iPad Pro (M5, 8th Generation)
Apple (Hacker News, MacRumors, MacStories):
M5 unlocks the most advanced iPad experience ever, packing an incredible amount of power and AI performance into the ultraportable design of iPad Pro.
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N1, the new Apple-designed wireless networking chip, enables the latest generation of wireless technologies with support for Wi-Fi 7 on iPad Pro. The C1X modem comes to cellular models of iPad Pro, delivering up to 50 percent faster cellular data performance than its predecessor with even greater efficiency, allowing users to do more on the go. Available in space black and silver, iPad Pro comes in 11-inch and 13-inch sizes, and features the Ultra Retina XDR display for an unparalleled viewing experience.
Other than the new processor and networking chips, the specs of the M5 iPad Pro remain largely identical to its predecessor, including its accessory support, physical dimensions and weight, color options (space black and silver, naturally), and 10-hour battery life for surfing the web on Wi-Fi or watching video. The M5 model, however, does support fast charging of up to 50 percent in 30 minutes with Apple’s 40W Dynamic Power Adapter with 60W Max or other compatible adapter.
This year, it’s a similar story in terms of differentiated models, but Apple is actually disclosing all the details of the M5 iPad Pro SKUs up front.
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As you can see, the two lower-tier storage options include only 12GB of memory and 9-core CPUs.
But if you go with a 1TB model or higher, you get a full 16GB of memory and 10-core CPU.
One other detail worth noting: just like on the M4, you can only order a nano-texture M5 iPad Pro if you opt for a 1TB version or higher.
I couldn’t help but be struck by the hero image Apple used in their M5 iPad Pro announcement. In several ways, it laughs in the face of core tenets of the traditional iPad experience.
- It’s explicitly sold as a device you will use in a laptop form factor.
- Touch input may be implied, but the use case they’re demonstrating is keyboard and mouse.
- There are many windows.
- Those windows are overlapping each other.
- Several windows clip off the screen.
Looks like Apple has removed the “iPad Pro” branding from the back of the iPads which appeared in 2022 with the M2 iPad Pro.
Previously:
Update (2025-10-22): Joe Rossignol:
The first reviews of the iPad Pro with the M5 chip have been shared by selected publications and YouTube channels, ahead of the device launching this Wednesday.
I did my testing across two days on AT&T’s 5G network, and while speeds were all over the place, on average, the M5 iPad Pro was a little slower at download and a whole lot faster at upload. Obviously, your mileage will vary depending on your carrier and geography. It’s certainly a viable chip, and that 6.8× improvement in upstream speed was especially surprising.
I do have to commend the little guy for actually getting a single bar of Verizon, something that no plumber or HVAC installer has ever managed at my house. It managed to download data at 30Mbps, though it could barely upload anything. Still, the fact that it managed to connect at all is pretty inspiring.
Apple’s N1 chip offers Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity, including Wi-Fi 7. I tested the M4 and M5 iPads on my local Wi-Fi 7 network, and it went pretty much as you might expect: the M4, which only supports Wi-Fi 6E, lagged behind the M5 with its pure Wi-Fi 7 power.
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There’s certainly more work to be done on iPadOS. But when I take the M5 iPad Pro out for a spin, powered by iPadOS 26, I am reminded that all my angst about the iPad’s hardware outpacing its operating system is beginning to fade away. The hardware is still amazing, to be sure, but it does feel like the operating system loves it back. […] I don’t know where this is all headed, but between iPadOS 26 and the M5 iPad Pro, it feels like the iPad Pro has finally fulfilled the promise it showed a decade ago.
How do you review an iPad Pro that’s visually identical to its predecessor and marginally improves upon its performance with a spec bump and some new wireless radios?
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Unfortunately, while Apple’s claims sound enticing, and the Neural Accelerators should improve AI tasks on a variety of fronts, such as token generation per second and prefill time (for time-to-first-token evaluations), these improvements have little to no practical use on an iPad Pro compared to a Mac right now. And it all comes down to the fact that, despite better multitasking and other features in iPadOS 26, there isn’t a strong app ecosystem to take advantage of local LLMs on iPad, beginning with Apple’s own models.
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Naturally, I wanted to test these models myself and see if I would have any practical use cases for them with my iPad Pro workflow. But I immediately ran into a series of problems, for which only Apple is to blame[…]
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The multitasking and windowing experience of the M5 iPad Pro is essentially the same as the M4, despite the improvements to the new chip and faster memory. I’m not ready to say that Apple has hit a performance wall with their new iPadOS windowing engine already, but at the same time, I’m not sure why Macs with 16 GB of RAM and much older chipsets could keep a lot more windows open at once back in the day.
Viticci’s frustration with the state of A.I. models on the iPad Pro is palpable. Ideally and hopefully, it is a future-friendly system, but that is not usually the promise of Apple’s products. It usually likes to tell a complete story with the potential for sequels. To get even a glimpse of what that story looks like, Viticci had to go to great lengths, as documented in his review.
