Apple iPad Pro M4 2024

Verdict

Is the iPad Pro M4 2024 the best tablet I have ever reviewed? Yes, there’s no question about it. Is it the one I would tell everyone to buy? Probably not. If you do make the purchase though, you won’t be disappointed. This is Apple’s hardware at its very best.

Introduction

The iPad Pro M4 2024 is a wonderful piece of hardware. It’s the first product powered by the M4 chip, which will eventually signal Apple’s march towards an AI computing future. It’s also not for everyone.

After 2023 came and went without barely a mention of the iPad range, 2024 certainly feels like the year for Apple’s tablet to take a grand step forward.

The latest iPad Pro, available in both 11 and 13-inch sizes, is the pinnacle of the iPad line and the best tablet I have ever used. If money is no object, you don’t need to read any further – just buy it.

With that said, the number of people who could splurge over $1000/£1000 or even over $2000/£2000 on a tablet is small. Especially when Apple sells the iPad 10 for $349/£349 and the iPad Air (which is now available in a 13-inch size) for $599/£599.

So, even if the iPad Pro is the best tablet, is it the one you should buy? I’ve spent the last three weeks putting it to the test, and the outcome might surprise you.

Design

• Ridiculously thin and light
• Immaculate build quality
• The Facetime camera is finally in the right place

‘The thinnest Apple product ever’ – that’s how the 13-inch version of iPad Pro M4 was described when it was unveiled. Thinner even than the iPod Nano. I am used to hearing tech being described as thin, and more often than not after a day or so of use it becomes normal – that hasn’t been the case here. 

Apple has been able to make this iPad Pro so thin for several reasons. First off is the improved thermal performance of the M4 chip, while the switch to an OLED panel removes the need for a backlight to sit behind the screen.

I’ve been using the 13-inch iPad Pro, which at just 5.1mm is 1.3mm thinner than the previous model. It’s so thin that when plugged in, the USB-C cable juts out every so slightly.

While the thin body certainly makes for a neat marketing line, I found the huge weight reduction more noticeable while I was reviewing the device. The iPad Pro M4 13-inch weighs 579g, 113g lighter than the previous 12.9-inch model and so much easier to hold comfortably for longer periods. It doesn’t weigh down my bag as much either.

There’s less difference with the M4 11-inch iPad Pro however. It is slightly thicker than the 13-inch at 5.3mm, but still 0.6mm thinner than the outgoing 11-inch model. It’s also 22g lighter.

There is something to be said about whether the weight reduction and the thinner body are worth it. Instead, that space could have been used for a larger battery to give this iPad a level of endurance that could far exceed anything we’ve seen in an iPad before. 

Before I started using the iPad Pro M4 2024 I would have argued this point profusely: I never once wished for the iPad to be thinner, and while the 12.9-inch was a little heavy, I rarely found it to be an issue. After a few weeks with this new iPad Pro, my mind completely changed. 

The thinner, lighter body makes the tablet a device that I now carry everywhere, with it being barely noticeable in my bag. It’s more comfortable to use especially when paired with the Magic Keyboard, is balanced perfectly and it just feels like I’m holding a huge display with nothing else attached. It’s masterfully built, and every single time I picked the tablet up I was surprised.

When a piece of tech gets thinner, there’s always the chance it can become more fragile in the process. I didn’t have any issues with the robustness of my iPad Pro during the multi-week review process, but it is the sort of device that’ll need to be looked after. There’s a lot of glass and metal here after all. Apple’s Smart Folio is the best case option in my view, and its rejigged magnet allows for it to be propped up at multiple angles. There’s a new Magic Keyboard too, which also acts as a way of protecting the tablet.

Visually, the iPad Pro M4 continues the overall look Apple introduced in 2018. The sides and back are flat, with a slightly raised camera bump housing a single 12MP sensor, LiDAR sensor and flash. There’s a trio of pins on the button for easy accessory connectivity and pairing, plus a single USB-C connector with USB 4 and Thunderbolt support.

The colour options are muted, especially compared to the pastel shades available on the Air. There’s Space Black (which is slightly darker than the Space Grey used previously) and Silver. These two colours match the ones available on the MacBook Pro 14 and 16-inch.

One change I appreciate is that the front FaceTime camera now sits on the long landscape edge, rather than the shorter vertical one. This is a much better position for video calls when the tablet is sitting in the Magic Keyboard case.

Screen

• The first OLED screen on an iPad
• Available in two sizes: 11-inch and 13-inch
• Stunning colours and fantastic brightness levels

The display on the iPad Pro M4 is a triumph. This is the first time we’ve seen OLED panels on an iPad and the result is a wonderful, HDR-capable canvas that fixes some of the issues with the Mini LED tech used before and finally brings parity to the whole Pro range. There’s 120Hz ProMotion too, to keep everything smooth when scrolling and swiping.

With the previous generation iPad Pro, you had to sacrifice screen quality for a more portable machine. The 11-inch model, which was my favourite due to its smaller size and lighter weight, had a good LCD but the higher-quality Mini LED screen was reserved for the heavy 12.9-inch option. Now, whichever size you want you know you’re getting an excellent OLED display.

The OLED display used is a huge upgrade over the LCD of the 11-inch. Blacks are deep rather than grey, colours are richer and the HDR support is far more noticeable. The way the black bars on either side of a movie blend perfectly into the tablet’s bezel makes for a deeply immersive experience.

Putting the new OLED iPad Pro next to the Mini LED model isn’t quite a slam-dunk upgrade, but it is better overall. The biggest difference is the lack of something called blooming, whereby brighter text and images on dark backgrounds would have an odd bloom of white around them. This was caused by the amount of dimming zones on the Mini LED panels but it isn’t an issue here.

I fired up The Batman – a film with lots of deep, dark scenes and plenty of contrasting brighter ones – in Dolby Vision on both the OLED iPad Pro and the Mini LED alternative. The very dark scenes looked better on the OLED, as the lack of obvious blooming is most noticeable here. In SDR content, so anything streamed from apps like BBC iPlayer and plenty of content on Netflix, the newer iPad Pro pumps out a much better image with sharper shadow details.

To offset any brightness issues caused by the change in panel type, Apple has used two OLED displays layered over each other (this is called Tandem OLED) to push up the brightness levels as much as possible. SDR content can now hit 1000 nits, although you’ll typically be comfortably at around 500 nits in normal use.

Performance and Software

• The first product with the M4 chip
• Either 8 or 16GB memory, up to 2TB storage
• Capable neural engine for AI tasks

Apple debuted a new chipset for the latest generation iPad Pro, the M4 – a piece of silicon many wouldn’t have expected to arrive until late 2024 at the earliest. Apple only released the M3 in October 2023, and it only made its way to the MacBook Air series in March 2024.

Skipping the M3 entirely for this iPad felt odd at first, but it’s clear why Apple did it. Performance is predictably fantastic, and I will delve deeper into that further down, but it’s not the key selling point. Instead, the improved thermal performance of the M4 allowed for the thinner chassis, while the improved GPU helped power the glorious display. 

The biggest advancement of all is the improved neural engine and the AI benefits that come with it. These benefits aren’t here yet but we’ll be sure to test them when iPadOS 18 and Apple Intelligence are made available.

Just like with its MacBook range, Apple is selling different ‘SKUs’ of the iPad Pro. Choosing different storage options now comes with a few more options than just the amount of GB available. The ‘lower-end’ 256GB (the new base storage size, which is very welcome) and 512GB versions have 8GB memory, a 9-core CPU consisting of three performance cores and six efficiency cores, and a 10-core GPU. 

Plump for the 1TB or 2TB versions and the CPU gets an extra core, taking it to 10, and the memory is doubled to 16GB. You can also choose a nano-texture glass display option on the 1TB or 2TB models to add a more matte covering over the screen. Both models have the same 16-core neural engine and 120GB/s memory bandwidth.

Having these extra things to think about when picking an iPad might be confusing, but for many the decision will be made by the high prices the 1TB and 2TB models sell for. The 13-inch 1TB iPad Pro costs £1899/$1899 (£2099/$2099 for the cellular version), while the 2TB starts at £2299/$2299 rising to £2499/$2499 for cellular. Switching to the nano-texture glass adds another £100/$100 to the bill.

For this review, I used the 13-inch 1TB model with the standard glass – a £1899/$1899 tablet. You would get mostly the same performance from the, still admittedly expensive, cheapest £999/$999 11-inch iPad Pro M4 though, so keep that in mind.

Considering the price and the sheer array of power on offer here, the iPad Pro M4 is overkill for anyone who wants an iPad just for reading, browsing, a bit of Netflix binging on a commute and similar tasks. I’d recommend getting the wonderful iPad 10 instead, or the latest iPad Air M2 if you want more power. For most, the £349/$349 iPad 10 is the easiest recommendation.

Of course, there’s more to tech for many than just buying the cheapest thing available. The iPad Pro M4 is a luxury item – yes, the power on offer might be more than most will need, but there’s a joy to using this device that isn’t found elsewhere.

In benchmark tests, the M4 chip outclasses the Android competition with ease. It scores more than double the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 powered Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra in 3DMark’s Wildlife Extreme test and not far off 3x the multi-core scores in Geekbench 6. Comparing the two seems unfair, but then Samsung’s top-tier option retails for £1199 – more than the base iPad Pro M4 11-inch.

The scores aren’t quite as drastically higher than those achieved by a 12.9-inch iPad Pro with its M2 chip, but there is an improvement in multi-core and GPU testing and I would assume we’ll see bigger improvements in AI-focussed apps once those start rolling out.

Benchmark scores might show what a machine is capable of, however they don’t show what something can actually do. The iPad Pro M4 is still hamstrung by the iPadOS software, which is virtually the same as the software on the iPad Air, and only missing a few multitasking features of the very base iPad. 

Some apps, like Apple’s music software Logic, have some M4-specific features and certain games – Resident Evil Village, for instance – require an M chip, but having moved from an M2 iPad it’s hard to really spot anything that feels that different. The same 10 minute 4K video exported from Final Cut slightly faster and a few of those intensive games loaded up quicker – that was about it.

Of course, this can and hopefully will change. I am not calling for MacOS to be ported to the iPad, though I would love it if Apple had some sort of ‘Pro Mode’ option that allowed certain Mac apps to work here and gave us an interface a little closer to that of its laptop range.

As I have mentioned throughout this review, the sole benefit of the M4 isn’t just about performance – the capability of this chip is what makes this tablet so light, thin and glorious to use, although I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want some powerful software to properly take advantage of its CPU and GPU.

There’s now only one camera on the back as the ultra-wide has been ditched, leaving just a 12MP main camera that’s excellent for taking pictures of documents. It shoots 4K video too, even in the ProRes format. Cellular service is available for an additional fee, while there are Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 onboard. The speakers and microphones are also excellent, as anyone who used an iPad Pro before would expect.

Battery Life

• Single USB-C port for charging
• No huge battery life improvements

Apple had a big decision to make with the iPad Pro M4 2024. Use the extra space gained from the improved chipset and thinner display module for a larger battery, or give everyone a thinner and lighter tablet. Apple chose the latter.

That means that while the 11-inch model has a marginally larger battery than its predecessor, the 13-inch has a slightly smaller cell. Don’t worry too much about this though as Apple is sticking stringently to the classic ‘10 hour’ battery claim that all the models seem to get.

I can easily get the iPad Pro M4 13-inch to last me a full work day when I am using it as a laptop replacement, and when used after work purely as an entertainment device for a bit of browsing and streaming, it lasted it all week. On a 10-hour flight from London to Seattle I watched films the entire way and had 20% left over at the end.

The battery life does drain quickly during intensive tasks. An hour of Football Manager Touch 2024 from Apple Arcade ate through 19%, while a couple of hours of editing RAW photo files inside Lightroom took it down another 20%. An hour on Zoom also took off 15%.

The charging situation here is a bit of a mess. Buy the tablet in the UK and there will be no charger in the box, just a USB-C to USB-C cable, although that isn’t the same for all regions. Still, even in regions like the US where a charger does come included it’s only the same, slow 20W plug that comes with every iPad. 

I’d have liked Apple to have implemented some of the MagSafe tech here, adding a wireless element like the iPhone range or a magnetic charger like the recent MacBooks. 

Accessories

• Updates Magic Keyboard fixes issues with original
• Supports Apple Pencil Pro and Apple Pencil (USB-C)

The iPad Pro M4 works well as a big slab of screen used solo, but it comes into its own when paired with Apple’s duo of accessories. These add-ons also help to set the Pro slate apart from the Air range, as this time they’re both exclusive to the higher-end tablet.

The Apple Pencil Pro is the extra I’d recommend the most. The stylus is a joy to use, whether for notes or sketches and this ‘Pro’ model adds some extra smarts. There’s now a haptic response when the Pencil is squeezed and this brings up a range of shortcuts on the screen, letting you quickly move between tools and colours.

There’s a gyroscope inside too that enables a ‘Barrel roll’ feature, giving precise control when you’re moving the pencil around, and Find My support if it goes missing.

This Apple Pencil Pro retails for the same $129/£129 as the Apple Pencil (2nd-gen) which might sound off, but it’s important to note that that older stylus will not work here. The only other supported Apple Pencil is the USB-C version that dispenses with the pressure sensitivity and feels a bit limited as a result. So, even if you are upgrading from a previous iPad, you’ll need a new Pencil.

You’ll also need a new keyboard, as the older Magic Keyboard covers won’t work with the iPad Pro M4 2024 due to the rejigged magnet arrangement. Apple has, of course, got a new version for those wanting to turn the tablet into something closer to a laptop and it remains both very good and very expensive.

Big changes this time include a function row of shortcut keys similar to a MacBook, a larger touchpad with haptic response and an aluminium layer around the keys to give some extra rigidity. It’s a welcome upgrade and the typing experience is fantastic.

The iPad Pro is roughly the same thickness as a MacBook Air with the keyboard attached. You do lose that stunningly thin chassis, but it is a much more productive device as a result.

At £349/$349 for the 13-inch models and £299/$299 for the 11-inch, it’s far from cheap and unless you’re going to be using the iPad for a lot of writing, I think you can skip this one.

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