iPad Pro M4 12.9 Review

When the Canvas Disappears and Only the Art Remains

Last month I was in a coffee shop in Koramangala, hunched over my old iPad Air, fighting to finish a vector illustration before a client deadline. The app kept stuttering. Layers lagged. And the whole time I’m thinking, there has to be something better than this. Then my friend walked in, dropped his new iPad Pro M4 on the table, opened Procreate, and started sketching with this odd new Apple Pencil that apparently knows when you roll it between your fingers. I didn’t say a word for about ten minutes. Just watched. Then I went home and ordered one.

That was three weeks ago. Here’s what I’ve worked out since.

First Impressions — Thin Is an Understatement

5.1 millimetres. That’s how thick this thing is. I’ve held biscuits with more heft. Apple keeps calling it their thinnest product ever, and I believe them, because it doesn’t feel like a computer in your hand — it feels like a clipboard. A very expensive, very capable clipboard milled from aluminium that probably costs more per gram than silver by now.

At 579 grams for the Wi-Fi model, it sits in the hand like it means business. Not too heavy for couch browsing, not so flimsy you brace for it to snap. The build stays rigid in spite of the daft thinness — I pressed on the back panel out of curiosity and got zero flex. None. Whoever engineered this deserves a raise, or at the very least a good lunch.

Two colours: Space Grey and Silver. I went Space Grey because I’m boring like that. The flat edges carry over from the last generation, and they still work nicely for the Apple Pencil Pro to snap on magnetically. Which it does — and it charges while it’s parked there. Small thing, big convenience.

The Display That Changed How I Think About Screens

Right. This is the part where I’ll sound like I’m overselling it, and I promise I’m not. The Ultra Retina XDR display on this iPad Pro is the best screen I’ve used on anything. Anything. And I’ve put a lot of devices through their paces.

What makes it special is the thing Apple calls tandem OLED — they’ve stacked two OLED panels one on top of the other. Why bother? Because a single OLED panel can’t get bright enough for what Apple was after here. Two working together push full-screen brightness to 1000 nits, with HDR peaks hitting 1600. That’s wild for a tablet. Plenty of laptops don’t get near it.

Resolution lands at 2752 by 2064, which works out to 264 PPI. Text looks printed. Not screen-rendered — printed, like ink sat down on paper. Scrolling PDFs and articles feels different here, because that clarity quietly removes a kind of eye-strain you don’t even register until it’s gone.

ProMotion gives you 120Hz adaptive refresh, so scrolling, drawing, everything stays smooth. The contrast ratio is technically infinite, since OLED can switch pixels fully off. Dark scenes in films go properly dark, not the washed-out grey you get off LCD. And colour accuracy? I held it next to my calibrated monitor and the iPad came within spitting distance — on a tablet you toss in a bag.

Older iPad Pros ran mini-LED, which was good. This is another league. The blooming that used to haunt mini-LED on dark backgrounds is just gone. White text on black looks clean now.

Apple Pencil Pro — It Stopped Feeling Like a Stylus

I wasn’t expecting much from the new Pencil. The old one was already great, wasn’t it? But the Apple Pencil Pro adds two things that genuinely reshaped how I work: barrel roll and squeeze.

Barrel roll means the Pencil tracks its own rotation. So with a flat brush in Procreate, twisting the Pencil in your fingers actually rotates the stroke on screen. I tried it once and my jaw dropped. Sounds tiny. Feels huge when you’re mid-drawing.

Squeeze is a haptic gesture — pinch the body and a radial menu pops up. Colour picker, brush swap, tool change, whatever you map to it. No more reaching for the toolbar. It’s one of those features you end up firing five hundred times a day once you find it. Pressure sensitivity runs to 4096 levels, the same as high-end Wacom tablets. Tilt detection is precise. And latency is low enough that the line lands right under the tip with no visible lag.

One gripe, though. The Apple Pencil Pro is sold separately, at ₹11,900 on top of the tablet. Same deal with the Magic Keyboard Folio. Apple giveth with one hand and chargeth with the other.

M4 Chip — A Desktop Processor in a Tablet Shell

The M4 is Apple’s newest silicon, and dropping it into the iPad Pro ahead of the MacBook was a bold call. You get a 10-core CPU and a 10-core GPU. The base model carries 8 GB of unified memory, while the higher-storage versions bump that to 16 GB.

What does that buy you in practice? It means I can have a 47-layer Procreate canvas open with multiple blend modes, a Safari window streaming reference shots, Slack floating in a window, and Apple Music going — and nothing hiccups. Nothing. The performance ceiling here is so high that in ordinary creative work I genuinely can’t find it.

I tried video editing in LumaFusion with 4K footage. Timeline scrubbing was instant. Exports beat my 2021 MacBook Pro. Lightroom rips through batch RAW edits with no spinning wheel. Logic Pro for iPad runs dense multi-track sessions without breaking stride. This isn’t marketing fluff — the M4 is flat-out overkill for what iPadOS currently lets you do, which is impressive and a little sad in the same breath.

Benchmarks put it ahead of most Windows ultrabooks. A tablet beating laptops that cost the same or more. Sit with that one.

Stage Manager and the iPadOS Question

Here’s where it gets complicated. And, honestly, a bit frustrating.

Stage Manager is Apple’s answer to “can the iPad be your laptop?” It gives you resizable, overlapping windows. Plug a 4K monitor into the Thunderbolt 4 port and you get a real extended desktop, dragging apps between the iPad screen and the external one. It works. Mostly.

The catch is iPadOS itself. It’s improved — a lot — but it still won’t do everything a Mac does. File management feels clunky next to Finder. Some apps still skip proper multi-window. You can’t run terminal commands or a real development environment. The browser, better as it is, still hits mobile-web limits on certain sites.

For creative pros — illustrators, photographers, musicians, video editors — this iPad can genuinely replace a laptop. I’d know, because it’s taken over about 80% of my work. But that last 20% keeps dragging me back to the MacBook. It’s the last-mile problem, and I’m not convinced Apple is rushing to fix it, because they’d rather sell you both.

Thunderbolt 4 — Proper Connectivity at Last

The single USB-C port now runs Thunderbolt 4, so transfer speeds go up to 40 Gbps. Hang external SSDs off it and shuffle huge files around. Drive an external 6K display. Plug in audio interfaces for music work. eGPUs? No — iPadOS won’t have it. But the raw capability of the port is sitting right there.

What you don’t get is USB-A. Or a headphone jack. Or a card reader. Everything wants a dongle or a hub, which is par for the course with Apple at this point. I’ve made peace with dongle life. You might budget another ₹3,000-5,000 for a decent USB-C hub if you plan to lean on this seriously.

Wi-Fi 6E is onboard and quick. There’s an optional 5G model if you need mobile data, though it shoves the price up noticeably. Bluetooth 5.3 handles AirPods, keyboards, and game controllers without fuss.

Battery Life — Solid but Not Spectacular

Apple claims 10 hours of video playback. My mixed creative days — drawing, browsing, video calls, the odd YouTube break — landed at a steady 8 to 9 hours. That’s a full workday if you don’t push too hard. Heavy Procreate sessions with the OLED panel at full brightness drain it quicker, maybe 6 to 7.

Charging runs through the Thunderbolt 4 port. Apple doesn’t toss a fast charger in the box (of course they don’t), but with a 35W adapter you’re looking at roughly two hours from zero to full. Not quick, but fine. I usually just leave it charging overnight.

Camera and Audio — The Extras

The front camera finally moved to the long edge, so you’re actually centred on a video call when the iPad’s held horizontally with the Magic Keyboard. Should’ve happened years ago. The 12MP ultrawide front camera with Center Stage is great for Zoom and FaceTime — it follows you around the frame as you move, which works well for standing presentations or when you’re waving your arms around in a brainstorm with a remote client.

Round the back there’s a 12MP main camera and a LiDAR scanner. Nobody buys an iPad for the rear camera, but the LiDAR is genuinely handy for AR and 3D scanning if that’s your thing. Interior designers I know use it to scan rooms for quick measurements and spatial planning. If that’s your field, it’s a nice bonus.

The four-speaker setup sounds incredible for something this thin. Spatial Audio with head tracking makes watching films on it surprisingly immersive — better than most laptop speakers by a wide margin. I watched a couple of episodes of a series on a late-night flight and the audio was clear, full, and loud enough at 50% volume that I never dug out my AirPods. The bass won’t rattle your chest, obviously, but there’s a warmth and presence I didn’t expect from something thinner than a stack of playing cards.

The Software Ecosystem — What iPadOS Gets Right and Wrong

Apple’s update track record is probably the strongest case for buying into the iPad ecosystem at all. This iPad gets iPadOS updates for at least five years, likely more. My friend’s 2020 iPad Air still runs the current version. Android tablets can’t touch that — even Samsung caps out at four years, and OnePlus gives you two.

Universal Control is a feature I didn’t think I’d touch and now use daily. One mouse and keyboard across your Mac and iPad at once — slide the cursor off the edge of the Mac and it shows up on the iPad. Drag files between the two. Sounds like a gimmick, but when you’re drawing on the iPad while pulling reference from emails on the Mac, the flow turns almost magical.

The iPad App Store has a depth Android tablets just don’t match. Most of the big creative apps — Procreate, Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, the Adobe suite, DaVinci Resolve, Logic Pro — have iPad builds tuned for touch and Pencil. On Android you’re mostly running stretched phone apps, which is a fundamentally worse experience. None of this shows up on a spec sheet, but it matters enormously day to day.

Where iPadOS still frustrates is the stuff I flagged earlier — file management, no terminal, thinner automation than macOS. Shortcuts has grown powerful but it’s no substitute for real scripting. Safari sometimes flat-out refuses to load a desktop site even when you ask it to. And sideloading apps means jumping through hoops, which boxes in power users.

Specifications

Accessories — The Hidden Cost

Let’s deal with the elephant in the room. The iPad Pro M4 starts at ₹1,12,900 for the base 8 GB/256 GB Wi-Fi model. But that’s the start line, not the finish.

Apple Pencil Pro: ₹11,900. Magic Keyboard: around ₹29,900. Smart Folio case: ₹7,900. A half-decent USB-C hub: ₹3,000 to ₹5,000. Add it up and you’ve quietly crossed ₹1,60,000, which is MacBook Air M4 territory. Worth thinking hard about before you commit.

The thing is, every one of those accessories genuinely makes it better. The Magic Keyboard turns the iPad into a laptop. The Pencil opens up the creative side. You more or less need them to get the full picture. Apple knows this. So does your wallet.

Who Should Actually Buy This

Not everyone. And I mean that.

If you’re a digital artist or illustrator, this is probably the best tool you can buy right now. The Pencil Pro on the tandem OLED with the M4 behind it is the closest thing to magic I’ve felt in a piece of tech. Procreate, Affinity Designer, Adobe Fresco — they all sing on this hardware.

Photographers editing on the move will love the display accuracy and the Lightroom speed. Musicians running Logic Pro on iPad finally have hardware that doesn’t make them compromise. Video editors in LumaFusion or the iPad build of DaVinci Resolve get timeline performance that rivals desktops.

Students taking handwritten notes? Sure, but maybe look at the iPad Air instead — it’s half the price and does 90% of this for note-taking.

If you need a laptop replacement and your work lives entirely inside Apple’s ecosystem with creative apps, go for it. If you need spreadsheets, code editors, proper file management, and true desktop multitasking, get a MacBook instead. The hardware here can handle it. The software can’t. Not yet.

The Real Question This Tablet Asks

Three weeks of daily use in, I keep circling back to the same thought. The iPad Pro M4 isn’t really up against other tablets anymore. It’s up against the MacBook Air. And on some fronts — the display, the Pencil, the touch interface — it wins that fight convincingly. On others — the operating system, file management, software flexibility — it still loses.

It’s a creative workstation trapped inside a tablet operating system. The hardware has arrived. The software is still catching up. Whether that gap bothers you comes down entirely to what you make and how you make it.

For me — the illustrator who started all this frustrated in a Koramangala coffee shop — the iPad Pro M4 is the best thing I’ve bought for my creative work in years. I draw on it every day. I edit photos on it. I write on it. It’s genuinely changed how I work.

But the MacBook still rides in my bag. Just in case.

Price in India

The iPad Pro M4 12.9-inch starts at ₹1,12,900 in India for the 8 GB / 256 GB Wi-Fi model, with higher storage variants climbing from there. You’ll find it on Apple.com/in, Amazon India, Flipkart, and authorised Apple resellers like Imagine and iStore.

Full Specifications

Pros

• M4 laptop-class performance in tablet
• Tandem OLED stunning display
• Ultra-thin 5.1mm
• Apple Pencil Pro compatible
• Thunderbolt 4 external display

Cons

• iPadOS limits laptop replacement
• Very expensive ₹1,12,900
• Pencil and keyboard sold separately
• No USB-A ports

Our Rating: 9.2/10 · Price: ₹1,12,900