IPad Pro (M4, 2024) Vs IPad Air (M2, 2024): Do You Really Need The Pro?

• 

  iPad Pro (M4, 2024)

  The most power in any tablet

  The iPad Pro now has OLED displays and the flagship M4 SoC, but it has a significantly higher starting price. This year, it also got a new Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil Pro, making it the most expensive laptop replacement on the market.

  Pros

  • Tandem OLED displays
  • Powerful M4 chip
  • Up to 2TB of storage

  Cons

  • Significantly more expensive
  • Still two RAM tiers based on storage amount

• 

  iPad Air (M2, 2024)

  The best iPad for most users

  The iPad Air (M2, 2024) is the best iPad for most people. Its fantastic price-to-performance ratio is driven by the powerful laptop-class M2 SoC. This year, it also has two screen sizes: 11-inch and 13-inch.

  Pros

  • 11-inch and 13-inch screen sizes
  • Powerful M2 SoC
  • Stylish design

  Cons

  • No Thunderbolt port
  • Only 60Hz display refresh rate

Apple overhauled its iPad range recently, with huge improvements and upgrades across the board. The new iPad Pro (M4, 2024) has fancy new OLED screens, new accessories, and the new M4 chip before it was put into a MacBook.

The new iPad Air (M2, 2024) is now two devices, one with an 11-inch display and one with a 13-inch display for fans of larger screens who find the iPad Pro’s pricing prohibitive. With so many changes, you might wonder which of the new iPads is the best for you. Let’s look at the new iPads and figure that out.

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Price, specs, & availability

The iPad Pro is more expensive this year

The iPad Pro (M4) comes in two sizes, with the lower-priced 11-inch display starting from $999. The larger 13-inch model is the one to go for if you want the best multitasking experience, but it does cost more, starting from $1,299. Those base prices include Wi-Fi, 256GB of storage, and 8GB of memory. If you get 1TB or 2TB of storage, you get 16GB of memory, which will significantly increase the cost. The maxed-out unit we reviewed with 2TB of storage, nanotexture anti-glare glass, eSIM, Magic Keyboard, and Apple Pencil Pro costs $3,077 in total.

The iPad Air (M2) now also comes in two sizes: an 11-inch display starting at $599 and a 13-inch display starting at $799. The base model has 128GB of storage and can go up to 1TB, and you can opt for cellular connectivity as well. Both iPads are officially on sale on May 15.

• 	iPad Pro (M4, 2024)	iPad Air (M2, 2024)
  Storage	256GB, 512GB, 1TB, or 2TB	128GB, 256GB, 512GB, 1TB
  CPU		Apple M2 (8-core CPU)
  Memory	8GB or 16GB LPDDR5	8GB LPDDR5
  Operating System	iPadOS 17.5	iPadOS 17.5
  Ports	Thunderbolt/USB4	USB-C
  Camera (Rear, Front)		Rear: 12MP Wide, AF, f/1.8, Front: 12MP Ultra-wide, f/2.4
  Display type	11-inch: Tandem OLED, 10-120Hz ProMotion, 10.9 inches, 16:11 aspect ratio, 2420 x 1668 resolution, 264 PPI, optional nanotexture, 13-inch: Tandem OLED, 10-120Hz ProMotion, 12.9 inches, 4:3 aspect ratio, 2752 x 2064 resolution at 264 PPI, optional nanotexture	11-inch: LCD, 60Hz, 10.9-inch, 3:2, 2360 x 1640 resolution, 264 PPI, 13-inch: LCD, 60Hz, 12.9-inch, 3:2, 2732 x 2040 resolution, 264 PPI
  Price	11-inch: $999, 13-inch: $1299	11-inch: $599, 13-inch: $799
  Connectivity	Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, optional 5G Cellular	Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, optional 5G cellular
  Weight	11-inch Wi-Fi only: 444g, 11-inch Wi-Fi + Cellular: 446g, 13-inch Wi-Fi only: 579g, 13-inch Wi-Fi + Cellular: 582g	11-inch Wi-Fi: 462g, 11-inch Wi-Fi + Cellular: 462g, 13-inch Wi-Fi: 617g, 13-inch Wi-Fi + Cellular: 618g
  IP rating	None	Not rated
  Battery	11-inch: 31.29Wh, 13-inch: 38.99Wh	11-inch: 28.93Wh, 13-inch: 36.59Wh
  Colors	Space Black, silver	Space Gray, Starlight, purple, blue
  Charging speed	20W	20W USB-C charger

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Design

The Air is actually thicker this time

This year, the iPad Pro (M4, 2024) and iPad Air (M2, 2024) have never been closer in design language. They both have stylish matte aluminum chassis, with lots of glass on the display side, making them both feel premium. The single USB-C port is in the same place on both, although the iPad Air has normal USB-C while the iPad Pro has Thunderbolt/USB4. Both have rounded edges, flat sides, and a single wide camera on the back. On the iPad Pro, the camera bump also has a LiDAR sensor, but the ultra-wide from the 2022 model has been removed. That’s fine, as nobody really used it. You’d pick your phone up for photographs, not your iPad.

The front-facing camera on both the iPad Pro and iPad Air has moved to a landscape position along the longer edge, away from the awkward positioning it held on the shorter edge. That’s a win on both tablets, and it makes video conferencing and multitasking easier to deal with. The old position was too easy to cover accidentally with your hand while holding the tablet.

The iPad Air also gains a 13-inch display option this year, so it and the iPad Pro come in 11-inch and 13-inch models. Finally, you don’t have to pay significantly more for the iPad Pro if you prefer a larger tablet screen. And the new OLED screens on the iPad Pro mean Apple could shave a little more off the thickness, so the 11-inch is now 5.3mm thick, and the 13-inch is 5.1mm. That’s thinner than the iPad Air, which is 6.1mm thick on both models. We’re not sure if you’ll be able to notice a millimeter of thickness, but it does mean the iPad Pro is slightly lighter to hold.

Winner: Tie. Both iPads are stylish tablets with very similar designs, so there isn’t enough to declare a clear winner. The iPad Air comes in more colors, if that’s important to you, with Space Gray, Starlight, blue and purple. The iPad Pro comes in Space Black and silver.

Display

OLED wins our hearts

The M4 iPad Pro is the first iPad to use an OLED display, and it’s gorgeous. Apple created a new type of panel for these iPads, dubbed “tandem OLED,” that uses two layers of OLED material to reach higher brightness levels than normal OLED while also using less power and with reduced risk of burn-in. It can reach 1,600 nits of brightness for peak HDR, and 1,000 nits for sustained brightness, and it also has ProMotion for 10-120Hz adjustable refresh rates. You can also spec it with nanotexture glass, which makes the screen matte and has an anti-reflective coating. Additionally, the 11-inch and 13-inch iPad Pros are using this new display, when previously you had to get the 12.9-inch version for the mini-LED screen.

The M2 iPad Air now has a 13-inch display option, but both models use 60Hz IPS panels, with a maximum brightness of 500 nits for SDR content and no HDR support. They’re not bad displays, as Apple is famous for its stringent supplier requirements, but they can’t hold a candle to OLED. They now support Apple Pencil hover and the Apple Pencil Pro, so they are more capable of sketching and other creative tasks than the previous M1-powered iPad Air.

Winner: iPad Pro (M4, 2024) The tandem OLED displays on the iPad Pro win here. Apple has managed to work around the limitations of existing OLED displays, but the new screens come with a higher price point.

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Performance and battery life

The M4 chip is a beast, but you probably don’t need it

Both the iPad Pro and iPad Air received processor upgrades this year. The iPad Air now uses the M2 chip, which was first used in the 2022 MacBooks, and is powerful and power-efficient. It never fails to impress me that laptop-class chips can be used in the smaller tablet form, but that’s a testament to how good Apple silicon is. The iPad Pro is even more impressive, with the first use of the M4 chip in any device. Maybe when Windows laptops using the Snapdragon X Elite chip arrive, we’ll have competition for which mobile chips are best, but until then, the M4 processor rules the roost.

Two versions of the M4 are used on the iPad Pro, separated by the amount of storage you decide to go with. The base 256GB model and the 512GB storage model have a 9-core CPU and 10-core GPU paired with 8GB of memory. The 1TB and 2TB models have a 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU, and 16GB of memory. We tested the more powerful M4 in our review, and the benchmarks are impressive.

That said, the M2 chip used in the iPad Air is no slouch. In a MacBook Air, which is also passively cooled, it gets GeekBench 6 scores of 2,591 for single-core and 9,837 for multi-core. That’s not so far behind the M4; most users probably won’t notice the difference when in use.

Winner: Tie. The iPad Pro is the most powerful of the two iPads here, but most users won’t need that added power over the M2 chip inside the new iPad Air. Either will perform similarly for the majority of tasks that are done on iPads, like video watching or web browsing. Only really creative professionals will notice the speed difference in apps like Final Cut Pro.

iPad Pro (M4, 2024) vs iPad Air (M2, 2024): Will you use the Pro features?

We called last generation’s iPad Air the best iPad for students, but it’s also the best iPad for most users. The upgrades added to the iPad Air (M2, 2024) make the best iPad for most people even better, and we have no reservations about calling it the winner here. With a new 13-inch screen size for larger slate fans, the powerful M2 chip, and the new landscape camera placement, the iPad Air is a winner. Apple has added these improvements while staying at the same base price, even doubling the base storage to 128GB. Sure, it doesn’t have the ProMotion OLED screen of the new iPad Pro, but it doesn’t come with the price tag either.

iPad Air (M2, 2024)

$570 $599 Save $29

The iPad Air (M2, 2024) is the best iPad for most people. Its fantastic price-to-performance ratio is driven by the powerful laptop-class M2 SoC. This year, it also has two screen sizes: 11-inch and 13-inch.

That said, if you’re a creative professional, the M4 iPad Pro is the best tablet on the market right now and will continue to be so for quite some time. It has tons of power in the new M4 chip, the tandem OLED screens are gorgeous, and battery life beats that of any other tablet and most laptops. If you need the pro-level features that come with the higher price point, the decision is simple: the M4 iPad Pro is a beast.

iPad Pro (M4, 2024)

The iPad Pro n ow has OLED displays and the flagship M4 SoC, but it has a significantly higher starting price. This year, it also got a new Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil Pro, making it the most expensive laptop replacement on the market.