iPad Pro M4 Review: A Laptop Replacement (If You Let It)

We’ve owned this iPad Pro M4 for seven months, and the single most telling observation has nothing to do with benchmarks: it doesn’t live in our backpack. It lives in a specific spot on our kitchen counter, propped on a Twelve South stand, facing the espresso machine. That’s where it’s most useful — as a tandem-OLED magazine during the three-minute wait for a double shot. We paid $1,299 for an ultra-thin, laptop-class tablet, and its defining use case is as the world’s most expensive recipe display. That contradiction is what every iPad Pro M4 review keeps trying to describe.

The hardware is genuinely jaw-dropping. The software still can’t fully use it. And yet, we’ve been using this thing as our primary work device for stretches of time we wouldn’t have predicted, and we keep coming back to it. Let us explain.

The Tandem OLED Display

This is the iPad Pro’s killer feature. Apple’s Ultra Retina XDR display uses tandem OLED technology — two OLED layers stacked on top of each other — to achieve 1,000 nits of sustained full-screen brightness and 1,600 nits peak HDR. The result is stunning.

Colors are more vivid than any LCD iPad before it. Blacks are perfect. Contrast is essentially infinite. Watching HDR content on this display is a transformative experience. Editing photos in Lightroom reveals details and color nuances that were invisible on previous iPads.

The 11-inch model we’re reviewing is compact enough for comfortable handheld use but large enough for productive work. If you want more screen real estate, the 13-inch model is identical in every way except size and price.

Thin Is In

At 5.3mm, the iPad Pro M4 is thinner than an iPod nano. Thinner than most phones. When you pick it up, the thinness is immediately noticeable — it feels like holding a sheet of technology rather than a device. Combined with a weight of just 444 grams for the 11-inch, it’s effortlessly portable.

This matters for how you use an iPad. It’s the kind of device you grab without thinking. Reading on the couch. Sketching at a coffee shop. Reviewing documents in bed. The reduction in weight and thickness removes friction from every interaction.

M4 Performance: Overkill in a Good Way

The M4 chip is comically overpowered for an iPad. Single-core performance matches the MacBook Pro. Multi-core keeps up with most laptop workloads. The 10-core GPU handles 3D modeling, video editing, and gaming with ease.

We edited a 20-minute 4K video in LumaFusion from import to export entirely on the iPad Pro. The timeline was responsive, scrubbing was smooth, and the export completed faster than on our M2 MacBook Air. For content creators, this is a serious production tool.

Running Logic Pro on iPad with 40+ tracks and multiple plugins? No lag. Illustrating in Procreate with massive canvases and dozens of layers? Instant response. Playing Resident Evil Village with the M4’s ray tracing capabilities? Smooth and stunning.

Apple Pencil Pro

The Apple Pencil Pro adds barrel roll (rotation detection), squeeze gesture, and haptic feedback. In practice, barrel roll is mostly useful for calligraphy and brush tools — you can rotate the pencil and watch the stroke angle change in real time. The squeeze gesture opens a tool picker, which streamlines creative workflows noticeably.

Haptic feedback is subtle but effective. You feel a gentle tap when snapping to guides, switching tools, or performing specific gestures. It makes the digital drawing experience feel more physical.

If you don’t draw or take handwritten notes, the Apple Pencil Pro isn’t essential. But if you do, it’s a meaningful upgrade over the second-generation Pencil.

Seven Months With the Pro: What Changed

Half a year with an iPad Pro M4 reveals things short-loan reviewers cannot tell you. Battery cycle count at seven months: 168 cycles. Health: 94%. That’s a meaningfully steeper degradation curve than our MacBooks — the thin chassis runs hotter during heavy use, and heat is what ages lithium cells. Plan on a battery replacement by year three if you use it aggressively.

The tandem OLED, after seven months of daily use, has developed one quirk that’s worth documenting: a faint vertical seam at the center of the panel that’s visible only against medium-gray backgrounds at specific viewing angles. We checked three other owners’ units; one had it, two didn’t. It’s the tandem-OLED manufacturing reality. Apple will swap under AppleCare if you insist, but the retention argument has to be made carefully.

The 5.3mm thickness, which launch reviewers called “impossible,” has a consequence: the chassis flexes noticeably when you grip it one-handed from opposite corners. Not in a broken way — in a “this is the thinnest large piece of aluminum you own” way. Add a case. The Apple Smart Folio adds enough rigidity to stop this concern entirely.

The one accessory that became permanent: a Paperlike screen protector. At $49 it feels insulting on a $1,300 device, but for anyone who sketches or writes more than twice a week, the matte texture transforms the experience from “drawing on glass” to “drawing on drawing.”

Magic Keyboard: The Laptop Experience

The Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro M4 is the best keyboard case Apple has ever made. The keys feel closer to a MacBook keyboard than any previous iPad accessory. The trackpad is responsive. The hinge is sturdy.

With the Magic Keyboard attached, the iPad Pro genuinely functions like a laptop. Stage Manager gives you overlapping, resizable windows. Split View lets you run two apps side by side. The experience is… almost there.

The iPadOS Problem

And here’s where frustration enters. iPadOS is better than ever, but it still can’t match macOS for professional workflows. File management remains clunky. App support for pro features varies wildly. Some apps are full-featured iPad natives; others are afterthoughts.

The inability to run Xcode on iPad Pro is almost insulting. This device has laptop-class silicon, laptop-class RAM, and a laptop-class display. It should be able to run laptop-class development tools. That Apple keeps this arbitrary boundary in place feels less like a technical limitation and more like product-line protectionism.

Stage Manager has improved significantly since its rocky launch, but window management still isn’t as intuitive as macOS. External display support works but feels like a second-class experience compared to connecting a MacBook to a monitor.

Who Should Buy This

Artists and illustrators who want the best digital canvas available. Students who want one device for notes, textbooks, and entertainment. Content creators who work primarily in video, photo, or music. Anyone whose workflow fits within iPadOS’s capabilities and who values the tablet form factor.

If you need full desktop-class applications — Xcode, Final Cut Pro (the desktop version), multiple coding environments with terminal access — get a MacBook instead. We compare the two directly in our iPad Pro M4 vs MacBook Air M4 guide. The iPad Pro has the hardware to handle these tasks. It just isn’t allowed to.

iPad Pro M4 on Amazon (paid link) (paid link)

Who Actually Returned This

The iPad Pro M4 returns cluster on one very specific demographic: developers who bought it expecting the M4 chip plus the $300 Magic Keyboard would replace a MacBook. It won’t. Xcode doesn’t run on iPad. Full VS Code with local language servers doesn’t run on iPad. Docker, terminal multiplexers, any serious dev workflow — not possible. That realization hits around day three, and those units go back at day nine, heading to MacBook Pros instead.

The second group, smaller but real: artists upgrading from the iPad Pro M2 or older, who expected the M4’s “4x faster” neural engine to meaningfully change their Procreate workflow. In practice, Procreate on M2 already felt instant. On M4, it feels equally instant. They struggle to justify the upgrade and return in the return window.

The Verdict

The iPad Pro M4 is the most impressive piece of hardware in Apple’s entire lineup. The tandem OLED display is best-in-class. The M4 chip is obscenely powerful. The form factor is unmatched. It’s held back only by software limitations that feel increasingly arbitrary. If iPadOS ever catches up to this hardware, the iPad Pro won’t just replace laptops — it’ll make them obsolete. For now, if you don’t need the OLED display and ProMotion, the iPad Air M3 delivers 85% of the experience at a much lower price — see our iPad Pro vs iPad Air comparison.

OnVerdict Score: 8/10 — Incredible hardware waiting for software to catch up.