Apple’s $999 iPad Pro Is Still the Best Deal in Tech

Look, I know this is not a message that everyone wants to hear, and for that I apologize in advance. Take it from someone who has spent seven years product testing for a luxury magazine; sometimes the dupe is not as good as the real thing. A Mazda is neither the salve for your mid-life crisis, nor is it a substitute for the Porsche 911. The best trench coat you can buy is still made by Burberry, and those vacuum cleaners that look exactly like a Dyson but are in fact drop-shipped straight from China? They’re not going to do you or your dust-laden floors any favors.

So as much as I’d like to tell you that Apple’s $999 iPad Pro is by no means worth three times the price of the “basic” iPad, it absolutely is. In fact, consider this your PSA to say that this isn’t a situation where you should settle for less. By all means, trust 90 percent of your grooming routine to a CeraVe SPF moisturiser or bluff your way through a smart casual dress code with a pair of Chelsea boots, half-decent blazer and the rest of your fit from Uniqlo. Those are perfectly acceptable cheat codes for life. If you’re getting an iPad, Apple’s Pro is the only way to go.

Crazy thin. No compromises

Apple has been making a Pro-level iPad for the best part of a decade now, but its most expensive tablet really entered rarefied air a year and a half ago. That’s when this device was slimmed down to an astounding 5.1mm in size—making it the company’s thinnest product ever—and a weight of just 20 ounces. If you’ve not held a Pro, then it’s hard to describe just how much this slimline aesthetic will ruin other tablets for you. It’s a bit like the tech equivalent of swapping grated cheese for fior di latte mozzarella on a pizza, and then realizing you’re now going to have to pay $4 more for a margherita for the rest of your life. Or going to one of those cinemas where your seat comes with a footrest and a cocktail bar around the back.

With tech like Apple’s own iPhone Air or Bvlgari’s Octo Finissimo, prioritising razor-thin design standards tends to come with significant compromises. For the iPad Pro, that’s emphatically not the case. You get its maker’s latest (and newly AI-capable) M5 processing chip, an awesome screen in the shape of the OLED Ultra Retina XDR display and access to a suite of genuinely elite accessories in the form of the Pencil Pro stylus and Magic Keyboard case. While the latest Pro is very much an iterative step forward for the device, it does come with a few bits of future proofing, such as new chips for both wireless connectivity and local networking, and fast-charging capabilities of up to 50 percent battery in 30 minutes.

That last one is especially useful if you tend to use your iPad in fits and starts, or it sits on the side of your office desk as a second screen. I never travel without a Pro these days, mainly so I can leave my laptop at home and disconnect from work, but I’m a profoundly last-minute packer. So being able to chuck this tablet in the front of my suitcase and know I’ll always be able to find the necessary juice pre-flight at the airport is a major win.

Like a laptop, but not quite

If you want to lie to yourself and say you’re buying a new iPad Pro to declutter your life and replace your laptop, Apple has offered up a few good reasons to bolster that delusion. Most significantly, the latest iteration of iPadOS introduces a new (and well-executed) windowing system, so you can work across multiple apps at once. Think rushing through your emails with Slack in the corner of your screen, or finessing your itinerary for a weekend away in Lisbon across Notes, Maps and ChatGPT. On top of this, there’s a drastically improved Files system for those who do serious video and picture editing on their Pro, as well as a Preview app for editing PDFs.