You Can Stop Waiting for the iPad Pro M5

It hasn’t even been a week since Apple unveiled the iPad Pro M5, a follow-up to last year’s iPad Pro M4, and you can already bring one home. Launch day was Wednesday, October 22. You can now walk into a store and leave with one, or buy one online and have it shipped out almost right away.

That’s how Apple likes to do it. Hit people with the news of an impending new product, and then make it available to take home before the goosebumps begin to recede. Mostly, that is, when Apple isn’t announcing a dud, like Apple Intelligence’s lukewarm reception.

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ramming forward

You’ll see a noticeable performance bump in choosing the iPad Pro M5 over the iPad Pro M4 if you’re choosing a 256GB or 512GB storage model. RAM jumps from 8GB to 12GB. That’s a healthy increase, especially on iPadOS, which is a typical Apple operating system in that it’s super efficient.

RAM is short-term memory that allows you to run more apps and services concurrently, and more performance-intensive apps. If you use your iPad Pro for graphics design or incorporate it into your workflow editing RAW photographs or videos, the iPad Pro M5 will be worth it.

If you already have an iPad Pro M4 with 1TB or 2TB of storage, though, save your money. RAM on these higher-storage iPad Pros remains the same at 16GB, so you won’t see much of a speed boost in jumping from a 1TB or 2TB iPad Pro M4 to a 1TB or 2TB iPad Pro M5.

Apple says that the iPad Pro M5 is 3.5 times faster at on-device AI tasks than the M4, though. Apple’s talking about the iPad’s built-in Apple Intelligence, not accessing ChatGPT or Perplexity through an app or browser.

I’d like to know how they measure that and why they specify “AI performance,” but I’m taking a guess that it comes down to the 50 percent increase in RAM, and if so, that’d be for the lower-storage tiers, not the higher-storage tiers.

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