Back in October 2025, Apple released the M5 iPad Pro.  I didn’t pick it up right away for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, the really wasn’t a compelling capability upgrade for me given I already an M4 iPad Pro.  I typically don’t upgrade my iPad with every upgrade cycle – which seem to be getting shorter and shorter now that Apple is using their own silicon.  So I didn’t really think I’d upgrade.  Then, I upgraded my home Wi-Fi network in December to support Wi-Fi 7.  I have 2 Gig up and down on my fiber optic home internet service (Love.  It.).  Then I started looking at the trade-in on my M4 iPad Pro (which certainly doesn’t get better with age) and I sort of talked myself into upgrading.  Which is easy to do because my iPad is the most used device I own.  I mostly use it for entertainment.  But I also use it a fair amount for writing articles like this one in bed.  I’ve never bothered getting the accessory keyboard case – I just dictate sentences using Siri…which does require more clean up for dictation accuracy than it should, but that’s another article.  I also do some image and video editing with it – mostly stuff I take with my iPhone.  But 80% of what I use it for is web surfing, shopping, and content consumption.

Don’t judge the iPad by it’s cover

Again, not much changed between the M4 iPad Pro and the M5 iPad Pro.  Aesthetically, the only way you’d tell them apart is by the writing which is on the lower section of the back of the iPad M4 (left) which is absent from the M5 iPad Pro (right):

Even the cameras are the same, which is fine because I can probably count on one hand where I’ve used the camera on my iPad.  When I ordered my M4 iPad Pro back in May of 2024, I got it in Space Black quite by accident.  The color really doesn’t matter because I keep it in case which completely covers the back.  But the rest of my Mac products are silver so I like to think there would be continuity…if my iPad ever came out of the case:

My M4 MacBook Pro and my M5 iPad Pro

Besides the color, about the only other choice I made was the 512gb of memory – which is the same I had with my M4 iPad Pro.  I briefly considered jumping up to 1TB of memory, but after checking my utilization I saw that I was using less than half of the system memory.  The cloud is a wonderful thing.  My memory selection brought the price of my M5 iPad Pro to $1499.  I did not get the Nano-texture display.  You sacrifice contrast and clarity on your display to get reduced glare.  In how I use the my iPads, glare isn’t that bad of a problem.  I prefer to maintain the look of the gorgeous tandem OLED display for content consumption.

N1 Chip

As I mentioned, I recently upgraded to the NETGEAR Orbi 770 Series Tri-Band WiFi 7 Mesh Network System, so I was anxious to test the upload/download speed on the new M5 iPad Pro with the N1 Chip.  The N1 is Apple’s custom wireless networking chip, designed in-house by Apple to handle Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, network traffic management, latency optimization, and power efficiency.  Instead of relying entirely on off-the-shelf Broadcom/Qualcomm radios, Apple now controls the whole stack.  With Wi-Fi 7, N1 can use multiple bands at once (2.4 + 5 + 6 GHz), balance traffic live, and re-route packets instantly:

M4 iPad Pro Speedtest.com results

M5 iPad Pro Speedtest.com results

The difference is huge.  I noticed it immediately when I started web surfing – all my web pages just snapped right open with almost no delay.  The latency dropped by more than half from 19ms in the M4 iPad Pro to 9ms in the M4 iPad Pro.  Thaaaaat’s what I’m talkin’ about!  Web surfing is so nice on this device – it’s a noticeable improvement.

IMPROVED…SOUND?

I spend a LOT of time watching content on my iPad while laying in bed with it sitting on my chest.  When I got my M5 iPad Pro and started listening to content, I swore it sounded better than the M4 version, despite Apple not stating anything about improved audio capabilities in the M5 iPad Pro.  The M5 iPad Pro officially carries over the same speaker hardware from the M4 — the “four-speaker audio” system.   However, there are some technical reasons why you might actually  hear a difference between the two.  Basically what I might be hearing is the result of more aggressive Computational Audio processing. The physical “woofers” are the same, but the “brain” driving them is much smarter.  Which tracks with what I’m hearing.  The sound stage seems larger with more seperation.  More like a home theater experience.

Yes, the M5 iPad Pro can do AI tasks faster. The M5 continues to use a 16-core Neural Engine, but Apple has tuned it to deliver much faster AI performance than the M4’s. Apple claims up to ~3.5× faster AI task performance on the new iPad Pro compared to the M4 iPad Pro.  But consider how you use AI as to whether this would be an advantage.  Is ChatGPT for example going to run faster on the M5 iPad Pro vs. older versions?  No – that’s because the actual AI processing isn’t handled locally.  If the AI heavy lifting is happening in the cloud, the M5’s extra neural horsepower mostly sits there…twiddling it’s silicon thumbs.  It’s possible in the next 2-3 years that you’ll start to see LLMs residing locally on device.  When that happens, whoever owns my M5 iPad Pro after I’ve upgraded a couple of times is likely to be quite pleased.

Fill ‘er Up Faster On The M5 iPad Pro

The M5 iPad Pro now supports fast charging.  And unlike many past iPads that were kind of mediocre about power delivery, the M5 model noticeably charges faster when paired with the right adapter.  My iPad charges all night on my night stand, then I toss it in my work backpack and sometimes use it during at lunch.  I use it some in the evening when I get back home from work, I use it to watch content on the treadmill, and then I go to bed and usually watch a bit before falling asleep.  The big upgrade with the M4 iPad (which carries over to the M5 iPad Pro) is how much lighter it was.  Previous iPads could really hurt if you…say…fell asleep while holding it and it smacked you in the face.  Ask me how I know…  In any event, there are few occasions where the fast charging will benefit me in my normal use.  But it’s a nice to have when you wake up to discover that the dog walked by the wall and unplugged the charging cable.  Again, ask me how I know…  I believe it can now fully charge from about 50% in approximately 30 minutes.

I love my iPads.  I almost never turn on a TV when I stay in a hotel as I much prefer watching content in a hotel.  It’s light weight so it’s easy to travel anywhere with, and it has more power than I’ll ever use.  With every iteration it becomes harder and harder to justify my MacBook Pro.  But I can’t ever see liking video editing on an iPad.  Photo editing isn’t bad at this point, but I still prefer a big monitor and a mouse.  Did I need to upgrade from the M4 iPad Pro to the M5, or do I recommend doing so?  Nope.  Am I glad I did?  You bet!