The new M5 iPad Pro unpacked by a YouTuber before official unveiling
A Russian tech YouTuber, Wylsacom, got hold of the new M5 iPad Pro, which was not announced at the September event but may well be unveiled at the October session (yes, it will probably take place this year).
This has happened before: as we reported back in October 2024, the same blogger unpacked an M4 MacBook Pro before it was presented by Apple. The sources of the devices are a great secret, of course, and Wylsacom just jokes about this unasked question by saying that the new iPad, for example, was thrown at him by some crazy guy from the bushes.
Wherever the leak comes from, it’s there. The specific device Wylsacom received was the M5-powered 13-inch 256 GB version of the latest iPad Pro. Here are the most important points from the video:
The look and feel will not change: same colors, same tactile sensations. According to Wylsacom, it’s a sad state of affairs: we are expecting something revolutionary, but instead are given the same thing with a 15% more powerful processor.
The case is aluminum, same as the recently unveiled iPhone 17 Pro. There were expectations that the iPad would be upgraded to titanium, but instead, the iPhone was downgraded to aluminum.
Compared to the M4-powered iPad Pro, the new M5 iPad does have a charger in the box, although it’s a slow 20W model.
Wylsacom used Geekbench 6 to look under the hood and do some tests:
- the processor speed remained largely unchanged;
- the amount of RAM increased to 12 GB;
- the amount of L2 cache increased to 6 MB;
- the benchmark test has shown a marginal performance improvement (up to 15% for the multicore version);
- the GPU in the M5 iPad Pro is 35% more powerful than that in the M4 iPad, which is significant.
When tested in AnTuTu, the new M5 turned out to be slower than M4, which looks like a glitch. In all other benchmarks, the M5 iPad Pro is mightier.
No new folio designs are needed: those made for the M4 iPad Pro fit the new model perfectly.
Summing up, Wylsacom concludes that the two tablets he compared are basically similar to each other. They look and feel almost identical, the cameras are not different, the case has not changed. The performance increase is rather minor, and it actually does not matter: according to the YouTuber, there are no tasks he knows of that would use all of the available M4 processor capacity, to say nothing about M5.
