Now that the dust is starting to settle, we can start to sort the wheat from the chaff in terms of what the meaningful improvements to the new M5 iPad Pro are.
As you have come to expect from your boys here at iPadProductivity.com, we have been keeping our ear to the ground, listening carefully to what is being said about the new M5 iPad Pro, so in this article we will give you our take on this new device, what is new and what it all means from people who actually work on an iPad, so lets dive in.
Banking on AI “feeds two birds 🐤🐤 with one scone”
The first bird 🐤 is AI 🤖
It is clear Apple’s strategy for the M5 iPad Pro is fine tuned towards AI performance, this is most notably obvious from their launch marketing, but why have they gone this route?
Right now we are living through the “AI Race”, where large companies are banking on AI causing the next major disruptor in technology.
Just have a look how jumpy the market has been this year. Take the Chinese AI company Deepseek for example. When Deepseek launched it’s LLM’s in January this year, they achieved similar performance to OpenAI, Anthropic and others. Deepseek claimed they achieved this with significantly less compute power compared to Nvidia’s advanced and expensive GPU’s, well, when the market heard this, they JUMPED and one of the Largest technology companies in the world (Nvidia) lost 18% of is share price over night.
In monetary terms this equated to $589 billion, which was wiped off their market cap, resulting in the largest loss in stock market history. That’s how on edge the market is around AI!
Apple also knows it‘s iPad customers own their devices for longer periods of time, and if AI continues on its current trajectory, Apple has to ensure its market leading tablet is future proofed.
Lastly, AI right now is a major sales buzz word, Apple knows this and is cognizant of the fact that it’s customers right now want AI capabilities, so it’s delivering.
The second bird 🐤 is “Gaming” 🎮
Not sure if you noticed the wording in the graphic above, but Apple is almost certainly playing on the word “game” in “game-changing”, why, because to enable major advancements in AI compute power, you need major advancements in GPU performance and that means gaming gets a huge boost!
Apple knows is customers love gaming on the iPad Pro, 65%-70% of App Store revenue is attributed to games. For Apple to attract more AAA titles to the iPad Pro, developers have to know the device’s hardware will support their titles.
Assuming Apple’s Strategy above, let’s look at what has changed.
Starting with the externals, nothing has changed, the design has stayed the same. There is no change to the screen, camera’s, speakers, colours or chassis. This I believe is due to two main reasons.
1.) The M4 iPad Pro brought with it a major design overhaul, most notably a chassis redesign. It was the thinnest device Apple has ever made and required a huge investment into R&D, one you don’t want to do year on year when you have eight different product lines each with multiple products that need breakthrough R&D funding.
2.) Apple has to ensure it gives suppliers enough time to produce and sell accessories, like cases, screen protectors and other 3rd party peripherals, before launching a new design. Otherwise 3rd party suppliers wouldn’t find it feasible to manufacture for the iPad Pro and accessory options would shrink for Apple’s premium tablets, making the device far less supported and thus less desirable.
The only external change we can see, is that the iPad Pro engraving has been removed. See Below 👇.
It’s all about the Internals.
The saying “it’s not what’s on the outside that counts, but rather wants on the inside” certainly rings true for the M5 iPad Pro and here’s where it gets interesting.
We are not going to re-hash specs that you can find on Apple’s website, but rather talk about what stands out to us the most.
Naturally the M5 was going to be based on Apple’s 3 nanometer technology used in the M4 and newly released A19 Pro chip. In our last article we alluded to fact that this was a good clue into the future M5 SOC and what we could expect to see, with specific reference to the neural accelerators. We are pleased to see that was the case.
What is interesting though, is that Apple are using the same 10 core design but with one heck of a twist. Apple are “supercharging” every core with it’s own Neural Accelerator, to dramatically boost core performance in both GPU and CPU cores. Apple claims these cores are now the fastest in the world!
So how does M5 actually compare to M4 in GPU Performance.
Aside from gaming (which we will talk about below), one of the most demanding GPU tasks for any computing device is video editing. These processes provide a good real world benchmark for graphics performance comparisons because they can be easily measured.
Not to cut to the chase but the new M5 iPad Pro is now capable of editing up to 5 streams of 4K ProRes Footage!
Oddly, Apple didn’t show the actual percentage gains when comparing the M5 against the M4 on its page, so for iPadProductivity readers, we fixed it for you 😉.
A BIG Boon For Gamers Even When Coming From M4
The M5 chip now delivers 60% faster GPU performance than M4! New 3rd generation ray tracing also provides 45% faster performance in demanding gaming compared to M4.
