The iPad Pro is about to turn 10, so hopefully you’ll forgive me for pulling out this well-worn Apple truism one more time. No, it’s not Steve Jobs saying “if you see a stylus, they blew it” (a quote continually used out of context.) It’s the tale of how since day one, the iPad Pro’s hardware often felt far more powerful and capable than the software it runs. If you recall, iPadOS was initially a scaled-up version of iOS, with most of the limitations inherent in software designed first for a phone. Apps could take great advantage of the larger screen, but working across multiple apps was just nowhere near as simple as doing the same thing on a Mac. Yes, the iPad has always been more portable, and accessories like the Apple Pencil make it better-suited for some tasks than a Mac, but the knock is always that the iPad — even the Pro — isn’t ideal for getting “real work” done.
The combination of the just-launched iPad Pro’s M5 processor and the massive iPadOS update might finally quiet that debate. Sure, some people will never want to replace their laptop with an iPad, but it’s more feasible than ever thanks to iPadOS 26. It brings a totally revamped windowing and multitasking system, a background tasks API that lets you run heavy processes like rendering video while working in other apps, more robust audio input support and a far better Files app, making the iPad Pro closer in its feature set to a Mac than ever before.
As Apple’s premium tablet enters its second decade, I spoke with the company’s Ted Merendino (from the iPad Product Marketing team) and Ty Jordan (Product Manager for System Experiences) to learn more about the evolution of the iPad Pro and iPadOS.
Given how many Mac-like features came to iPadOS 26 this year, I was curious to hear how the company approached putting all that Mac DNA into the iPad while still keeping it distinct, as well as the engineering challenges it presented. “One of the things that makes iPad such a unique device is it’s extremely versatile, right?” Jordan said. “You can use it with touch, you can use it with a trackpad or a keyboard or the Apple Pencil, and that’s really powerful. But it also actually makes an extremely challenging engineering and design problem to try and solve when you’re thinking about something like the new windowing experience.”
Jordan went on to describe a “multi-year effort” to reconfigure the underlying iPadOS architecture. Apple worked to “maintain the immediacy that you’ve come to expect with a touch device, while still allowing users to have this freedom and flexibility to work across so many more windows at once,” he said. From there, the company had to figure out how to bring a bunch of familiar tools from the Mac together and make sure they work across touchscreens, trackpads and keyboards.
An iPad running multiple windows in iPadOS 26
(Nathan Ingraham for Engadget)
Jordan pointed to Expose (a tool in macOS that shows you all your open windows by swiping up on the trackpad with three fingers) as a good example of something they wanted to bring to iPadOS in a way that felt native. “We leveraged the home gesture that people have been familiar with on iPad for a long time,” he said, “so you can easily see a bird’s eye view of all your windows.”
Swiping up on the iPad’s screen with one finger has brought you home for years, but now swiping up and holding for a second drops you into Expose, the same way it invokes open apps on an iPhone. And you can use the same three-finger swipe up on an iPad with a trackpad as you can on a Mac. “All these pieces have to be reconsidered over and over again in order to make sure that they do feel distinct to iPad,” Jordan said.
While iPadOS 26 is a major revision that was just released less than a month ago, the iPad Pro M5 is more of an iterative update, at least on the outside. That’s not a big surprise given that the M4 model released in May 2024 was a complete redesign. The iPad Pro M4 is more capable thanks to the big software update, but this year’s M5 update pushes the tablet even further into a world where AI performance is paramount.
“M5 has a faster Neural Engine, which continues to be the most power efficient location on the chip to run on-device AI,” Merendino said, citing features like Live Text and Subject Lift that have been in iOS and iPadOS for a while now. He also noted that the faster CPU in the M5 has had neural accelerators for a few generations, things that help with low-latency AI tasks like speech recognition.
But the M5’s redesigned GPU is where the big changes can be found. “Within each GPU core is the new Neural Accelerator that dramatically speeds up GPU-based AI tasks,” Merendino continued. “So if you are segmenting super high-resolution video, this is much, much faster. For on-device image generation, this is much faster.” Benchmarks I took while reviewing the iPad Pro M5 back this up — all the GPU-based measurements showed huge improvements over the M4.
Merendino noted that Apple invited the developer for image generation app Draw Things into its labs to test the app with the M5’s GPU neural accelerators and it provided about double the performance of the M4 chip and four times the performance of the M1. My testing with Draw Things backed this up. I ran four different image generation prompts on both the M4 and M5 iPad Pro, and the M5 was more than twice as fast. It typically finished the default prompts I tried in the app in about 50 seconds, while the M4 took about 2 minutes and 25 seconds. Other tasks, like large language model token generation, are six times faster on the M5 compared to the (much older) M1.
Impressive, for sure, but it’s also fair to say that most iPad Pro users are likely not going to be pushing to the edge of the M5’s computational powers. The flip side of this, though, is that the iPad Pro will likely remain fast enough for all but the most demanding tasks for years. Apple knows this, and it’s evident in the way it’s positioning this new iPad Pro — it’s for demanding customers who’ve been using an M1- or M2-powered iPad Pro for years now and are ready for an upgrade.
One of the main hardware differences between the redesigned M4 and M5 iPad Pros and their predecessors is that Apple made the tablet even thinner and lighter than ever, while packing in the company’s latest silicon. It’s a wild engineering feat, one that impressed me from the very first time I picked up the iPad Pro M4 last year. There is one somewhat humorous thing about the iPad Pro, which is that it’s thinner and lighter than the iPad Air — despite the Air name having historically been used for Apple’s most portable products. Just look at the iPhone Air for the latest example.
That made me ponder if a more “pro” iPad should be a little thicker and heavier to accommodate a bigger battery, like what you’ll find in the MacBook Pro. The iPad Pro’s 10-hour battery life for basic tasks like web browsing and watching video isn’t short, but if you push it harder it’ll drain a lot quicker. Merendino said that the ongoing thought process behind balancing battery life, performance and size comes down to a focus on portability and versatility.
“One of the things that has defined iPad since the very beginning is portability. For creative pros, the iPad Pro is untethering them from a workstation,” he said. “It’s letting them create and be productive wherever they may be. And what’s unique is that over the years we’ve made iPad more and more portable.” That’s undeniable; the first iPad was about 1.5 pounds with its 9.7-inch screen and the 13-inch iPad Pro is a quarter of a pound lighter. “But we have also made it vastly more powerful,” Merendino continued, “even though it’s a more portable device, a vastly faster device. We have still maintained that all day battery life that we know users depend on.” So while we’re probably not getting an iPad Pro with 15- or 20-hour battery life any time soon, I can respect the trade-off of making the tablet as portable as possible. It’s one of its main differentiating features compared to a Mac, after all.
A rumor that started making the rounds just after the iPad Pro M5 was released puts the “Mac versus iPad” debate into a new territory, though. A few reliable sources including Mark Gurman at Bloomberg and analyst Ming-Chi Kuo both say that the M6 refresh of the MacBook Pro will usher in touchscreens for the first time on a Mac. If this happens, it’ll likely upend the debate yet again. But in the same way an iPad doesn’t really replace the Mac, I don’t think a touchscreen MacBook will necessarily be better than an iPad for some things. The iPad is still the most versatile device Apple sells, and the company believes that versatility is something people recognize and want.
“With the windowing system that we built, it [still] starts with every app being fullscreen,” Jordan says. “And the idea behind that philosophy is making sure you can be the person who has iPad and is just using it on the couch to watch a show, and then can seamlessly transition to being a professional who’s connected to an external display with a Magic Keyboard and a bunch of windows open. And that versatility is really interesting, and I think customers who gravitate towards iPad are looking for that device that can go across those worlds.”
