Hey Everyone,
There is no doubt we are living through unprecedented times. It still amazes me that two years ago you could purchase 32GB of DDR5 RAM for under $90, now you’ll pay around $529, thats an astonishing 400% increase! Now, word on the street is that new iPhone prices are likely going to increase at the September iPhone event on the 9th. It seems the age of price increases is here to stay, certainly for a while.
If your thinking “nah the prices will come down soon, I will just wait for that new M5 iPad Pro to come back down in price”, you may be waiting a good while!
The reason we don’t foresee an end to these price increases is actually quite simple. The AI race as many people know, has eaten up all possible manufacturing capacity for RAM, Storage and advanced semi-conductors and not to be “Johny Raincloud”, but it gets worse! The enormous backlog for these components, from companies all over the world is showing that there is no end in sight. To further exacerbate the issue, data center investment plans are breaking records.
Just look at these infrastructure investments:
- Amazon Web Services – $220B
- Google & Microsoft – $190B each
- ByteDance & Oracle – $530B
Left: Image posted by Zuckerberg showing the construction plan for Hyperion superimposed on Manhattan.
Meta’s is working on a data center called “Hyperion” in Louisiana which is planned to be the size of the Manhattan!
As we have seen, Apple wasn’t immune to these increases. Despite Apple’s incredible supply chain management and buying power, the tech giant was forced to increase it’s pricing in June. iPad prices jumped by as much as $150- $200 in some instances, which was the case with the iPad Pro, which moved from $999 -$1199 for the 11” and from $599 – $749 for the same sized iPad Air.
This has meant there are actually a few great burying opportunities out there, providing of course that you know what to look for!
Consider The M4 iPad Pro!
I am seeing and hearing of a lot of people comparing the M4 iPad Pro to the new M5, often actually settling on the M4 iPad Pro, and the reasons are pretty obvious. Let me show you.
Design
Take the design, the M5 iPad Pro uses the exact same chassis that was ushered in to Apple’s revolutionary redesign, that was the M4 iPad Pro. The M4 iPad Pro is Apple’s thinnest device ever, and since the chassis is unchanged on the M5 iPad Pro, there is no compromise.
Fun Fact!
Apple knew a much faster M4 chip in this ultra thin chassis meant the engineers had to rethink it’s thermal management, so it introduced two new materials, (big points if you know what they are)….. Copper & Graphite.
By introducing graphite sheets into the housing, the heat could be pulled away from the logic board and be spread more effectively, instead of being concentrated in one spot. The copper was infused into the Apple logo on the back of the iPad, where the super fast M4 Chip sits. Apple says this improves the thermals by 20%! Point being, this is still exactly the same in the M5 iPad Pro.You can watch this video by YouTuber “Phone Repair Guru”, where he shows you the copper in the Apple logo, it’s quite cool.
Chip Difference – is it worth it?
We can dive deep into the differences between the two chips, but in this case I don’t think that will help in making a buying decision. So let’s look at what we believe counts for most people.
Interestingly both the M4 and M5 chips run at 4.42 GHz. Tests in Geekbench 6 show there is only an 11-13% difference in the single core and Multi-core tests. Even if you are a power user, an improvement this small is honestly very tough to notice.
The M4 chip beats virtually all competitor laptop chips in single-core performance, even topping Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285HX. We were actually talking about this on the podcast in Episode 11, when comparing ASUS’s new ExpertBook Ultra against the 13” M4 iPad Pro 1T.
Where a difference does become noticeable however, is in the Metal tests. These tests use the full GPU to measure graphics and compute capability. Here the M5 offers a more substantial 40% performance improvement over M4. This means the M5 iPad Pro will offer noticible improvements in graphics intensive tasks like; rendering 3D models, Photo and Video editing, exporting projects i.e 4K/8K, rendering animations in 3D Animation apps like Procreate Dreams, image editing, AAA gaming to name a few.
I think most people agree single-core usage is the most prevalent in executing typical office work type tasks such as; loading an webpage, running a formula in Excel, opening Word document or simply clicking through a presentation in PowerPoint. It is the performance metric that dictates the perceived speed and snappiness of a device, I would say an 11% difference between M4 and M5, is certainly not worth it for most people doing normal work tasks.
If you are a power user or a professional with heavy, creative, GPU hungry workflows, then yes you may want the extra performance that comes with the M5, but then again if thats you, you probably already knew that. However those are the edge cases.
Displays, no different either?
Both the M4 and M5 iPad Pro use Apple’s most advanced displays – Tandem OLED or as Apple refers to it, “Ultra Rentina XDR”. In the world of consumer electronics, these displays are widely considered by display experts, as the most advanced screen technology currently available. Apple themselves refer to it as the “best OLED display that has ever existed in a device of its kind”.
Since this is often the primary reason by which many people decide to buy an iPad Pro, I am sure you agree the fact that there is again no difference in screen technology, means the M4 iPad Pro really is starting to sound like a no brainer. But there’s more…
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