iPad Pro M4 (2024) review: big, bad, but now thinner!

The iPad Pro always has supercharged hardware — enough to run desktop-class apps and console-grade games. Literally, with games like Resident Evil and Assassin's Creed: Mirage already out for or headed for iPads with any M-class chip. But it is quite shocking that the brand-new M4 chip debuts in a tablet, instead of a MacBook.

New designs! Kind of... The new iPad Pros with M4 chips are now slightly thinner and lighter than before. The "big" model now has a 13-inch display, instead of 12.9 inches. And the selfie camera now resides on the right frame of the tablet — top frame when it's in landscape, which will make video calls less awkward. No titanium treatment, but Apple made it a point that the 0.21 inch chassis of the 11" and the 0.2 inch chassis of the 13" are "as sturdy as before".

The Pro iPads, much like their iPhone counterparts, usually come in boring colors. That is Space Black and Silver — no quirky or vibrant options like on the iPad Air or the base iPad.



iPad Pro users have been envious of that base tier iPad 10th gen — it had the Magic Keyboard Folio, which had function keys — something missing from the good old Magic Keyboard for Pros. Well, no worries — Apple has taken the time to update that, too! The new Magic Keyboard now comes with function keys and a larger trackpad for a more "laptop replacement" look, feel, and function. Plus, an aluminum palm rest. All cool — unfortunately, it will only fit the new Pros. And, conversely, the iPad Pro M4 (2024) will not fit older Magic Keyboard models.

The Apple Pencil also got some love — here comes the Apple Pencil Pro. Separate purchase, compatible with both the iPad Pro M4 (2024) and iPad Air M2 (2024). It comes with a new squeeze sensor for ease of access to sub-menus, as well as a gyroscope for real-time brush and barrel roll control. And it has a Taptic engine inside to give you gentle feedback on a squeeze.

As we all know, chargers have been dissapearing from Apple product boxes. Thus far, iPads did include it, but no more. The iPad Pro M4 ships with a tablet and a cable in the box, that's that.

Apple seemed set on not going to OLED tech for its premium tablets — instead, it gave us the Mini LED panels in the iPad Pro 12.9 (2021) and iPad Pro 12.9 (2022). It looks good... but not OLED good — there's still some blooming observed when watching in the dark.

Now, we have new panels in the new iPad Pros, and they are special! Tandem OLED — the iPad Pro M4 (2024) screens are made of dual-layered OLED sheets, stacked on top of each other. This ensures better color calibration and much more brightness. As per Apple specs, we have 1,000 nits max brightness for SDR, and 1,600 peak brightness for HDR content. This is not iPhone levels of bright, but rest assured it's plenty of nits!

Display Measurements:

Of course, they have 120 Hz ProMotion refresh rate and, double of course, they have a special new name — say "Hello" to Ultra Retina XDR!

As an added bonus, professionals who often work in bright environments — or outdoors — but demand excellent colors and visibility can upgrade to a nano-textured glass when buying a new iPad Pro. This option is $100 extra, and it's only available on the 1 TB and 2 TB models — so it's pretty pricey.

The oleophobic coating on the glass seems to be doing better than before! Ever since the Apple Pencil was introduced, Apple introduced a new coating to the screens, presumably to ensure smooth performance from the stylus. It wasn't good at keeping fingerprints off before, but with our new iPad units — it's pretty easy to keep them clean.

Unlocking an iPad Pro is still done via Face ID and it is still orientation-agnostic. You can look at it upside down for all it matters, the Face ID will still work right. It's pretty fast, reliable, and has quite a wide angle.

In reality, people don't hold up tablets to take photos out in the park or at a show... thankfully! So, cameras are not where tablets — the iPads included — usually put a lot of focus. A good enough rear camera is required for the occasional shot or document scan. And, it seems Apple agrees. The ultra-wide camera from the back has been stealthily removed. Now, we have the 12 MP main snapper with an improved "adaptive" True Tone flash next to it for better white balance when taking photos of paper.

Thanks to the chip, you can still do 4K video at 24 FPS, 25 FPS, 30 FPS, 60 FPS, and ProRes video at 4K 30 FPS... uh, if you want to do this with a 12 MP tablet camera.

The selfie camera, as we mentioned, has now moved, so it is in a better spot when your iPad is in a landscape position (most of the time). It has the same 12 MP resolution as before, and an ultra-wide lense so it supports Center Stage — the software feature that follows your face around as you move, or widens the shot when it sees two faces enter the frame. We've grown to like it and prefer it after a couple of years of use now.



Also, the Pro iPads have the LiDAR sensor on the back — a Time of Flight camera, which enables accurate environmental scanning and placing virtual objects in your space. It gives you a better virtual ruler and better-performing AR apps and games. Though, we haven't seen the AR trend explode, so this is still a very niche feature.

It was quite a shock to see a new Apple chip debut on a tablet, not a Mac. The Apple M3 is not even a year old, and now we have the Apple M4, powering the iPad Pro (2024) edition. We have a slight suspicion that it's only a branch of the M3 silicon, and not a full on generational upgrade. Apple talked a lot about how it compares to the M2 — the M4 is up to 50% faster than the M2, and its GPU is up to 4 times faster — plus, it adds Dynamic caching, Mesh Shading, Ray tracing for some advanced real time graphics work.



And it already outperforms the M3 in benchmarks, so it's not just a rebrand — it's a legit new processor. Kind of a bold move.

Performance Benchmarks:

But let's get down to the nitty gritty — real life use. Nobody is surprised — these run fast, smooth, responsive, extremely satisfying. M4 is a beast, and iPadOS is... well, not quite a desktop system. You can rest assured that you will have a lot of headroom and years of work out of this tablet. In fact, we are still rocking 2020 and 2021 iPad Pros around the office — those A12Z and M1 chips still huff and puff well enough for medium workloads, audio work, photo and video editing.

Apple did finally launch Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro for iPads last year, and it gave them very nice updates this year. Live Multicam with up to 4 iPhones beaming imagery to a single Final Cut instance on your iPad is pretty cool.

Logic Pro also comes with new AI features — the good old Drummer gets new band buddies — AI powered bassist and keyboards. OK, one — this is very cool. Secondly — it'll probably come to slightly older iPad Pros, too. See, Apple did make it a point that it has been putting Neural Engine segments in its chips well before the rest of the industry started using dedicated NPUs for AI.

If you have an M1 iPad Pro, maybe you aren't even in a hurry to upgrade, unless you want the cool new thin chassis, the new Magic Keyboard, or the new Apple Pencil Pro (or at least the Hover feature for the Pencil gen 2).

The new iPad Pros will come with iPadOS 17 right out of the box — there's simply no newer version. We guess we will see a sneak peek of iPadOS 18 when WWDC opens in June. But, for the time being, 17 is what we got.

The OS came with the new Journal app, a Weather app facelift, new iMessage features that make group chats easier to navigate and participate in, and new Apple Music features for shared playlists. Plus, some minor facelifts across other apps. Stage Manager is of course a huge feature here, as it gives you a desktop-ish environment to multitask and work in, when you connect an external monitor via the Thunderbolt port.



We did talk a bit about the new Logic and Final Cut features in the hardware section. AI was kind of brushed during the presentation — Apple made it a point to imply that old features, such as picking up a subject from the background, or copying text from a photo or live video, were already "AI features". No bold new statements were made, and we expect a bigger AI-loaded drop during WWDC in June or at iPhone release in September.

iPads, like iPhones, receive OS updates for a good chunk of time after release — a minimum of 5 years. Apple hasn't really came out to promise such a concrete number, but history shows us that this is the period Cupertino typically aims for. So, the iPad Pro (2024) is expected to last you this long:

• 2024 - launch with iPadOS 17
• Late 2024 - get iPadOS 18
• Late 2025 - get iPadOS 19
• Late 2026 - get iPadOS 20
• Late 2027 - get iPadOS 21
• Late 2028 - get iPadOS 22
• Late 2029 - questionable. We may or may not get iPadOS 23 here

Apple has spent a lot of time showing off its upcoming AI features on iPhones — it's tied with the launch of the iPhone 16 series, and every AI presentation featured an iPhone and talked about iOS 18. However, you may have forgotten that, during MMWC 24, it was shown that iPadOS will also get plenty of tricks — there's no reason it wouldn't. The current AI features that we expect to drop by the end of 2024 are:

• AI-assisted writing and drawing with the Apple Pencil (straighten lines, objects, handwriting)
• Audio recording transcription
• iPad Calculator with Notes integration that generates complex graphics and changes numbers and results in real time as you edit formulas
• AI-summarized notifications
• Auto-compose replies
• Compose and change the tone of emails and messages
• Generative photo editing (a.k.a. Magic Eraser)
• Image generation and emoji generation (Genmoji)
• Smarter Siri that can understand deep context and create complex answers and solutions
• ChatGPT integration — if Siri can't answer

The text features have now dropped with iPadOS 18.1 in October. We are expecting iPadOS 18.2 in December to bring about the Image Playground and ChatGPT integration. It's still unclear if the iPad Pro will get Visual Intelligence — the feature currently only works on iPhone 16 series with iOS 18.2 beta and requires the Camera Control button, otherwise you have no way to activate it. It's a smart camera type thing — point your camera towards an object and you get the options to either ask ChatGPT about what it is, or perform a Google Image Search.

With all of its mobile devices, from laptops to phones to tablets, Apple aims for a comfortable 10-hour screen-on time. Anything extra is a bonus, anything less than that is not ideal. Our experience with the "normal-sized" iPads thus far is that yes, medium load like video streams and multi-app use will drain the battery at a speed of 10% per hour. If you game a lot, or do video editing, the overall on time can fall to 8 or even 6 hours if you are not giving it any breathing room.



Apple's specs lists the batteries of the iPad Pro M4 (2024) as 31.29-watt-hour for the 11-inch and 38.99-watt-hour for the 13-inch. Assuming those are 3.77 V batteries, this should translate to something around:

• iPad Pro 11" M4 (2024) battery capacity - ~8,300 mAh
• iPad Pro 13" M4 (2024) battery capacity - ~10,340 mAh

Our benchmark tests kind of confirmed our hunches, but also surprised us somewhat. It seems the new iPad Pro M4 is kind of "evening out" the battery performance — simple web browsing drains faster. But 3D gaming and video streming is up. So, the M4 is definitely more efficient, that's a thing.

The iPads still draw 20 W on the wire, so it'll take them a while to charge a full 100%:

PhoneArena Charging Test Results:

Well, there are no haptics on Apple's tablets, unlike Samsung's Galaxy Tab devices. We can't say we miss them — it's a bit weird when you have a whole tablet vibrating with your taps and swipes.

Since the new Pros are so thin, the speaker design inside is different and there's a slightly less bass coming out from them for sure. They are still quite loud, meaty, and detailed, though. We wouldn't say it's a dealbreaker.

As before, the iPad Pros are coming in two flavors — a regular-sized iPad Pro 11" to a huge iPad Pro 13". We generally recommend the smaller version for most people — it's much more portable, easier to fit in various spots, nooks and crannies around your home or working environment. And an 11-inch screen is generally good enough for most things you'd do on a tablet.

However, the market has proved that customers love large tablets. That's why Apple continues to produce the iPad Pro 13", and that's why Samsung keeps making the Galaxy Tab S10 Ultra (we actually asked — apparently, 30% of Galaxy Tab S8 sales were of the Tab S8 Ultra. Isn't that crazy?).

But be aware that the iPad Pro 13" has a unique twist to it. It has a more square-ish aspect ratio of 4:3. This gives you a lot of vertical space for web browsing or pro editing apps. However, it's more limiting when looking to do splitscreen or watching wide, cinematic videos. The iPad Pro 11" has a slightly wider 10:7 aspect ratio, which makes it more universal. Combined with the more manageable size, it'll be the better option for most people.

But if you are looking at a big, cumbersome, and quite expensive tablet, we imagine that if you want one, you have your very well-defined reasons. A laptop replacer it is not, but maybe some people simply don't want MacOS or Windows — just a huge canvas to draw on, open large apps, or watch movies.

iPad Pros are great — they run fast and smooth, their displays are awesome, and they can do... some stuff. They are definitely not laptop-like, so if you intend to be a "digital nomad" with one — take into consideration that an iPad still favors the "one app at a time" approach. It's not that it doesn't have Split View or Slide Over. In fact, it also can run Center Stage straight on the iPad screen, no need for an external monitor. But the way the operating system works, it still just wants you to keep your primary app in focus. For example, if you are exporting video, but minimize the app — that export has now failed.

This, combined with the price, puts a lot of people off.