Tested: The new iPad Pro M5 is the luxury tablet for the discerning creative

Has the iPad Pro finally become the laptop alternative for creatives it always promised to be? It’s only taken ten years of iterative iPad generation updates. The combination of the M5 processor and iPadOS 26, which offers floating, multitasking windows in a way that’s almost 100% usable and not completely annoying, plus a software offering that’s broadening in the direction of creative apps, means it has a lot of computing potential in a thin and ultraportable form. That it still requires multiple accessories and costs as much as a MacBook Pro to get the best out of it is the only thing holding it back.

Key specifications

Design, build and display

• Thin and light
• Only one port

Apple hasn’t gone for a radical redesign for the M5 generation. Everything, including the MacBook Pro, looks pretty much the way it did before. In fact, you can place the M1 and M5 versions of the 13in iPad Pro against each other, and the only real difference apart from the weight is that the new model has a few more holes in its speaker grilles and there's no longer any engraving on the back (apart from the Apple logo) unless you put it there. The M1 iPad Pro doesn’t fit the M5’s Magic Keyboard case, so there must have been some slight shuffling of the position of the magnets, but it’s not something immediately noticeable.

There's clearly a lot more going on inside the iPad, however, and it’s remarkable that Apple can squeeze a full laptop chip - no cut-down GPU core counts this year - into such a thin, passively cooled tablet and not have it run so hot that it glows red.

The screen is an OLED, just like the M4 model, and it’s very beautiful. Streaming and gaming look great on it, but you’re not planning on spending this much on a tablet just to play Infinity Nikki. The 120Hz, wide-colour display is bright and vibrant, and will show just about anything you’re working on off to its best, with the ability to drop a low as 1 nit for shadows that retain plenty of detail.

Build quality is exemplary, with the optional Magic Keyboard case attaching with a magnet and turning the iPad into the laptop-alike of your dreams. It’s hard to be too enthusiastic about the way iPad Pros are made, and the fact that this year’s model weighs slightly less than the M4 (and significantly less than the M1) makes it even more portable than before.

Design score: 4/5

Features

• You'll want a keyboard and Pencil
• iPadOS 26 is largely successful

The iPad Pro really comes alive with a Magic Keyboard or an Apple Pencil or, preferably, both. The ability to type and sketch makes it endlessly useful, though you may find yourself wondering why you didn’t just buy a laptop. Adding the accessories, which were provided to Creative Bloq along with the iPad itself, boosts the cost of the cheapest 11-inch model to well over the price of a MacBook Air, and a 13-inch model with 1TB of storage becomes more expensive than the entry-level M5 MacBook Pro.

Without these accessories, it’s still a powerful device, and it’s possible to hook it up to just about any wireless mouse and keyboard you’ve got lying around, as well as an external monitor, via its USB-C port and a suitable dock or hub. iPadOS 26 needs room to breathe, and with suitable extras can provide a laptop-like experience, though you’re still restricted to its selection of apps and some questionable design decisions such as the way menus sit at the top of the screen, window control buttons that look like those in macOS but don’t work in quite the same way, and rounded corners that don’t quite line up.

The only real hardware feature on the iPad Pro itself is the USB-C port, and while it’s nice to see that it’s a USB4/Thunderbolt 3 standard socket, the fact that there's only one and it’s responsible for charging means the likely purchase of another accessory to break it out into useful ports.

Feature score: 3/5

Performance

• Very fast CPU
• Huge graphics improvements

It’s always been hard to come up with scenarios within the purview of iPadOS apps that will really test the iPad Pro, and that continues with the M5 model. Video editing in Final Cut Pro or Davinci Resolve, running multiple tracks in Logic Pro, building up a lot of layers in Procreate or Illustrator, crazy stuff in Zbrush or Nomad Sculpt. Apps like the Affinity suite or Photoshop are now so at home on iPad that it’s barely breaking a sweat.

And while the performance you’ll get out of creative apps depends on the complexity of your project, the numbers we get from synthetic benchmarks don’t lie. The MacBook Pro M5 has some of the best single-core scores we’ve seen in Geekbench, and that goes for the iPad Pro version as well, with the passively cooled M5 just a few hundred points behind the version with a fan. The same goes for the GPU: using the Metal API, the iPad scores 74046 against the MacBook Pro’s 76397, a difference of just 3.12%.

As for a performance uplift over previous iPad chips, we’re looking at a 56.28% rise in single-core CPU performance over the M1 iPad Pro, and a 30% rise over the M3 chip in last year’s iPad Air. It’s a significant bump if you can make use of it, and if you shell out for the 1TB or 2TB iPads (we’re testing the 1TB model here), you get 16GB of RAM instead of 12GB, which will also make a difference.

Apple has added neural accelerators to its GPU cores this year, and is making a lot of noise about the graphics chip’s support for hardware-accelerated ray-tracing. This means that in the Solar Bay ray-traced gaming test, the M5 iPad produces 71fps against the 36.5fps pumped out by an M3. That’s a 64% increase.

Performance score: 5/5

Price

Apple’s iPad: Luxury Edition comes at a suitably luxurious price, even in its entry-level form. It costs from £/$999 for the 11-inch one and £/$1,299 for the 13-inch one. The version we tested sets you back £1,899.

You’ll be tempted to immediately jump up to the 13in 1TB model just to get the extra screen area and RAM, as there's no other way to add it otherwise, and once you’ve added the Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil (or Pro) you’re looking at the same amount of money as a MacBook Pro or a Windows laptop with a decent Nvidia GPU. As such, you’ll need to be really sure the iPad Pro fits your workflow and needs before committing.

Value score: 2/5

Who is it for?

• Multitasking creatives

While it’s unlikely to be your sole computer, the M5 iPad Pro works well as a machine you use most of the time for sketching, editing, typing, just about anything. There are still areas where it’s not as good as a laptop, but they’re getting smaller as the software offering improves, and the sheer quality of the hardware means that, if you can get past the price, it is an ideal creative companion.

Buy it if...

• Touchscreens fit into your workflow
• You prefer it to a laptop
• The software you need is here

Don't buy it if...

• Something cheaper will do the job
• A laptop fits your process better
• You need even more GPU power

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