I've been designing interfaces professionally for eleven years. In that time, I've watched Apple pitch the iPad as a laptop replacement roughly a dozen times, and each time I've walked away thinking: close, but not quite. So when the M4-powered iPad Pro landed on my desk six weeks ago, I decided to do something I hadn't done before. I committed. For six full weeks, I used the 13-inch iPad Pro M4 as my primary design machine for client work, personal projects, and everything in between.

The results surprised me in ways I didn't expect, both good and bad.

The Hardware

Let's start with the obvious: this thing is absurdly thin. At 5.1mm, the 13-inch model is thinner than a lot of the notebooks I sketch in. The first time I pulled it out of my bag at a coffee shop, I genuinely worried I'd snap it. Six weeks later, that fear has mostly faded. The build quality is exceptional, and while I wouldn't recommend tossing it around carelessly, the tandem OLED display hasn't picked up a single pressure mark despite daily Apple Pencil use.

Speaking of that display: it's the best screen I've ever used on a tablet. The tandem OLED technology delivers blacks that are actually black, and the color accuracy out of the box measured within Delta E 1.2 on my calibration tool. For design work, that matters. I stopped second-guessing whether the blues on my screen would match what clients saw on theirs. HDR content looks genuinely stunning, and the 120Hz ProMotion refresh rate makes every interaction feel buttery in a way that's hard to go back from.

The M4 chip itself is, frankly, overkill for most tasks. I ran complex Figma files with 200+ frames, layered Procreate canvases with 80+ layers at full resolution, and even did some light 4K video editing in LumaFusion. The iPad never stuttered. Not once. Battery life consistently hit 9-10 hours of active design work, which is better than my 16-inch MacBook Pro manages on similar tasks.

Apple Pencil Pro

The Apple Pencil Pro is a genuine leap forward, and I say this as someone who thought the second-generation Pencil was already excellent. The barrel roll gesture, which lets you rotate tools by twisting the Pencil, felt gimmicky for about ten minutes. Then I started using it with calligraphy brushes in Procreate and angled shading tools in Fresco, and suddenly I couldn't imagine going back.

Haptic feedback is the other standout feature. The subtle click you feel when snapping to a grid line or completing a selection is the kind of detail that makes the Pencil feel less like a stylus and more like an actual tool. It's a small thing, but over hours of use it reduces the cognitive load of checking whether your actions registered on screen.

Hover detection, carried over from the previous generation, continues to be incredibly useful for precision work. Being able to see exactly where my stroke will land before I commit has eliminated maybe 30% of my undo taps.

Software Reality Check

Here's where the honeymoon ends. iPadOS has improved meaningfully over the past few years, but it remains the single biggest barrier to the iPad Pro fulfilling its potential as a professional tool. Stage Manager works better than it did at launch, but "better" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. I regularly lost track of which window group I was in, and the system still can't reliably remember my preferred window arrangements after waking from sleep.

File management remains painful. I spent an unreasonable amount of time emailing files to myself or routing things through AirDrop because the Files app couldn't reliably connect to my NAS during two separate sessions. The lack of a proper Finder equivalent means that something as simple as batch-renaming exported assets turns into a multi-app juggling act.

The Figma situation is a microcosm of the broader problem. Figma on iPad is good, possibly even great, for reviewing designs and making quick edits. But for the kind of deep, multi-file component work I do daily, it's missing too many features. I found myself reaching for my Mac roughly twice a week for tasks that should have been possible on a device this powerful.

Safari has also been a recurring frustration. Some web apps I rely on, including certain client portals and project management dashboards, still serve me mobile versions despite the iPad having a desktop-class browser. This isn't entirely Apple's fault, but the result is the same: I hit walls that shouldn't exist on a $1,300 professional device.

Who It's Actually For

After six weeks, I have a very clear picture of who will love this iPad and who will be frustrated by it. If your creative workflow revolves around illustration, handwritten notes, photo editing, or any task where the Pencil is your primary input device, the iPad Pro M4 is the best tool money can buy. Nothing else comes close to the combination of screen quality, Pencil precision, and raw performance.

If you're a designer who works primarily in Figma, Sketch, or similar multi-artboard tools, and you need reliable file management, real external monitor support with independent resolutions, and the ability to run complex automation scripts, this isn't your laptop replacement yet. It's an exceptional companion device. There is a difference.

Students, researchers, and anyone who consumes and annotates large amounts of content will find this to be the best tablet experience available. The combination of the OLED display, Apple Pencil Pro, and the sheer lightness of the device makes it ideal for that use case.

The Verdict

8/10
Exceptional Hardware, Held Back by Software

The iPad Pro M4 is the best tablet ever made by a significant margin. The hardware is so far ahead of the software that it almost feels like two different products stitched together. The display is breathtaking, the performance is untouchable, and the Apple Pencil Pro transforms it into the finest digital canvas in existence.

But the software keeps it from being the laptop replacement Apple wants it to be. Stage Manager is better, not good enough. File management is functional, not professional. And the app ecosystem, while massive, still has critical gaps for power users.

I'm keeping it. It's earned a permanent place in my bag alongside my MacBook Pro, not instead of it. And until Apple takes iPadOS as seriously as they take the hardware, that's likely where it'll stay.

Pros

Cons

Sarah Kim

Sarah covers productivity tools, audio gear, and workspace technology. When she's not testing gadgets, she's optimizing her home office setup for the hundredth time.