A market research firm appears to believe that Apple will unveil the new M5 iPad Pro series later this year, and while that is exciting as far as new releases go, the information received claims that the flagship tablets will hardly be any different from the M4 models, apart from the notable chipset upgrade. This lack of differentiation, coupled with some shipment data, suggests that the newer models will not be the driving growth behind Apple’s tablet, and it will be up to the less expensive slates to generate that momentum.
New M5 chipset may not deliver substantial performance gains either when running in the new iPad Pro family compared to the M4; up to a 10 percent improvement only by using TSMC’s 3nm ‘N3P’ node
A research note from Meritz Securities was spotted by tipster @Jukanlosreve talks about how, at the beginning of last year, LG and Samsung were estimated to deliver around 9 million OLED panel shipments belonging to the M4 iPad Pro. Unfortunately, due to a lack of demand, the revised figure dropped to approximately 5.7 million units. In 2025, we should expect more or less the same reception because the OLED found in the M5 iPad Pro family is projected to ship up to just 5.5 million units.
Meritz Securities predicts that the internal hardware of the M5 iPad Pro models will remain the same, including the OLED technology, meaning that Apple will stick with the tandem structure while giving the newer tablets the M5 upgrade. Unfortunately, one report claims that this chipset has started getting mass produced on TSMC’s 3nm ‘N3P’ technology, and compared to the company’s current-generation 3nm ‘N3E’ node, the efficiency improvement is only 10 percent, while the performance bump is even smaller at 5 percent.
These details may explain why Apple may unveil the M5 iPad Pro lineup after it has announced the updated versions of the MacBook Pro, with the possibility that the flagship tablets will be delayed until 2026. The Cupertino firm launched the M4 iPad Pro series earlier to showcase the new sleek design, tandem OLED technology, and the massive performance and efficiency advantages of using the M4, which is why these devices arrived earlier than the MacBook Pro models last year.
Even then, 11-inch and 13-inch M4 iPad Pro models barely did enough to push the sales momentum, as the products were as expensive as a Mac, leaving Apple to rely on its less expensive iPad models to contribute to that 15 percent growth that the company witnessed during its Q1 2025 earnings call. This year, we could have another ‘déjà vu’ moment with the M5 iPad Pro models, with the newly announced M3 iPad Air series and the more affordable A16 Bionic-powered iPad coming to the rescue.
