The 3 Best Pro Tablets of 2025
Top pick
The M4 iPad Pro has a faster processor than the current MacBook Air lineup, and a better OLED screen to boot. But coders, web developers, media editors, and anyone who needs to use a lot of external accessories are likely to find iPadOS limiting.
The Apple iPad Pro (11-inch, M4) runs on Apple’s cutting-edge M4 processor and pairs it with a vibrant OLED display, making for a meaningful upgrade over previous generations. Apple has also redesigned the iPad Pro’s accessories, adding a new Pencil Pro and Magic Keyboard that both feel better to use than their previous-generation predecessors. The iPad Pro shouldn’t be your primary device for crunching numbers in Excel or typing out a report while referencing a ton of documents, since its screen gets cramped when multitasking and its keyboard accessories don’t beat out the keys on a traditional laptop. But for creative pursuits, or even as a second device for note-taking and casual work on the go, the iPad Pro is a flexible and powerful touchscreen tool.
Its M4 processor makes it speedier than a Mac laptop. All of Apple’s tablets perform well, but this version of the iPad Pro has Apple’s latest processor, the M4 chip, which you can’t even find in the company’s most powerful MacBooks yet. This means Apple’s pro tablets are faster than its laptops—for now. Loading and switching between apps and multiple browser tabs, playing 3D games, editing and exporting photos and videos, and using drawing and drafting apps all felt quick and fluid in our tests. The M4 chip also performed well in video-editing apps and exported a two-minute 4K video in just about one minute via the LumaFusion app. The processor also easily handled digital modeling in Nomad Sculpt, even when manipulating complex models with hundreds of thousands to millions of vertices. Note, though, that all of this was true of the previous-generation, M2-based iPad Pro as well. If you already have an M2 iPad Pro that you’re happy with, you have no need to upgrade.
Its new OLED display is bright and offers fantastic contrast. The M4 iPad Pro has a new OLED display instead of an LCD panel. Instead of shining a backlight through a picture, the OLED screen can change the brightness of individual pixels. The resulting difference in image quality is easiest to see while you’re watching a dark or moody movie, since OLED displays can individually dim or turn off pixels, giving the display a wider spectrum of darkness and shadow to show. The display is also impressively bright, though only when the automatic brightness setting is turned on: The iPadOS screen-brightness slider sets the display’s brightness to only about 500 nits, but when bright light hits the iPad’s front-facing sensors, the automatic brightness setting increases the display’s output all the way up to about 1,000 nits. That’s about twice as bright as the iPad Air can get, and it reaches the brightness of some OLED TVs.
The webcam is best used in landscape orientation, as you would on a laptop. Apple has moved the iPad Pro’s webcam to the center of the tablet’s right edge, where you’d probably expect it to be when using the iPad like a laptop. This design change makes your video calls look a lot more natural, especially when you use the Magic Keyboard or another case that stands the tablet in a landscape orientation.
It operates silently, and its battery lasts a long time. Unlike some laptops and Windows tablets we’ve tested, none of the iPads need a fan. Some parts of the tablet can get warm when you’re using it for long periods, but it will always be quiet no matter what you’re doing. Most people will have no problem getting the battery to last a full workday, and with light to medium use your iPad Pro can go multiple days between charges.
The new Pencil Pro adds a “squeeze” feature and new sensors. The M4 iPad Pro can pair with Apple’s new Pencil Pro, which you can lightly squeeze to bring up a new menu of drawing tools. The Pencil Pro also has new sensors to detect how you’re turning or angling it, so you can more accurately use tools with less-typical strokes, such as digital calligraphy pens or chisel-tip digital markers. As with the non-Pro version of the stylus, you can still hover over the iPad with the tip to highlight an object on the screen or preview an illustration mark, you can still double-tap the stylus to swap between drawing tools, and it still magnetically attaches to the side of the iPad to charge.
The Magic Keyboard case is easier to open and more comfortable to use. We have been skeptical of the Magic Keyboard case in the past because it’s very expensive and tough to open, and it makes the tablet harder to use in portrait orientation because you have to remove your iPad from the case to use it that way. However, Apple has made a few improvements that make the M4 version a much more enjoyable keyboard to use. It’s now much easier to open with one hand, to start, which immediately makes a good first impression. The keyboard and trackpad also feel sturdier than the previous generation, and its aluminum body makes the keyboard feel a bit more like typing on a MacBook. Apple also added a new row of function keys, similar to those found on a MacBook keyboard. The new Magic Keyboard is the best keyboard case we’ve tested for the iPad Pro for now, but you can easily connect a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse to your iPad and just get a normal cover to save yourself some money.
The 13-inch size is better for multitasking and comparing documents. The 11-inch iPad Pro is best for using your tablet like a tablet, as a second device that you can use to write notes, quickly enter information, or read and annotate documents. However, if you’re planning to use your iPad like a laptop—that is, usually in landscape orientation in the Magic Keyboard case and with multiple applications open at the same time—the 13-inch version has enough space for documents and windows to be open at a normal size. We found that multitasking similarly with the 11-inch iPad Pro felt a little cramped when working for extended periods of time.
Face ID makes unlocking the tablet impressively convenient. The iPad Pro has a face-scanning Face ID camera to log you in, similar to those on iPhones; the process might take some getting accustomed to if you’ve used an older or less-expensive iPad with a Touch ID fingerprint reader integrated into its home button or power button, but Face ID was quick and accurate in our testing.
Flaws but not dealbreakers
An iPad still isn’t a great laptop replacement. A Mac or a Windows PC, such as Microsoft’s Surface, can do many common computer-y things that an iPad still can’t. Apple has attempted to solve part of this issue with a feature called Stage Manager, an optional mode where up to four windows can be open on the iPad at the same time. However, having more than two windows open makes the screen feel cramped, and it doesn’t seem as if Apple has entirely figured out multitasking on the iPad just yet.
It isn’t great for coding. Apple doesn’t allow coding apps such as Xcode or Visual Studio in the App Store, and even third-party web browsers on the iPad need to use the same rendering engine Apple uses for Safari, so the iPad is a bad choice for coding apps or testing web pages. (There is Swift Playgrounds, but it’s more of an educational tool than a serious code editor.)
It isn’t user-repairable. There are no repairs you can perform yourself on the iPad Pro. If you don’t have AppleCare+, Apple’s extra warranty coverage, getting it repaired can cost up to 85% of the tablet’s price.
It has no headphone jack. We don’t like that the iPad Pro omits a standard 3.5 mm headphone jack, something that’s still included on many Windows tablets and Apple’s own MacBook lineup. Either you need to get a dongle to use existing headphones or you need to switch to Bluetooth headphones.
