Apple iPad Pro M2 (2022) review: The extraordinary made a little ordinary

When Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled the first-generation iPad Pro in 2015, he called it, “the biggest news for the iPad since the iPad.” Over seven years later, the 2022 iPad Pro is the least newsworthy iteration of Apple’s flagship tablet to date. With a grand total of new features you can count on one hand, is this model worth its princely asking price? Find out in this iPad Pro M2 review.

Update (March 2023): Added references for Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro apps.

What you need to know about the Apple iPad Pro M2 (2022)

• iPad Pro (M2, 11-inch)
  • Wi-Fi only: $799-$1,899 / £899-£2,149
  • Cellular: $999-$2,099 / £1,079-£2,329
• iPad Pro (M2, 12.9-inch)
  • Wi-Fi only: $1,099-$2,099 / £1,249-£2,499
  • Cellular: $1,299-$2,399 / £1,429-£2,679

Apple’s premium tablet series for late 2022 hit shelves 18 months after the iPad Pro M1. The 11-inch iPad Pro (4th generation) and 12.9-inch iPad Pro (6th generation) are more commonly categorized as the iPad Pro M2 due to their chipset of choice.

Like the iPad Air (5th generation) which also launched in 2022, the iPad Pro M2, no matter which version you opt for, is fundamentally a tock-year tablet; a slate that borrows the same design and overall feature set of the “tick” predecessor, while ratcheting up the compute power and attaching some welcome, but somewhat minor, bells and whistles.

The titular M2 is the star attraction, of course, with Apple proclaiming that it has effectively “supercharged” the iPad Pro. Inherited from Apple’s MacBooks, the custom Apple Silicon M2 chip is claimed to deliver a 15% faster CPU and a 40% GPU performance boost. It also houses an upgraded Neural Engine for a supposed 40% uplift in speed for machine learning tasks, and offers nearly double the memory bandwidth compared to the M1 iPad Pro.

This combined might enables one of the iPad Pro’s other headline features: the ability to capture low-compression ProRes and ProRes RAW video in 4K at 30fps, plus faster ProRes transcoding (up to three times faster than the iPad Pro M1. As with ProRes-capable iPhones, 4K recording is not available on the base 128GB model, which makes sense; it’d eat that up in seconds (storage options go up to a whopping 2TB). What makes less sense is that you’ll also need to download a ProRes-ready app, as, for some baffling reason, Apple’s default camera app doesn’t have a ProRes toggle.

The connectivity suite has also been bumped up from Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0 to Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. While you’ll need appropriate networking and accessories to take advantage of both, considering iPads are often long-term purchases, this is some welcome future-proofing.

If everything we’ve listed so far seems horribly dry and uninspiring, I have some bad news for you — that’s all the new features you get on the hardware front. Otherwise, everything that was great about the M1 iPad Pro is carried over wholesale, though the same is true of some pesky legacy issues that have plagued the iPad Pro for several generations, but we’ll get to those later.

The one final truly new feature — that no other iPad is currently capable of — is a hover ability for the 2nd generation Apple Pencil, which shows you a preview of where your stylus will touch the screen. It’s unclear why this is exclusive to the 2022 iPad Pro, but Apple has hinted that the M2 chip is an essential ingredient.

The iPad Pro M2 (2022) is available to buy from Apple, Amazon, and other major third-party retailers around the world. As for colors, don’t expect any surprises here either — it’s Space Grey or Silver (pictured), just like the last three generations.

What’s good?

Apple has faced fair criticism over its proclivity for copy-paste products in 2022, but staying the course and iterating on success isn’t always a bad thing. As such, the iPad Pro M2 benefits from the elite design benchmark set by its direct predecessor, from which it borrows essentially every aspect of its build and aesthetic. The only significant visible difference? It now says iPad Pro on the back, not just iPad. Exciting stuff.

The 12.9-inch model I tested once again comes equipped with a dazzling Liquid Retina XDR, “ProMotion,” mini-LED display, with peak brightness of 1,000 nits, or up to an eye-popping 1,600 nits for compatible HDR content. It’s an absolute stunner that outputs intense yet accurate colors that are easily viewable even in the brightest conditions, with a dynamic 120Hz refresh rate ensuring animations are smooth whether you’re doomscrolling or gliding around in Genshin Impact at 120fps.

The rest of the package is equally premium. The glass/recycled aluminum construction is impeccable, with squared-off edged, curved corners, and just enough bezel room to avoid touching the screen with an errant finger when held. It’s certainly not a small or light tablet, especially if you opt for the larger model, but the careful weight distribution means it’s perfectly possible to use like any other traditional tablet, either in landscape or in portrait. The booming quad speakers and fast and accurate Face ID biometrics are also retained from the iPad Pro M1, as is the USB-C 3.1 “Gen 2” port for docking accessories or outputting to a monitor.

But let’s get to the star attraction. What does Apple’s marketing line of “supercharged by M2” really mean for the iPad Pro (6th generation)? A decent jump in benchmarks, for a start. The iPad Pro M2 leads in all metrics for CPU tests when put against its predecessor. The GPU didn’t quite reach Apple’s 40% increase claim in our tests, but a ~37% bump is close enough, especially when it also topped the MacBook Air M2’s top score in our testing (~6,250).

3DMark’s GPU stress test (below) did reveal a few more interesting details, however, as the M2’s score drops by 20% after a single run. Even at this point, it’s still higher than the maximum offered by the M1, but that peak GPU performance is seemingly only available in short bursts. That said, the M2 iPad Pro then sticks extremely close to that second run throughout the rest of the test, with less than 300 points separating the second run from the twentieth.

The M1, by comparison, doesn’t have as dramatic of a fall-off, but the true level of sustained performance doesn’t really kick in until it hits the 4,100-3,900 range. This should ensure that the M2 can handle GPU-heavy tasks like media editing and gaming at a more steady rate than the M1 iPad Pro. Of course, it’s worth remembering that even the lowest scores here are over double the peak of an equivalent Android tablet like the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1-powered Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra, which caps at around 1,800-2,000. It’s a similar story for the Surface Pro 9 (SQ3) which sits just below 3,000 after a single run.

Benchmarks aside, the iPad Pro M2 runs like a dream. Navigation around the UI is astonishingly smooth and even with multiple apps running at once, I couldn’t get the tablet to buckle under the strain. Wondering about gaming? The notoriously power-hungry Genshin Impact ran at maxed-out settings at 120fps with no discernable hiccups. The only place you’ll notice any dips at all is if you’re extensively transcoding ProRes RAW video, but essentially everything else the iPad Pro is actually capable of won’t even come close to maxing out the M2’s potential.

Thankfully, there’s no significant knock-on to battery efficiency. The 12.9-inch iPad Pro M2 I tested matched the M1 iPad Pro I’ve been using since the latter’s launch, with only a few minutes of variance here or there. When measured to the minute, the M2 model does come in under the M1 model, which isn’t a surprise considering the M2 MacBooks have also fared fractionally worse than their M1 counterparts. However, in real-world use, you won’t notice such a minor change.

Your mileage will vary wildly due to the extreme screen brightness the iPad Pro is capable of, and whether or not you’re running 5G on the cellular model. For basic web browsing or watching movies, the iPad Pro M2’s 40.88-watt-hour cell typically gets 10-10.5 hours on a single charge. That’s well within the ballpark for any modern iPad, even with the raw power of the M2 chip. Again, this was for the 12.9-inch model, and historically the 11-inch version has surpassed these figures by adding an hour or more to the slate’s endurance stats by virtue of its less power-hungry display.

The iPad Pro M2 arrives running iPadOS 16 out of the box. With it come a handful of new software features — some hits, some fairly significant misses. On the more positive end, iPadOS gains a lot of the useful tweaks we saw in iOS 16, including improved Focus modes, edit or delete in Messages, and some added polish to stock apps — most notably the underserved Home app for smart home controls and management.

Speaking of apps, there’s also now a default Weather app which finally brings the iPad’s meteorological chops up to the same standard as iPhones and Macs. Files, Contacts, and Notes have also seen iPad-specific tweaks, though the sixth-gen iPad Pro gets some extras to boot, such as virtual memory swapping support for all models, Display Zoom resolution scaling to squeeze more apps and objects on a single screen, and Reference Mode for adapting the screen to professional color grading. Many of these features are also coming to previous generation iPad Pro models, but the M2 version is guaranteed to offer all of them. You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned the big new software feature yet, Stage Manager — we’ll get to that later.

Like the hardware, none of the software changes were seismic enough to rock the foundations of the iPad Pro experience when the tablet originally launched. However, Apple, after years of pleading, finally brought Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro to all iPads with an M1 or greater chipset. With true pro-grade Apple apps for video and music editing, the tablet’s usability is now far closer to the MacBook than it ever has been. It’s also worth remembering that more general big-screen app availability and compatibility, long-term software support, and Apple’s product ecosystem interoperability are all second to none in the tablet world. On the latter, multi-screen Universal Control, in particular, is an absolute joy on the larger, fast-refreshing screen when positioned next to a Mac.

The one M2-only feature that might convince dedicated digital artists to open their wallets is the Apple Pencil “hover.” While not a truly novel feature (remember Samsung’s Air Actions?), Apple’s implementation is genuinely impressive. Being able to see where the tip of the stylus will land immediately improves drawing accuracy, and the ability to preview color combinations when sketching saves precious seconds. The true potential will depend on third-party developer buy-in, but we’ve already seen updates to the likes of Pixelmator, Luna, and ASTROpad Studio to enable unique hover capabilities.

What’s not so good?

Despite my praise for the iPad Pro M2’s display, it should again be noted that I tested the 12.9-inch model. The 11-inch model still has a reasonable enough Liquid Retina panel, but it lacks the crazy-high brightness capabilities and the 2,500+ local dimming zones that provide greater contrast and deeper blacks. The $300 price difference between the models plays a factor, of course, but the 11-inch model’s display is similarly found lacking when compared to several of Samsung’s Super AMOLED-equipped Galaxy S8 tablets that fall in the same price category. It’s not bad, but it’s not exactly “Pro,” either.

And neither is the camera setup. In terms of hardware, the rear 12MP standard and 10MP ultrawide cameras are identical to the iPad Pro M1’s shooters. These are tried and tested cameras and are appropriately performant considering the inherent limitations of taking photos with an ~11-13-inch square device. The addition of ProRes capture is also a unique boon for the M2 iPad Pro. However, when the Pro-tier iPhones are rocking dedicated zoom lenses and 48MP main sensors, it wouldn’t be unfair to have expected at least a minor spec bump.

The real camera sore spot, though, is that pesky portrait-positioned selfie shooter. We now live in a time where the only iPad with a sensible landscape camera is the iPad (10th generation) — which is itself a confusing mish-mash of a tablet. Perhaps the Apple Pencil magnetic charging or Face ID hardware is to blame. Whatever the reason, the result is that it’ll look like you’re rudely staring into space on a video call — a scenario that will very likely occur for the professional crowd the iPad Pro M2 is actively courting. Center Stage continues to be great at keeping the subject in the frame with its face-tracking techniques, but that frame will forever be at an awkward angle until Apple sees sense.

For a premium-tier tablet, the iPad Pro M2 lags behind in the charging stakes in a similar fashion to Apple’s smartphones. The 20W brick included with the iPad Pro M2 charges the 12.9-inch model’s whopper battery in roughly two and a half hours from zero to 100%. That’s equivalent to previous generations and respectable enough in isolation, but we have to keep in mind that the monster Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra’s equally enormous 11,200mAh cell can be refilled in under one and a half hours (though you will need to buy a compatible charger). The iPad Pro M2 technically can draw 30W from a compatible Power Delivery charger, but that’s an extra expense, and you’re still looking at a two-hour wait for a full recharge.

The iPad Pro M2’s real kicker, though, is the state of Apple’s tablet software. Yes, iPadOS is getting better with every iteration, but it’s still an awkward, glorified take on iOS that isn’t as lean as its originator, nor as feature-rich as full-blown macOS. Like the iPad itself, it’s stuck somewhere between a mobile and a desktop experience, and it doesn’t fully satisfy as either.

This manifests in the small details. Sure, there’s a dedicated Weather app now, but still no stock calculator? How about multi-user support? Even true extended display support — a long-requested feature — isn’t there out of the box, having been pushed back to iPadOS 16.2 (due in late 2022). The culprit? Stage Manager. Oh, Stage Manager…

Ostensibly Apple’s solution to running multiple apps at the same time on an iPad with a dock-like UI, Stage Manager has sadly flopped on arrival due to nonsensical choices made regarding how it actually works. It’d take far too long to explain every confounding foible, but the “Stage” and “Pile” setup, where you drag apps from a stacked pile onto the main workspace, doesn’t operate with any consistency and is a far cry from genuine multi-tasking. Meanwhile, some apps scale according to their position, others don’t. It also feels like trying to decode the Matrix figuring out what order of inputs might cause an app to outright disappear from a pile, or how to get it back without Stage Manager throwing its toys out of the pram and closing completely.

The promise is there, and those wondrous moments where you’ve got three apps running harmoniously at once on the Pro’s screen can occasionally feel like a revelation, but Stage Manager too often operates like a pre-beta feature that should’ve been kept under wraps until iPadOS 17.

Stage Manager is, perhaps mercifully, restricted to M1 and M2 iPads for now. Though this is one of the only obvious ways that Apple is actually harnessing all that untapped power from its refreshed silicon. The App Store is home to countless delicately-optimized apps, but that’s true of any iPad — a pro needs to up the ante. Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro are fantastic additions and long overdue, but we’re still waiting on Xcode, Blender, and numerous other pro-grade apps — not even modified ones to fit the iPad’s form factor — the iPad Pro still only truly comes into its own as a true professional product when used in conjunction with a Mac or MacBook. But even then, with Universal Control active and all the software advancements that come with macOS then just a screen away, the latent potential of the iPad Pro feels even more painfully unrealized.

There’s even less incentive to pick up an M2 model for non-professionals, too. The most demanding games already ran at maxed-out settings on the M1 version — what else are you going to do with all this power? The tablet will keep ticking at rapid speeds for the many years that Apple will support it with software updates, but that was also true of the 2021 version, which itself was already barely scratching the surface of the M1’s capabilities.

And if you do want to take full advantage of the iPad Pro M2’s full feature set, you’ll need Apple’s first-party accessories. Now, those accessories are beautifully made and effortlessly functional, but they’re all optional and they cost a fortune. The hover feature may as well not exist for anyone disinclined to stump up $129 for the second-generation Apple Pencil ($89 at Amazon). The Magic Keyboard is another Apple favorite and is essential for transforming the iPad Pro (M2) into a laptop-tablet hybrid. However, the limited viewing angles and lack of a function row make the $299-$349 asking price (depending on the size) harder to stomach. It’s also bizarre that an iPad (10th generation)-exclusive folio case exists with a detachable keyboard, kickstand, and a function row. Where’s the iPad Pro version, Apple?

Apple iPad Pro M2 (2022) specs

Apple iPad Pro M2 (2022) review: The verdict

The iPad Pro M2 (2022) is the most performant and objectively impressive iPad to date. Yet no matter how high its benchmark scores continue to rise, the iPad Pro as a product line will be unable to harness all that power until its core software platform and toolset can hang with its sublime spec sheet. This has been true for several years, yet it’s felt more keenly with the M2-toting iPad Pro, as its meager shortlist of new features fails to distract from iPadOS’ continued deficiencies, even with more recent pro-grade app additions like Final Cut Pro.

And yet the iPad Pro M2 continues to be one of the best premium tablets (if not the outright best) in the game. The M2 model will be particularly enticing for digital artists eyeing up the new hover feature. If you have an aging iPad Pro — or are looking to upgrade from a lower-tier iPad to the fanciest one money can buy — you can’t really go wrong here, either, as long as you’re not put off by the hefty asking price.

However, the unrefined day-to-day experience does invite wayward glances at the competition — many of which seem to have a clearer overriding vision. At the top of that list is the Microsoft Surface Pro 9 ($1,099), or at least the Intel version; the Arm-based SQ3 variant makes a few too many performance trade-offs to be a genuine rival. For the former, you’re getting a full-fat Windows 2-in-1 that leans a little more into the laptop half of its hybrid nature. Like the iPad Pro, though, it gets expensive when you factor in all the accessories.

Then there’s Android’s big boy, and I mean big. The Samsung Galaxy S8 Ultra ($1099 at Amazon) is a behemoth tablet with a giant 14.6-inch display and an included S Pen stylus. Android’s tablet software is even less sophisticated (for now), and its Snapdragon chip can’t push anywhere near as many frames per second as Apple’s silicon, but the Ultra’s sheer size and stretched 16:10 aspect ratio makes it a dream machine for media. Meanwhile, the Galaxy Tab S8 Plus ($799 at Amazon) is more manageable, but lacks the Ultra’s wow factor.

Apple’s own stable offers up two compelling alternatives, too. Unless you have a specific use case in mind for the iPad Pro M2, the iPad Air (5th generation) ($559 at Amazon) is a more humble proposition, but it packs a ridiculous amount of punch for the price and can be paired with the same accessories as the iPad Pro. Of course, those same accessories for the iPad Pro also take Apple’s top tablet into MacBook territory. In particular, if you’re considering the 12.9-inch iPad Pro M2 as a laptop stand-in (and don’t care about stylus compatibility), keep in mind that by the time you’ve added the Magic Keyboard, you’ll be well over the base price of the MacBook Air M2 ($1095 at Amazon).

With very few exceptions, much of Apple’s product portfolio for 2022 has been stuck in a holding pattern. The iPad Pro M2 arguably got hit the hardest in this regard — improved in only a handful of niche ways and, as such, fittingly launched with little to no fanfare. The end result is a genuinely extraordinary tablet that can occasionally feel very ordinary indeed, but that doesn’t stop it still being the best tablet money can buy.

Top Apple iPad Pro M2 (2022) questions and answers