Federico Viticci’s M5 iPad Pro Review ⇥ macstories.net

Even if you are not interested in the iPad or Apple product news generally, I recommend making time for Federico Viticci’s review, at MacStories, of the new iPad Pro. Apple claims 3.5× performance gains with A.I. models, so Viticci attempted to verify that number. Unfortunately, he ran into some problems.

Viticci (emphasis his):

This is the paradox of the M5. Theoretically speaking, the new Neural Accelerator architecture should lead to notable gains in token generation and prefill time that may be appreciated on macOS by developers and AI enthusiasts thanks to MLX (more on this below). However, all these improvements amount to very little on iPadOS today because there is no serious app ecosystem for local AI development and tinkering on iPad. That ecosystem absolutely exists on the Mac. On the iPad, we’re left with a handful of non-MLX apps from the App Store, no Terminal, and the untapped potential of the M5.

In case it’s not clear, I’m coming at this from a perspective of disappointment, not anger. […]

Viticci’s frustration with the state of A.I. models on the iPad Pro is palpable. Ideally and hopefully, it is a future-friendly system, but that is not usually the promise of Apple’s products. It usually likes to tell a complete story with the potential for sequels. To get even a glimpse of what that story looks like, Viticci had to go to great lengths, as documented in his review.

In the case of this iPad Pro, it is marketing leaps-and-bounds boosts in A.I. performance — though those claims appear to be optimistic — while still playing catch-up on last year’s Apple intelligence announcements, and offering little news for a user who wants to explore A.I. models directly on their iPad. It feels like a classic iPad story: incredible hardware, restricted by Apple’s software decisions.

Update: I missed a followup post from Viticci in which he points to a review from Max Weinbach of Creative Strategies. Weinbach found the M5 MacBook Pro does, indeed, post A.I. performance gains closer to Apple’s claims.

As an aside, I think it is curious for Apple to be supplying review units to Creative Strategies. It is nominally a research and analysis firm, not a media outlet. While there are concerns about the impartiality of reviewers granted access to prerelease devices, it feels to me like an entirely different thing for a broad-ranging research organization for reasons I cannot quite identify.