2025 M5 iPad Pro vs 2018 iPad Pro – Is the Upgrade Worth It?
Apple kind of screwed itself seven years ago with the original 11-inch iPad Pro: its design and performance still hold up today. So has the time finally come to upgrade to the 2025 M5 iPad Pro? Maybe. (This isn’t sponsored, and no iPad was sent or loaned to me.)
Price
The M5 starts at $999 for the 11-inch and $1,299 for the 13-inch, $200 more than in 2018. A 13-inch with nano-texture glass and cellular goes up to $2,599. At $999, I think the M5 iPad Pro is a pretty good deal.
Design
The M5 is about 1 mm thinner, 1 mm taller, 1 mm narrower, and 24 grams lighter. Not huge numbers, but a surprise when the M4 design debuted. The bezels are a little thinner, and the front camera moved to the landscape edge. On the back, the M5 adds a small camera bump and a LiDAR sensor.
Performance
The M5 has a 9-core CPU (10-core on 1 TB and 2 TB models), a 10-core GPU with a neural accelerator in every core, and a 16-core Neural Engine. The 2018’s A12X has an 8-core CPU, 7-core GPU and 8-core Neural Engine.
| Geekbench 6 | M5 | 2018 (A12X) |
|---|---|---|
| Single-core | 4,152 | 1,346 |
| Multi-core | 16,508 | 4,582 |
| Metal | 74,609 | 17,213 |
In day-to-day use the 2018 isn’t slow, but with more apps open it starts to stutter and is a bit slower opening apps.
Gaming surprised me. In Call of Duty on high settings, I didn’t notice any stutter or frame drops on the 2018, and the other games I tried ran with no discernible difference. Resident Evil wouldn’t even download on the 2018, though, so some games won’t meet its minimum specs.
AI is no contest. In Draw Things, the M5 generated my image in 7 minutes 22 seconds; the 2018 estimated two hours, so I stopped it. There’s also no Apple Intelligence on the 2018 (you need M1 or later).
Storage is faster too: reads around 3,000 MB/s on the M5 versus about 900 MB/s on the 2018. The M5’s port is Thunderbolt (40 Gb/s) versus 10 Gb/s USB-C.
Display
This is the big one. The 2018 has a 600-nit Liquid Retina LCD with no HDR. The M5 has the Ultra Retina XDR tandem OLED: 1,000 nits normally and 1,600 nits for HDR. Both are 264 ppi, 120 Hz ProMotion, laminated, with True Tone.
Watching John Wick, the 2018 crushes the shadows: you can’t see a woman’s face in a dark scene, or the smoke rising on the right side, while the M5 shows all that detail, plus real HDR highlights on the chandeliers. The extra brightness also helps outside or in a bright room.
Speakers, cameras, battery and more
- Speakers: both have four. The 2018 got louder (87 dB versus 84 dB) and sounds fuller to my ears, probably because its speakers are physically bigger. The M5 sounds a bit muddy.
- Camera: both 12 MP. The M5’s photo is very sharp and true to life; the 2018’s looks nicer but is completely fake, super smooth with off colors. The M5 also shoots ProRes and has LiDAR for AR and room scanning.
- Battery: both are rated 10 hours, but my seven-year-old 2018 drains about twice as fast, so 5–6 hours versus about 10. The M5 charges to 50% in 30 minutes with a 60 W adapter.
- Wireless: Wi-Fi 7 versus Wi-Fi 5 (much faster), 5G versus 4G, and Bluetooth 6 versus 5.
- Accessories: the M5 gets the newer Magic Keyboard with an aluminum base, a function row, and a haptic trackpad, plus Apple Pencil Pro with barrel roll, squeeze, haptics, hover and Find My.
Who should upgrade?
- Creatives and pros: yes. My daughter, an artist, gets more layers in Procreate. Final Cut Pro won’t even install on the 2018, and LiDAR room scanning needs the newer iPad.
- Content consumers: the tandem OLED will knock your socks off.
- Gamers: maybe not, if your games run fine now.
- On the go a lot: nano-texture (1 TB and 2 TB only) is amazing in bright places.
- Battery only lasting a few hours: a good time to upgrade, though a battery replacement for about $100 could buy a couple more years.
- Need more storage or cellular: upgrade.
If you don’t need it, stick with your old one a little longer. If you do upgrade, I have a video on transferring everything to your new iPad.
Links
In this video
- 00:00 Introduction & Overview
- 00:24 Pricing Comparison
- 00:50 Design & Build Differences
- 01:46 Performance Specs and Benchmarks
- 02:50 Camera & LiDAR Changes
- 3:48 Gaming performance
- 4:45 AI testing
- 5:50 SSD and Thunderbolt/USB
- 6:38 Display differences - OLED vs LCD
- 8:42 Speakers
- 9:29 Cameras
- 11:06 Batteries and charging
- 11:40 WIFI 7 test, Bluetooth and Cellular
- 12:13 Keyboard accessories and Pencils
- 13:08 WHO SHOULD UPGRADE?
Some links in this post are affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I may receive a small commission. See my ethics statement.
