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Tablets · Apple iPad Pro

Apple iPad Pro M2

12owners with an opinion
30%of verdicts positive
3/7positive/negative since 2024
0.5 yrslongest happy owner
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and design; criticized for ease of use and display.

What owners wrote

Likes itOwned 0.5 years
I've been using a 12.9" M2 iPad Pro as a daily driver for six months. It is almost perfect - the only big issue I have is a problem in WebKit where a two-finger-tap on a trackpad procs both the system contextual menu and the web app context menu. It makes using VSCode, Google Docs, etc. highly annoying and remains unresolved. Here's the issue in bugzilla: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=260722 Outside of that, I love using it and actively prefer it over a regular desktop OS for all tasks outside of software development (and with the bug fixed even that would be better)
Doesn’t like it
My iPad Pro M2 takes around 30 seconds to solve it in Safari, while my Mac Studio solves it in about 3 seconds using 449% logical CPUs. It really makes no sense. Interesting how much slower it is than native - could it be protections against things such as crypto mining?
Doesn’t like it
not the op but for me safari has been deteriorating for years: 1. ios performance in scrolling and loading (especially on my ipad pro m2) is unbearably slow, just stutters everywhere when loading a page in the background 2. tap-and-hold to open a link menu is so strange; sometimes it highlights text instead of showing the menu, sometimes it works ok, there is some kind of strange ui timing issue at work 3. on ipad and ios the tab overview display scrolling is absolutely appalling like 4fps level slow... completely unbearable to scroll through tab previews 4. developer tools are abysmal compared to chrome 5. on desktop performance is also extremely slow compared to chrome, its night and day 6. battery usage is so bad on ipad, just leaving some tabs open they run down the battery and chug memory (i know this is more a web thing, but they should at least freeze tabs in the background or make it an option) 7. just strange bugs on ipad, when tapping a text field the keyboard pops up, then suddenly disappears and the pops up again... just a terrible app etc etc lots of paper cuts, but the performance issues are the biggest for me... i like the tab groups + auto save and icloud sync and built-in spellcheck, but its getting harder and harder to resist the alternatives
Doesn’t like it
> The best comparator here is likely the iPhone 16 Pros, released in late 2024. These were the flagship iPhones until late 2025. They are only one generation old. They have the same CPU and the same 8GB of RAM. I have never heard anyone complain that they suffer performance-wise from having too little RAM. I have 8GB of RAM in my M2 iPad Pro running iOS (yes, it’s “iOS” despite what Apple’s crack marketing team might call it), and I’ve certainly started to complain. Doing anything with the web, and like one or two other apps is enough to have apps I’m switching between page out like every two or three minutes.
Doesn’t like it
Browser use on the modern web is enough to put you in swap territory early and often on 8GB of RAM. My much more RAM efficient M2 iPad Pro with the non-desktop OS and 8GB of RAM frequently has to page out apps I had open two minutes ago if I’m doing anything with the web and like one or two other applications. This things eventual replacement in like 4 or 5 years is going to need twice or thrice the RAM for me to consider it an upgrade.
Likes itStill going
I would disagree with the conclusion. It sounds like a faulty line of hardware on the M2 Air then. My partner is the IT manager at a school where they have over 1000 iPads (10th gen) deployed with iOS 18 and there are no reported issues like this. We ourselves have iPad Pro M2's without these issues which we both use all day every day. Our kids have 3x 10th gen iPads too. No issues. YMMV but they just work for us and the software, which not perfect, is probably the least shit out there. I mean the trash heap in my office is mostly Surface machines as a comparison...
Doesn’t like it
The M2 iPad Pro with Apple Pencil and Magic Keyboard. I got it so that I could do some writing and note-taking away from my main work computer. Forum posters and tech reviewers assured me the device was up to the task. But the reality is that while iPadOS can do about 60-70% of what macOS can do, the remaining 30% is entirely impossible to accomplish unless you have access to a computer. I learned this the hard way when I was traveling with just my iPad and somebody sent me a ZIP file that had a hidden file in it (in the UNIX sense, i.e, with a name starting with a period). At the time, there was no way to view or open this file using the iPad Files app. I could pay for a third-party file manager, or I could use iSH to edit it in Vim. Why make it impossible to see dotfiles at all?! Why not give me a checkbox I can enable to temporarily view those files? I understand that it's rare to receive a dotfile over email, but it's not an impossible event. At some point I discovered you can't install custom fonts on an iPad. Apps can bundle their own fonts, but installing a font globally requires a nasty workaround: use a third-party app to embed your font files inside a security profile, then install that security profile via the Settings app. For a device that targets designers, video editors, and musicians, not being able to install your own fonts is such a bizarre choice. There were other weird papercuts too. When exporting tracks from Logic, I couldn't put the app in the backgroun
Doesn’t like it
I own almost every Apple ecosystem device, but I definitely wouldn’t call their mobile device RAM capacity as sufficient. It physically hurts me when my iPad Pro M2 and iPhone 16 Pro Max (earlier 15,14,13,12,11) start to swap out live apps - sure some apps retain state, but the majority still don’t. Even Safari randomly reloads tabs for me, while I’m just researching purchases across <10 live tabs.
Neutral
I've got an M2 iPad Pro, running 16.3.1 and jailbroken with UTM HV. It's very fast, about 96% of the native speed, however you can only use up to 5 and a bit gigabytes of ram before getting terminated. The linux experience isn't too great either. It tends to be quite buggy and crashes a lot, I've tested Ubuntu 24.04 and Fedora 40. Overall, it's cool but too buggy for me to use daily.
Likes it
Tangent, but related; I wish Apple would now stop shaving mm off the iPad's thickness and start improving battery life. It's been officially "up to 10 hours" since 2010 - 14 years. I think it's the only compute device Apple sell that hasn't increased its Apple-rated battery runtime in the last 14 years. I had zero complaints frankly about the previous generation M2 iPad Pro's thickness, it was already impressively thin! I'd much, much rather see battery runtime go up at this stage. That 10hrs number falls notably under heavy loads too. More battery is more headroom to run heavy applications or games away from a plug socket. This advert's focus on thin just further reminds me that Apple have spent over a decade not improving iPad run-time.
Doesn’t like it
My m2 pro is already more powerful than I can use. The screen is too small to do big work like using a daw or doing video editing, the Magic Keyboard is uncomfortable so I stopped writing on it. All that processing power, I don’t know what it will be used for on a tablet without even a good file system. Lousy ergonomics
Likes itHasn’t owned it
> If they don’t meet standard is there anything actually stopping developers from writing a better one? Uh, the App Store guidelines? >it doesn’t run MacOS No, it doesn't, but they both run XNU and share a huge amount of their userspace. If someone was clamoring for AppKit on iPad, yeah, you'd be correct in saying that's a silly request, but macOS and iOS are for most intents and purposes the same, aside from the artificial limitations placed on the latter to protect App Store profits. 1-hour of battery life / Wh of battery capacity between the last iPad Pro with an M2 and the M2 Macbook Air are pretty close too, its not like the limitations are there solely to save battery life since macOS with is yucky icky energy hog background tasks and spoooOoOOOky applications that haven't had their code inspected by Apple and might be able to do maniacal things like read the filesystem don't tank the battery life that much after all. (52.6Wh in the MBA for 12 hours of browsing, vs 40.88Wh in the old M2 iPad Pro 13" for 10 hours). Of course these are very different kinds of devices with very different feature sets, but minus a touchscreen and OLED, plus a hardware attached keyboard and trackpad, what are the actual material differences, not vague market segmentation, between a Mac and an iPad? If the iPad is only for content consumption, why does Apple sell one that stock is better than most of the Macs they sell? Why does Apple market and position the iPad Pro as a content creatio…
Likes itHasn’t owned it
Thunderbolt!! As usual I'm envious of this hardware, & wish the rest of us who aren't ok in Apple's tight walled garden had options half as good. The M2 is a great chip. Yeah, sure, way better than anything else & ridiculously great for a tablet: yes. The display is amazing, as usual. What is new & exciting to me here is Thunderbolt. For so long, "mobile" devices have not had any of the perks of modern computing when it comes to connectivity. Being able to connect to other devices via a modern high speed cable is a kick ass feature that enables all kinds of advanced uses. With things like Steam Deck, I'm hoping we see a little less strict siloing & see mobile devices start to get competitive in interesting ways. It's a fantastic device: for $400 it blows almost every phone out of the water in almost every conceivable way, wipes the floor & makes mock of what we get. We should have higher expectations, see more cross-market products, but we've been locked into very tight market segments for a long time. One other category busting device I'd cite- really interesting- is the Lenovo Legion Phone, an ultra-serious gaming phone from 2021, which has dual batteries, cooling fans, a 144Hz OLED screen & tip top specs, but most genre-busting of all: a phone with two USB-C ports. Do it. Make your phone a connectable device! Go next level! I'd love to see a betting pool on what quarter we first see a phone with USB4. Anyone here wanna bet on anytime in 2023? Personally I still think anyti