Apple iPad Pro M4 Review: The Best Tablet. Period.
Apple's M4-powered iPad Pro is the most powerful tablet ever made, with an Ultra Retina XDR OLED display, impossibly thin 5.1mm chassis, and desktop-class performance.
I've been using the iPad Pro M4 as my travel computer for four months. No MacBook, no laptop — just the iPad, an Apple Pencil Pro, and the Magic Keyboard folio. I want to tell you it completely replaced my laptop, because that would be a satisfying narrative. The truth is more nuanced.
The Display Is From the Future
The tandem OLED display on the 13-inch M4 iPad Pro is genuinely the most impressive screen I've seen on any portable device. It achieves what OLED couldn't before: sustained 1000-nit brightness in HDR content without the brightness throttling that single-stack OLEDs suffer from. Watching HDR video on this display in a dim room is a different experience from any other tablet — the whites are genuinely bright, the blacks are absolute, and the colors are so accurate they make you question how you tolerated anything less.
M4 Performance
The M4 chip in this iPad benchmarks within a few percent of the M4 in the MacBook Pro. I've run Lightroom edits, 4K video exports in LumaFusion, and multi-layer Procreate files without a single hesitation. The performance ceiling for iPad apps has essentially been removed.
The Elephant in the Room: iPadOS
iPadOS is not macOS. It does more than it did three years ago — Stage Manager for multi-window workflows is genuinely useful — but it remains a tablet OS that handles professional workflows, not a desktop OS that happens to run on a tablet. If your work involves specific Mac software, the iPad Pro is a complement, not a replacement. If your work runs in web apps, Apple's first-party suite, or tablet-native apps like Procreate, it's outstanding.
