Apple’s biggest product event of the year happens in September, when the company puts out a new batch of iPhones and Apple Watches and other odds and ends. But in most years, Apple either has another smaller event or just a handful of additional product announcements later in the fall in October or November—usually the focus is on the Mac, the iPad, or both.
It seems like a new iPad Pro could be one of the announcements on tap. Russian YouTube channel Wylsacom has posted an unboxing video and early tour of what appears to be a retail boxed version of a new 256GB 13-inch iPad Pro, as well as an M5 processor that we haven’t seen in any other Apple product yet. This would be the first new iPad Pro since May 2024, when Apple introduced the current M4 version.
The same channel also got hold of the M4 MacBook Pro early, so it seems likely that this is genuine. And while the video is mostly dedicated to complaining about packaging, the wattage of the included power adapter, and how boring it is that Apple doesn’t introduce dramatic design changes every generation, it does also give us some early performance numbers for the new M5.
While we don’t have details on the chip’s manufacturing process or other changes, quick Geekbench 6 runs show the M5 in this iPad Pro improving CPU performance by roughly 10 to 15 percent and GPU performance by about 34 percent compared to the M4 in the old iPad Pro.
This M5 includes three high-performance CPU cores and six high-efficiency CPU cores, the same core count as the 256GB and 512GB versions of the M4 iPad Pro (the 1TB and 2TB iPads and the M4 Macs all get one additional performance core, for a total of four, and we’d bet it’s the same way for the M5). We don’t know how many GPU cores the M5 has, though, given the larger performance improvements, it’s at least theoretically possible that Apple has added additional graphics cores on top of the 10 that the M4 includes. Higher clock speeds, faster RAM, architectural improvements, or a mix of all three could also explain the jump.
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