This was supposed to be a long-term review of the iPhone Air. But a funny thing happened shortly after it came out… I picked up the M5 iPad Pro and decided to make it my daily driver, not the Air. So it felt a little dishonest to review the Air when it hasn’t seen a ton of use over the past year.

So instead, I’m going to talk about how the M5 iPad Pro has held up over the past year, as someone who used this iPad, not as a YouTube machine, but as a daily driver. A machine that went (basically) everywhere with me instead of my phone that I could still be productive with. Potentially the most fully realized version of the idea of the iPad as a third category of device.

Video Version

Hardware

Feature	Specification
Color	Space Black
Storage	512 GB
Chip	Apple M5 (9-core CPU, 10-core GPU)
RAM	12 GB Unified Memory
Display	11-inch Ultra Retina XDR (Tandem OLED)
Resolution	2420 x 1668 pixels (264 ppi)
Cellular Modem	Apple C1X (5G Sub-6 GHz)
SIM Type	eSIM only (No physical SIM slot)
Wi-Fi	Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be)
Bluetooth	Bluetooth 6.0
Battery Life	Up to 9 hours on Cellular / 10 hours on Wi-Fi
Weight	0.98 pounds (446 grams)

Instead of digging into each of the specs individually, I want to talk about the ones that I’ve found have been most impactful over the past year.

First and foremost has to be the display. It’s not new for the M5, but the Ultra Retina XDR display is still the best display Apple ships on any device (at least until the touchscreen MacBook Pro arrives). Since I’ve been using this iPad out and about more, I’ve come to appreciate some things about it outside of the deep blacks and 2,000,000:1 contrast ratio.

I’ve been lucky enough to go on a couple of sunny vacations in the past year, and both times I was able to use my iPad Pro in pretty direct sunlight for reading, with no issues with screen visibility. And that’s without the optional nanotexture finish. That’s a testament to the 1000-nit screen brightness for SDR content, and maybe to the efficiency of the M5 as well. This iPad didn’t overheat after long periods in the sun, which I’ve had happen with prior iPads.

The other important spec for my use as a primary device is the built-in cellular support on the model I went with. The M5 iPad Pro comes equipped with Apple’s C1X modem, and just like I said when I initially reviewed it, there’s still no noticeable difference, good or bad, between it and the Qualcomm modem in the M4 iPad Pro. This is not a reason to upgrade to this iPad.

For most people, cellular is a luxury, because tethering to your phone works well enough. But for me, it’s kind of transformative to how I use the iPad, and it kind of completes the picture of the iPad as a third category of device. There’s a freedom in just being able to take it out of your bag and immediately perform a task. And of course, cellular has allowed the iPad Pro to steal most of the jobs from my iPhone. When I leave the house with just my iPad and my Apple Watch, I can use it for turn-by-turn navigation in the car, listening to music or podcasts, pulling up my grocery list in the store, or ordering food for pickup on my way home.

The other half of the picture is the Magic Keyboard, which lives in my bag. If I have a few minutes and want to crank out some emails, the iPad can do it, because it’s the small laptop Apple apparently no longer wants to make. And with cellular, I don’t have to worry about sketchy public Wi-Fi.

When you combine these features with the more portable size of the 11-inch iPad, the ability to hook it up to a display, and iPadOS 26 and 27 getting better at running iPhone-only apps, you get a very interesting in-between device that can serve as a daily driver for both iPhone and Mac tasks. The one device that (almost) does it all.

Now we just need to get Apple to let us natively make cellular phone calls on this thing.

Scratches

Since I’ve been using the iPad outside of the house more than I probably ever have, I quickly came to the realization that the iPad Pro is in desperate, desperate need of some form of Ceramic Shield.

My screen had a noticeable scratch on it within the first two weeks, and it’s only gotten worse. Ceramic Shield 2 is the real deal on newer iPhones. It’s not perfect, but my iPhone Air has taken a few hard floor drops with no noticeable damage outside of a scuff on the edge. I don’t know if it’s an issue of cost, or maybe Ceramic Shield doesn’t scale well to larger displays, but Apple really needs to do something here. It’s a shame to have this nice laminated display and feel like you have to put a screen protector over it.

The back has gotten a few scratches as well, and they’re more obvious because I have the Space Black model. But I weirdly find that as I get older, I don’t care about those scratches as much as I used to. Most people put their iPads in some kind of case or cover anyway.

Battery Life and Fast Charging

If there’s one area where Apple falls short with the iPad Pro, it’s battery life. Apple claims the M5 iPad Pro gets up to 10 hours of battery life, and I’ve never seen anywhere near that on any but the lightest of days. On heavier-use days, when I’m on the cell network a lot and using a lot of turn-by-turn navigation, I’m plugging this thing in by 1 or 2 PM. It’s not great.

From a battery life perspective, the iPad Pro is falling behind both the Mac and the iPhone. But maybe that’s the trade-off for putting an M-series chip in something so thin. I don’t know how they solve this.

What I’d want to see them do is probably impossible: find a way to improve battery life without making this device a millimeter thicker. But hey, I can dream.

What’s helped, though, is fast charging, which is officially supported on the iPad Pro for the first time. iPad Pros have always charged quickly, but this is the first one that can take a 60W charger and hit 50% in about 30 minutes. Because I have pretty much nothing but fast chargers in my office, I’ve been able to top this thing up really quickly when it gets low, without impacting too much of my day.

120Hz Monitor Support

Another key improvement I’ve been using with this iPad Pro is being able to drive an external display at 120Hz, on up to a 4K display. I mostly work on my original Studio Display, so I set up a second little setup on my gaming desk, with a LG 32GS95UV 4K OLED monitor that goes up to 240Hz.

Getting there wasn’t straightforward, and Apple doesn’t offer much guidance. I ended up needing a DisplayPort adapter, as I couldn’t get HDMI to work with multiple adapters. I wrote a post shortly thereafter detailing how I got this feature working.

Overall, the feature has been a mixed bag for me. I absolutely appreciate the smoother scrolling when reading documents or webpages in Safari. But like people have talked about with the Mac, I can absolutely see the difference in text rendering on a 4K display versus a 5K display. I guess I’ve been spoiled in that regard, but I’m hoping a future iPad Pro can drive a 5K display at 120Hz, to have the best of both worlds.

I should also mention what a disappointment this feature has been for gaming. To my knowledge, there are no games that take advantage of both full-screen support on an external monitor and 120Hz. Gaming is one of the places where high refresh rate displays are most impactful, and the ecosystem just isn’t there on iPadOS.

M5

Of course, the biggest upgrade of the M5 iPad Pro was technically the chip, but it’s probably been the least interesting aspect of it. In day-to-day performance, I can’t tell the difference between my M4 iPad Pro and my M5 iPad Pro. I don’t see that as a problem or a failure on Apple’s part. That’s just how year-over-year upgrades go.

Where I’ve found some benefit with the M5 is in its efficiency. Anecdotally, the M5 iPad Pro runs cooler than my M4 when you really push it.

From a gaming perspective, the GPU in the M5 is technically faster than the one in the M4, but there hasn’t been a single game where I’ve noticed a difference. Both chips play pretty much any iPadOS game at max settings.

The M5 also got a bump from 8 GB of RAM on the lower-end SKUs to 12 GB. As far as I can tell, this mostly matters for the extra Apple Intelligence features it enables, such as the expressive Siri voices and the improved on-device dictation model.

Pricing

Of course, all of this comes at a price. My model, as configured today with the elevated pricing in today’s market, is $1,600, which is kind of insane for any computer right now.

Usually when a reviewer complains about iPad Pro pricing, there’s the implied point of “…and no iPad is worth this much.” I push back on that a little bit. Yes, the iPad Pro is too expensive, but so is the MacBook Pro. And the Mac Studio. Heck, even the MacBook Air gets pricey pretty quickly. But there’s never that question of whether or not it’s worth it.

The thing about the iPad Pro is that it actually offers a lot of utility and value. But if you choose not to take advantage of it, then the very proposition of an expensive iPad seems ludicrous. That’s a choice on the buyer’s part. For me, as an iPad-first user, buying an iPad Pro feels like what buying a MacBook Pro must feel like to Mac users. It’s expensive and I wish it were cheaper, but I get it.

Conclusion

The 11-inch iPad Pro is maybe the best representation of the versatility of the iPad itself. When I leave the house with just it and my Apple Watch, it does the majority of what I need my iPhone to do (minus native cellular calls). When it’s on the Magic Keyboard or docked to a monitor at my desk, it does a lot of what a Mac does.

It’s not without its issues. The screen scratches too easily and the battery life doesn’t match up to Apple’s claims. But outside of those issues, the M5 iPad Pro has worked well as a different kind of daily driver. It is the device that really is the closest thing Apple has to one device that does it all.