M4 iPad Pro review: Well, now you’re just showing off

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The new iPad Pro is a technical marvel, with one of the best screens I’ve ever seen, performance that few other machines can touch, and a new, thinner design that no one expected.

It’s a prime example of Apple flexing its engineering and design muscles for all to see. Since it marks the company’s first foray into OLED beyond the iPhone or Watch, and the first time a new M-series chip has debuted on something other than a Mac, it comes across as a tech demo for where the company is headed beyond just tablets.

Still, it remains unclear why most people would spend one, two, or even three thousand dollars on a tablet that, despite its amazing hardware, does less than a comparably priced laptop—or at least does it a little more awkwardly, even if it's impressively quick and has a gorgeous screen.

Specifications

There are some notable design changes in the 2024 iPad Pro, but really, it’s all about the specs—and it’s a more notable specs jump than usual in a couple of areas.

M4

First up, there’s the M4 chip. The previous iPad Pro had an M2 chip, and the latest Mac chip is the M3, so not only did the iPad Pro jump two whole generations, but this is the first time it has debuted the newest iteration of Apple Silicon. (Previously, new M-series chips launched on the Mac first and came to the iPad Pro a few months later.)

Using second-generation 3 nm tech, the M4’s top configuration has a 10-core CPU, a 10-core GPU, and a 16-core NPU. In that configuration, the 10-core CPU has four performance cores and six efficiency cores.

A lower configuration of the M4 has just nine CPU cores—three performance and six efficiency. Which one you get is tied to how much storage you buy. 256GB and 512GB models get nine CPU cores, while 1TB and 2TB get 10. Additionally, the two smaller storage sizes have 8GB of RAM to the larger ones’ 16GB.

This isn’t the first time Apple has tied RAM to storage configurations, but doing that with CPU cores is new for the iPad. Fortunately, the company is upfront about all this in its specs sheet, whereas the RAM differentiation wasn’t always clear to buyers in the past. (Both configurations claim 120GB/s memory bandwidth, though.)

An iPad Pro attached to a keyboard and a pencil — Can the M4 help the iPad Pro bridge the gap between laptop and tablet? Mostly, it made me excited to see the M4 in a laptop. Credit: Samuel Axon

Regardless of the specific configuration, the M4 promises substantially better CPU and GPU performance than the M2, and it supports hardware-accelerated ray-tracing via Metal, which some games and applications can take advantage of if developers put in the work to make it happen. (It looked great in a demo of Diablo Immortal I saw, but it’s unclear how often we’ll actually see it in the wild.)

Apple claims 1.5x faster CPU performance than the M2 and up to 4x faster graphics performance specifically on applications that involve new features like ray-tracing or hardware-accelerated mesh shading. It hasn't made any specific GPU performance claims beyond those narrow cases.

A lot of both Apple’s attention and that of the media is focused on the Neural Engine, which is what Apple calls the NPU in the M-series chips. That’s because the company is expected to announce several large language model-based AI features in iOS, macOS, and iPadOS at its developer conference next month, and this is the chip that will power some of that on the iPad and Mac.

Some neat machine-learning features are already possible on the M4—you can generate audio tracks using certain instruments in your Logic Pro projects, apply tons of image optimizations to photos with just a click or two, and so on.

It’s unclear exactly what new AI features the M4 will power in the new versions of iPadOS and macOS, but we do know that the updated Neural Engine introduces greater support for 8-bit compute, so working with 8-bit data should be twice as fast on the M4 as on the previous chip. Apple is looking to support a wide range of data formats, which is good for efficiently running different types of models. What will that mean in terms of specific models and features? We’ll probably have to wait until WWDC in June to find out.

That’s a bit of a theme with anything having to do with the M4 here; to learn more about it, we really need to test it on the Mac, where more tools are available for that task. So look out for more in-depth coverage of the M4 when it comes to the Mac—hopefully in just a month or two.

The Mac is also where I’m personally most excited about the M4. The truth is that you have to dig pretty deep into Final Cut, Logic, or a small cadre of other pro apps on the iPad Pro to find a case where you’ll see a different experience on the M4 than you would with the M2. They exist, mostly in the form of very specific tools and features within those programs, but most users won’t run into them much.

The Mac is a more versatile machine with more demanding workflows simply by nature of who is typically using it and what software has been released for those users. The iPad Pro is more powerful than most users need it to be, but Mac users will surely appreciate a notable bump in performance when they get the same chip in the future.

OLED display

The iPad is first and foremost about the display, and that’s where Apple has really gone to town here. Previously, the biggest iPad Pro had a Mini-LED display that helped overcome some of LCD’s downsides by counteracting bloom and achieving higher contrast between dark and bright areas of an image than before. It had darker blacks and very bright HDR highlights.

Unfortunately, the smaller iPad Pro still had an older-style LCD display. As balanced as it was, it couldn’t hold a candle to the quality of the OLED screens found in iPhones and high-end TVs.

Now, both iPad Pro models have OLED screens. Not only that, but they have a new kind of OLED screen called “Tandem OLED,” which stacks two OLED panels on top of one another to achieve higher peak brightness with a little help from the M4.

Details are scarce on exactly how Tandem OLED works, but we know that one of the panels is transparent to light generated by the second, so the light path goes from one through the other. A series of algorithms monitor and adjust this process on the M4 chip.

The screen gets very, very bright. Credit: Samuel Axon

What matters for most users is the result, though, and it's spectacular. You get precise, per-pixel illumination for perfect contrast without any of the distracting blooming exhibited by the previous large iPad Pro's Mini-LED display, and you also get perfect blacks in the pixels that should be black, which is a dramatic difference from regular LED displays' gray-ish glow.

We're also seeing peak brightness of around 1,600 nits on highlights (1,000 typical), which is frankly absurd for an OLED screen. One of the main downsides of OLED displays compared to competing LED technologies has been that they can't usually reach the same brightness in HDR highlights. Not so here.

This display is about as good as it gets in any consumer device (including high-end TVs and smartphones). My only complaint is that when I watched the same content on the iPad Pro as I watched on my LG OLED TV, the image skewed subtly to green with some content. I would have never noticed it without a side-by-side, direct comparison, though.

If you're looking for a portable screen for watching movies or authoring content, you can't get better than this. There's an adage that a tablet is all about the screen, and if that's true, this is the best tablet ever made—there's no competition anywhere near it, even in Apple's own lineup.

Configuration options

Beyond the M4 and the OLED screens, most of the specs are the same as the previous iPad Pro, so we won’t get into detail on most of the rest. All that’s left to cover on this front is the storage configurations. The entry-level storage capacity is now 256GB ($999 for the 11-inch, $1,299 for the 13), with possible (and pricey) upgrades to 512 GB (+$200 over base), 1TB (+another $400), and 2TB (+yet another $400).

You can also add nano-texture glass for an extra $100 to the 1TB or 2TB configurations. That option reduces screen glare while retaining some of the advantages of a glossy display. Given that Apple told users they had to be super careful about the nanotexture in the Pro Display XDR, though, I’m not sure whether to recommend it.

Finally, you can pick between Wi-Fi-only and Wi-Fi+5G models; 5G costs $200 extra. All told, these are extremely expensive tablets.

Design

Ultimately, an iPad is an iPad—that is to say, the basic design is well and settled. It’s a thin slate that’s almost all screen on one side, with cameras on the back and some subtle buttons along the edges. That obviously hasn’t changed here.

But the device has gotten thinner this time around. The 13-inch iPad Pro is only 5.1 mm thick, and the 11-inch is slightly thicker at 5.3 mm. (The difference isn’t that noticeable.) The devices are also surprisingly light, at 1.28 pounds (579g) for the 13 and 0.98 pounds (444g) for the 11.

I don’t think anyone was asking for a lighter iPad Pro, but it is nice. It makes the tablet a bit more comfortable to hold for long stretches of time—especially the 13-incher. It feels great to grip and use.

The materials are the same, the bezels are of a similar size to the previous models, and most of the components look the same and are positioned in the same spots.

There is one big, welcome exception: The front-facing camera is now on an edge that will be at the top when using the device in landscape mode rather than at the top of portrait mode. It’s a little baffling that it took this long to happen, but it’s finally here, and I’m glad to see it.

Unfortunately, the redesigns here have a nasty downside: The new iPad Pros do not support many of the accessories built for the prior models. If you own a case or even the Magic Keyboard from a previous model, you’ll have to buy new versions.

Accessories

In light of that, there are, of course, new and very expensive accessories you can buy for the iPad Pro. The keyboard-less Smart Folio returns with few notable developments other than accommodating the new iPad Pro design.

The Magic Keyboard, meanwhile, gets a nicer-feeling, more metallic-looking chassis, plus the addition of a row of 14 function keys for adjusting brightness, media playback, and so on. Its trackpad is slightly larger and supports haptic feedback. I’ve complained in the past about the prior Magic Keyboard’s trackpad, and this one is a little better, though it’s still not as good as what you’ll get with a Mac laptop.

The Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro — The keyboard now has a function row and a slightly better trackpad. Too bad it's so expensive! Credit: Samuel Axon

The other benefit of the Magic Keyboard is passthrough charging that allows you to keep the iPad Pro on power while using its USB-C port for something else, like external storage or a musical instrument.

The typing experience isn’t any different, but it’s still solid.

More interesting is the new Apple Pencil Pro, which lives alongside the first- and second-generation Apple Pencils. The differentiators between these pencils will likely be arcane and confusing for most potential buyers.

The new Pencil Pro is a marked improvement. It now supports pressure sensitivity and provides haptic feedback while you use it. Additionally, it offers a few new interactions. You can now squeeze it, which in some apps will bring up a menu of options. Twisting it in a “barrel roll” allows you to change exactly what you’re putting down on the page. (There’s double-tap, too.) Apple’s own apps, like Freeform, support these gestures, and third-party developers can add their own uses for them.

I’m not a visual artist, and I have no nostalgia for handwriting over typing. I’m pretty sure I type faster on an iPhone or iPad than I can write by hand, to say nothing of my 140 words-per-minute average on a proper physical keyboard, so the Pencil isn't really for me. But it was clear to even me how the new gestures and feedback could help make things move more smoothly for the artistically inclined.

As neat as these accessories are, they’ll rapidly ramp up the bill. The Apple Pencil Pro costs $129, and the regular USB-C Pencil costs $79. The 11-inch Smart Folio costs $79, while the 13-inch case runs $99.

It’s the Magic Keyboard that will really take things into the stratosphere, though, at $300 for the 11-inch variant and $350 for the 13-inch. Frankly, that’s crazy, and I don’t understand why they have to cost so much. These tablets are so expensive to begin with.

Performance

Apple made big promises about the performance of the M4 in the iPad Pro, in part because the tablet leapfrogged the M3 to go all the way from the M2 to here. Specifically, Apple claims 1.5x faster CPU performance compared to the M2.

We tested several Apple devices with the M2, M3, M4, and the A12 and found that the M4 comes pretty close to matching Apple's claim about relative CPU performance. In the Geekbench benchmark, this iPad Pro achieved almost 44 percent faster performance than the iPad Air with M2 in the multi-core test and a jump of around 41 percent for single-core.

GPU performance is up compared to the chip found in the previous iPad Pro, albeit not as radically—about 28 percent. We saw about 20 percent faster performance than the M2 in Geekbench's machine learning test for the Neural Engine/NPU in the M4. That could really vary a lot depending on the models you're running, though. As I mentioned earlier, Apple says the M4 introduced greater support for 8-bit compute, so it could be up to twice as fast for that data type.

The performance improvements compared to the M3 running in the MacBook Air are less dramatic: +20 percent or so for the CPU, +13 percent for the GPU, and +8 percent for the NPU. However, there are big differences in the thermals between these machines, so keep that in mind.

All told, performance isn't the big story with the iPad Pro, mainly because almost no one was complaining about performance in the M2 model. There's a big step up in CPU performance in particular from the last model to this one, though that's partly because this upgrade was so overdue; it skips a chip generation, and this was one of the longest gaps in the iPad product update cycle yet.

I'm always happy to see faster performance, but it really doesn't seem necessary with these machines. The use cases and software have to catch up first. There's more to discover with the M4, so look out for our coverage of the M4 in the first Macs that get it later this year.

Overkill

The iPad Pro is so much faster than most people need it to be—so loaded with expensive, cutting-edge technology—that it seems like it exists more for Apple to show off what it’s truly capable of than it does for most actual user needs.

As with most things in life, you get what you pay for—but I’m not sure most of us need to pay this much to get what we need. The cheaper iPad Air—or even the even-cheaper regular iPad—will already exceed most people’s purposes.

The M4 is the perfect example of this; it’s ridiculously fast, yes, but there are only a few applications that can truly make any use of that speed in a way that feels meaningfully different from the M2 found in the current-generation iPad Air, and even in those apps, you’re generally looking at edge cases or very specific features.

On the other hand, the OLED screen is extraordinary, and even folks who aren’t display nerds will absolutely see the difference. If you’re looking for a high-end movie-viewing experience on your next flight, look no further than these tablets (or Apple's Vision Pro). The screen on the iPad Air is fine for that, but it’s nowhere near as good as what you get with the Pro now. The screen is the main reason I would consider buying a Pro instead of an Air. It's not a small difference.

In previous reviews of the iPad Pro and iPad Air, I’ve noted that there wasn’t enough differentiation between the Pro and Air to justify going with the more expensive option for most of us. Before, the difference was largely about having a 120 Hz screen instead of a 60 Hz one or marginally better performance and extremely niche features specific to the needs of some content creators.

Now Apple has indeed delivered notable differentiation between the two tiers, but in doing so, it has taken the iPad Pro way past any goalpost most critically thinking buyers were looking for. If you're debating between the two, it's all about whether you want to pay more for OLED. (The thinner design is actually pretty nice, too.)

In a way, it almost looks like the iPad Pro is a testing ground for new technologies like the M4 and OLED that might come to the more flexible Mac platform in the near future.

The iPad Pro is an amazing device, and it’s a delight to use for some kinds of tasks. But despite continual refinement, the limitations of iPadOS compared to the flexibility (and better pro software support) of macOS mean I’m more excited about what these new developments might mean for future Macs than anything else.

The good

The spectacular “Tandem OLED” screen might be the best screen I’ve ever seen in a mobile device
Extraordinarily fast CPU, GPU, and NPU performance
Lighter design makes for more comfortable handling
The front-facing camera is now in a much more sensible location

The bad

Several desirable upgrades are tied to extremely expensive high-end storage configurations
You’ll want additional accessories to get the most out of these devices
iPadOS is still in an awkward middle position between smooth-to-use consumption platform and almost-but-never-quite-there productivity platform

The ugly

The iPad Pro is extremely expensive, especially with its accessories—and it’s probably a lot more tablet than most people need

Listing image: Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon Senior Editor

Samuel Axon is a senior editor at Ars Technica. He covers Apple, software development, gaming, AI, entertainment, and mixed reality. He has been writing about gaming and technology for nearly two decades at Engadget, PC World, Mashable, Vice, Polygon, Wired, and others. He previously ran a marketing and PR agency in the gaming industry, led editorial for the TV network CBS, and worked on social media marketing strategy for Samsung Mobile at the creative agency SPCSHP. He also is an independent software and game developer for iOS, Windows, and other platforms, and he is a graduate of DePaul University, where he studied interactive media and software development.

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