems really feels like more of a benefit to Apple than to consumers. So this remains a “meh”.

Cameras

Welp, the pre-release rumors of an iPad Pro with two front-facing cameras didn’t come true.

I’m a little disappointed there were no changes with either of the cameras on the M5 Pro. Not that what’s there isn’t serviceable, especially against your standard laptop front camera. Seeing the new 18 MP front sensor that debuted on the iPhone Air and other 2025 iPhones, it would have been nice to see the iPad Pro get the same resolution bump, even if it didn’t get the new selfie cropping feature.

The rear camera hardware is fine for what it needs to do. I still wish that Apple would bring Visual Intelligence support to iPadOS. I can’t think of a better use case for that camera, and I’ve thought of a few 😁.

AI

One of the big marketing pushes for the M5 Pro is how much improved it is over its predecessors for AI. And I’m sure that’s true. The M5 adds neural accelerators to the CPU, after the M4 added them to the GPU. The Neural Engine itself is also faster. Basically, wherever you want to run your AI workload on the iPad Pro will be some percentage faster than the M4 iPad Pro.

But does that really matter?

The ability to use local AI models is important, and Apple needs to be much more competitive here, but to the average user, “AI” is really just using ChatGPT or Claude in a web browser or an app. Which means the models aren’t running locally.

I will always prefer compute that happens on device, but the popularity of these cloud-based AI chatbots suggests that the average user, even the average “pro user,” doesn’t care, as long as they see some benefit.

In the press materials for the M5 iPad Pro, Apple used this app called Draw Things as an example of software that will benefit from the improved AI hardware. I’d never heard of this app before, but it does on device image generation using different models you can install via the app or one you may have on device. This seemed like as good a test as any, so I ran the app with the same prompt and same model (Qwen 1.0) to see if there was any difference in performance against my M4 Pro.

I wasn’t surprised the M5 generated the image faster, but I was surprised just how much faster it was. The M5 iPad Pro generated the image about three times as fast as the M4.

The N1 Chip

The N1 Chip promises faster wireless and Bluetooth connections, but since I don’t have a Wi-Fi 7 router or any Bluetooth 6.0 accessories, all I will say here is that wireless largely seems fine. No issue with connecting to Bluetooth accessories like the Apple Pencil Pro or AirPods Pro 3. As you hope for with a wireless chip, the N1 is pretty unexciting.

Negatives

Battery Life

I’m not going to compare the battery life of the iPad Pro to the battery life of a MacBook (which all have much bigger batteries). Instead, I’m going to grade the iPad Pro against Apple’s own claim of 10 hours of battery life.

This remains an area where the M5 iPad Pro falls short, like most iPads these days. The problem is little more pronounced on more powerful machines that encourage you to do more and run more powerful apps, but I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw 10 hours of meaningful battery life on an iPad. Maybe the iPad Mini, but that’s a pretty casual use device for me.

On the 11-inch iPad Pro, I get about 7 hours of battery life on average before I feel like I should plug the device in.

I’m not sure how Apple can improve this without the underlying battery technology making some huge advances. You might say “well, they could make the iPad thicker and fit in a bigger battery”, and you’d be right, but I firmly believe that devices you hold in your hands, like a tablet or a smartphone, should be as thin and light as possible. So in my mind they shouldn’t go down the “make it thicker” route.

RAM

The RAM situation on the iPad Pro improved a little, but remains frustrating.

It’s great that the 256 GB and 512 GB models got a RAM increase, but it’s frustrating is that

• To get 16 GB of RAM, you still need to spring for the 1 TB or 2 TB configurations. On the Mac, you can buy a $599 Mac Mini and it comes with 16 GB of RAM
• There’s no option to go beyond 16 GB of RAM. If Apple wants to encourage more upgrades from professionals, they need to increase the RAM ceiling, even they still lock it to the higher configurations. I would have spent a lot more money upgrading to the M5 if I knew I could get 24 or 32 GB of RAM.
  

Ports

With iPadOS 26, Apple is absolutely sending the message that you can use your iPad like a traditional laptop. One thing traditional laptop users love is ports. They can never have enough. And while the Thunderbolt 3 support is the iPad Pro does give you the flexibility to use docks and adapters, it’s past time for Apple to give us another Thunderbolt port.

Right now if you want to charge your tablet while you have an external SSD plugged in, you can’t, unless you’re using something like the Magic Keyboard or the KUXIU M30 Magnetic Smart Connector Charger for iPad Pro.

You shouldn’t have to buy anything extra to be able to charge and work at the same time.

Software

This isn’t going to be that obnoxious section of every iPad review where I complain about how the hardware is so good, but the software lets it down. That hasn’t been true in a long time.

This is more about Apple software quality as it pertains to iPadOS (though you could argue they have software quality issues across the board).

iPadOS 26

iPadOS 26 is arguably buggier than iPadOS 18. That’s not really a surprise. Whenever Apple does big software changes, it takes some time for them to further optimize and squash bugs. So that’s kind of expected.

But what iPadOS 26 does for the iPad Pro is something I really didn’t think I’d ever see from Apple.

It makes it a slightly worse tablet.

I don’t want to oversell this. We’re not at Microsoft Surface levels of bad here, but the touch experience has taken a bit of a hit in this new release.

The new windowing and multitasking is getting a lot of praise from general tech reviewers and those that want the iPad to be a Mac. But the reaction from actual iPad users has been much more mixed. There are touch-based workflows that are now either more limited or cumbersome than they were in iPadOS 18.

Consider Split View, which is only now only accessible in Windowed Apps or Stage Manager modes. In iPadOS 18, you could quickly drag and drop an app from the Dock to create a split with an already open app. Now, you’d have to open the second app, then either flick each app to a side of the display or tap-and-hold the traffic light buttons on each app to turn them into splits. That’s more taps to accomplish something that could have been easily done with a simple drag in the past.

Why does this matter when the new windowing brings a lot more flexibility in many other ways? Well, it turns out that if you’re not using a 13-inch iPad, there’s not really enough screen real estate to have a bunch of apps open at one time. Even if you take advantage of the window tiling feature, the windows are borderline too small to be useful. If you’re not using tiling, you spend a lot more time fiddling with windows and trying to get them to be the right size, and then doing that again if you rotate the iPad.

The previous multitasking seems like it was optimized for the 11-inch and smaller iPads, whereas the new windowing seems like it was intended for larger screens, like the 13-inch iPad Pro or the rumored 14-inch iPad Pro.

You can sort of recreate much of the old multitasking using Windowed Apps mode. iPadOS 26.1 even brings back a version of Slide Over to help with that. But this all takes more steps than it did before.

It’s kind of funny to think about how originally tablets and smartphones freed us from the tired old paradigms of desktop computing and now we’re sliding back to the complexity of the past like its a good thing.

Poor External Display Software

External display support is still jankier than it should be four years after adding the feature. iPadOS 26 helps a little, but the amount of bugs I run into as someone that spends a significant amount of time with their iPad connected to a display is depressing. It’s clear that no one at Apple actually uses this feature for more than a few minutes at a time.

My latest annoyance is that sometimes when dragging your window from one side of your external display to the other, you hit the halfway point, your window magically starts showing up on the iPad display, as if you’re trying to drag between displays. Sloppy.

That joins other bugs I regularly run into such as:

• When you first connect your iPad to a monitor, the iPad seems to have the incorrect coordinate space for your mouse. Try to move your mouse over to the monitor, and the iPad moves the pointer in a completely different direction. It takes about a minute for the iPad to get its act together and the mouse to work as expected.
• Every so often, you’ll be in your flow with a bunch of windows open on your monitor, then want to open an app on the iPad display annnnddd…nope! Springboard (the iPad homescreen) decides it doesn’t want to, and would rather crash instead, taking all of your nicely arranged windows with it.
• There’s still, to my knowledge, not enough software support for interacting with the external display. I do a lot of screen recording for videos, and you can’t screen record an external display. This extends to screen sharing as well. As nice as it is to be able to share your screen during a Teams call, it would be logical to be able to choose which display I share, and there’s no way for apps to do that.

Buying Advice

For iPad Pro users on older models, if OLED isn’t super important to you (have I mentioned how amazing this display is?), I wouldn’t even consider upgrading to the M5 Pro unless you’re on an M1 or older. And even then, if you can find a deal on the M4 iPad Pro, you can save some money without sacrificing most of the experience.

For users on other iPads, or who are maybe coming to the iPad for the first time, the question is: what’s your budget? If you can swing it, the iPad Pro is simply in a league of its own after its most recent redesign.

Conclusion

The M5 iPad Pro isn’t a huge improvement over its predecessor, but it continues to present the best case for a tablet that can be a primary computer. Its display and performance are top of the line, and its impressively thin design and optional cellular make it the most portable computer Apple sells this side of an iPhone.

The iPad Pro is somewhat let down by its software, but not because it doesn’t run macOS. Some of the decisions made in iPadOS 26 made the Pro more laptop-like at the expense of some of its touch optimizations. And having support for 120 hz on external displays is somewhat blunted by how buggy the extended display support remains on iPadOS.

Overall, if you’re looking for a thin, modern, flexible, and portable computer, you can’t do much better than the M5 iPad Pro.