iPad Pro M5

TOUCH SENSATION Super powerful and pricey as heck, the M5 version of the iPad Pro is the best creative tablet of 2025

- Ian Evenden

Has the iPad Pro finally become the laptop alternative for creatives that it always promised to be? It's only taken 10 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 per cent usable and not completely annoying, together with 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.

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 13-inch 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). 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.