Apple’s M5 iPad Pro arrives in users’ hands tomorrow, and the first reviews have been published this morning. Here’s what reviewers are saying about Apple’s latest hardware.
Hardware-software mismatch continues?
One of my big hopes leading up to the M5 iPad Pro’s launch was that it would finally break from the normal pattern of iPad hardware exceeding the software’s capabilities.
iPadOS 26 brought significant productivity improvements to the iPad. And most of today’s reviews acknowledge that.
However, while many reviewers do find the software finally matching the hardware, at least one called out the mismatch of the M5 chip’s strengths (gains for AI and high-end gaming) and the current iPadOS ecosystems in both departments.
For an overall positive take, there’s David Pierce at The Verge:
I worried with last year’s model that the iPad Pro was almost too good a piece of hardware, given how limited iPadOS continued to be. Those shackles aren’t all the way off with iPadOS 26, but they’re getting there. The M5 Pro now feels a lot like a super-fast laptop that never seems to slow down, even when I have 10 overlapping apps open just because I can.
Federico Viticci at MacStories highlights iPadOS 26’s ongoing limitations that relate to the M5 chip’s unique strengths:
This is the paradox of the M5. Theoretically speaking, the new Neural Accelerator architecture should lead to notable gains in token generation and prefill time that may be appreciated on macOS by developers and AI enthusiasts thanks to MLX (more on this below). However, all these improvements amount to very little on iPadOS today because there is no serious app ecosystem for local AI development and tinkering on iPad. That ecosystem absolutely exists on the Mac. On the iPad, we’re left with a handful of non-MLX apps from the App Store, no Terminal, and the untapped potential of the M5.
In other words, even though Apple says the M5 iPad Pro is technically a powerhouse for AI (and high-end gaming, as Viticci addresses later in his review), only the Mac really specializes in those areas.
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