M5 iPad Pro tested: Stop me if you’ve heard this one before

This year’s iPad Pro is what you might call a “chip refresh” or an “internal refresh.” These refreshes are what Apple typically does to its products for a year or two or more after making a larger external design change. Leaving the physical design alone preserves compatibility with the accessory ecosystem.

For the Mac, chip refreshes are always very exciting to me, because many people who use a Mac will, very occasionally, assign it some sort of task where they need it to work as hard and as fast as possible, for an extended period of time. You might be a developer compiling a large, complex application, or you might be a podcaster or streamer editing or exporting an audio or video file, or maybe you’re just playing a game. The power and flexibility of the operating system, along with first-party and third-party applications designed to take advantage of that power and flexibility, means that “more speed” is always exciting, even if it takes a few years so that speed adds up to something users will consistently notice and appreciate.

And then there’s the iPad Pro. Especially since Apple has started using the same M-series chips it uses in Macs, most reviews of the iPad Pro contain some version of “this is great hardware that’s much faster than it should be for everything the iPad does.” Namely, our test of the iPad Pro M4 from May 2024:

Still, it’s not entirely clear why most people would spend one, two, or even three thousand dollars on a tablet that, despite its incredible hardware, does less than a comparably priced laptop – or at least does so a little more clumsily, even though it’s incredibly fast and has a gorgeous screen.

Since then, Apple has announced and released iPadOS 26, an update that brings important and mostly welcome changes to the way the tablet handles windowed multitasking, file transfers, and certain other types of background tasks. But it’s the kind of thing that’s not even going to stress out an Apple M1, much less a chip twice as powerful.