After 2 years, Apple has finally released new iPads, and for the first time, the iPad has a newer and faster chip than the Mac. The M4 iPad Pro leaves our Macs feeling outdated, but is it worth $400 more than the new iPad Air? Let’s dive into all the differences to find out exactly what that extra cash is getting you.
Design, Size, and Weight
First, on the outside, both the iPad Pro and iPad Air still look very much like iPads, and both come in 11 and 13-inch sizes. The Pro only has 2 color options in Silver or Space Black, while the Air has 4: Space Gray, Blue, Purple, and Starlight.
The 11-inch iPad Pro is thinner than the Air by 13% while the 13-inch Pro is thinner by 16%. Naturally, this means the Pro is lighter than the Air too by 4 to 6%.
Display
However, the display sizes are not quite the same, even though they are both labeled 11 and 13 inches. The diagonal length of the 11-inch Air is 10.86 inches, and the 13-inch Air is 12.9 inches. This disclaimer is not on the Pro, which means it should be the stated size.
The Pro displays are one of the biggest differentiators this year, with the highlight being the Tandem OLED tech instead of IPS. There are slightly more pixels at the same dpi, again due to being slightly larger. The Pro’s OLED display offers all the advantages of OLED, including inky blacks, fantastic motion, and 1000 nits of brightness compared to the Air’s 600, peaking at 1600 for HDR content. The 1TB and 2TB Pro models also have a nano-texture display glass option for $100 extra, which scatters ambient light for less glare. Picking it also gets you the coveted polishing cloth in the box as well!
And of course, the Pro display has ProMotion, supporting up to 120Hz refresh rates compared to just 60 Hz on the Air.
Chip, Performance and Storage
The second biggest difference between the 2024 iPad Pro and iPad Air is the chip. For the first time, Apple has equipped the iPad Pro with a chip that is a generation ahead of what you can get on any Mac, the M4. In comparison, the iPad Air has the now last-last-gen M2 chip with 8 CPU, 10 GPU cores, and 8GB of memory.
This time, the storage option you get on the iPad Pro determines a lot more than just storage capacity, but also CPU power and even memory. The 256 and 512GB models have a 9-core CPU and 10-core GPU, with 8 GB of memory, while the 1TB and 2TB models have an extra performance CPU core to make 10, and double the memory to make 16GB.
Apple says the M4 is 50% faster than the M2, which probably applies to the higher tier M4. If we assume the 9-core is 90% of the performance of the 10-core M4, that means it’s 35% faster than the M2.
The M4 has the benefits of M3 as you might expect, like the GPU features of dynamic caching and ray tracing, giving 4 times the “pro rendering” performance compared to M2. That doesn’t necessarily mean gaming performance.
The M4 also has a more powerful neural engine, able to process 38 trillion operations per second vs 15.8 trillion on the M2, which is 140% faster. The media engine is also improved, granting 8K video acceleration, ProRes encoding and decoding, and AV1 decoding. And the memory bandwidth of M4 is 120 GB/s compared to the M2’s 100 GB/s.
Of course, the 1TB upgrade including chip and memory means you pay more for those extra upgrades too. The $400 upgrade fee from 512GB to 1TB can be split as $200 for the extra storage and $200 for the extra CPU core and memory. On storage options, the iPad Pro starts at 256GB and goes up to 2TB, while the iPad Air starts at 128GB and goes up to 1TB.
Camera and Audio
For the camera, the best news is that both the iPad Pro and Air have the camera centered on the landscape orientation now instead of portrait. However, there are a few more camera capabilities as well in the iPad Pro, including adaptive true tone flash that makes it easy to scan documents with even lighting, ProRes video recording, audio zoom to focus where audio is coming from, and stereo recording.
The front camera now has TrueDepth, portrait mode with advanced bokeh and depth controls, portrait lighting features, and animoji and memoji support.
Related to the TrueDepth Camera, the iPad Pro offers Face ID authentication, while the iPad Air only supports Touch ID built into the top button. The Pro also has a LiDAR Scanner that the Air does not.
On audio, the iPad Pro offers 4 speakers as well as 4 studio-quality mics, while the iPad Air has only 2 speakers and 2 mics.
Connector
While both iPads seems to have the same USB-C style port, the iPad Pro’s is more capable with Thunderbolt and USB 4, meaning speeds of up to 40 Gbps instead of the iPad Air’s USB 3 transfer speeds of up to 10 Gbps.
Keyboard and Pencil
The M4 iPad Pro now supports a new Magic Keyboard, which has a larger glass trackpad and a 14-key function row as improvements to the old Magic Keyboard supported by the Air. However, they both support the new Apple Pencil Pro, along with the older Apple Pencil with USB-C.
Disappointingly The Same
There are a few similarities that are worth pointing out, mostly because they are disappointingly the same. They have the same battery life at 10 hours, and unfortunately, the same wireless connectivity with only Wifi 6E and not Wifi 7.
And of course they both run the same iPadOS software, which means they aren’t laptop replacements for most people.
Cellular
And if you’re interested in the cellular option, both iPad Pro and Air have it, but it costs $200 extra on the Pro, but for some reason only $150 extra for the Air. I guess Pros just deserve to pay more…
Value Comparison
So in summary, what do you get for the extra $400 cost of the iPad Pro over the iPad Air?
Well, first of all, it’s worth noting that the iPad Air starts at 128GB and costs $100 more for 256GB, while the Pro starts at 256GB. So the price difference for everything else is technically only $300, but that’s only if you put the full value on the extra storage.
So for $300 more for the iPad Pro at 256GB or 512GB storage sizes, you get:
- OLED display with all its advantages including better motion, true blacks, increased brightness, and 120 Hz refresh rates
- The M4 chip that is 35% faster in CPU, up to 4x faster in GPU, and 140% faster in AI tasks
- A media engine with 8K, ProRes, and AV1 acceleration
- A set of more capable cameras with features like the iPhone has
- Face ID instead of Touch ID
- More and better speakers and microphones
- A faster Thunderbolt and USB 4 port instead of USB 3
- Support for a new, still expensive Magic Keyboard
- And a more expensive cellular upgrade option
And if you’re in the realm of 1TB of storage, then the price difference between the Pro and Air is $500, and for that extra $200 you get:
- All of the previously mentioned things except
- The same storage size
- And the M4 chip has an extra CPU core and double the memory so performance should be closer to 50% faster than M2
So is the iPad Pro worth it over the iPad Air? I really like OLED and high refresh rate screens, so for that reason I don’t really want to settle for the iPad Air. However, I also can’t really justify paying over $1000 for the iPad Pro.
Yes, the M4 chip is great, but if I want to spend that much for the performance, then I’d much rather get a MacBook instead, especially as the cost of even the 256GB 13” iPad Pro and Magic Keyboard is already well beyond the price of a 512GB 14” MacBook Pro that has a much more suitable operating system for productivity!
But let me know if you would get the iPad Pro over a MacBook and why.
