This year's iPad Pro is what you might call a “chip refresh” or an “under the hood” refresh. These updates are what Apple typically does to its products within one, two, or more years of making larger exterior design changes. Leaving the physical design alone maintains compatibility with the accessory ecosystem.
On the Mac side, upgrading the chip still worries me a lot because a lot of people who use a Mac very rarely give it some task where they need it to work as hard and as fast as possible for an extended period of time. You might be a developer compiling a large and complex application, or a podcaster or streamer editing or exporting an audio or video file, or maybe you're just playing a game. The power and flexibility of the operating system, and the first-party and third-party applications built with that power and flexibility in mind, means that “more speed” is still exciting, even if it will be a few years before that speed becomes something that users consistently notice and appreciate.
And then there's the iPad Pro. Especially since Apple has switched to using the same M-series chips it uses in the Mac, most reviews of the iPad Pro contain some version of “It's great hardware that's much faster than you need for everything the iPad does.” Namely, our iPad Pro M4 review from May 2024:
However, it remains unclear why most people would spend one, two or even three thousand dollars on a tablet that, despite its great hardware, does less than a comparably priced laptop, or at least does it a little more awkwardly, even if it is impressively fast and has a great screen.
Since then, Apple has announced and released iPadOS 26, an update that brings important and mostly welcome changes to the way the tablet handles windowed multitasking, file transfers, and several other types of background tasks. But this is something that won't stress even the Apple M1, let alone a chip that's twice as powerful.
