My favorite M5 iPad Pro review
Riley Hill is one of my favorite writers focused on the iPad, and he just reviewed the new M5 iPad Pro on his SlatePad blog. It's absolutely worth a read, but as a lapsed iPad fanatic myself, I couldn't resist remarking on a couple things.
Alongside high refresh rate support comes support for Adaptive Sync. The principle behind this is the same as Apple’s ProMotion. The refresh rate of the connected monitor can dynamically change based on the current content. This contributes to how smooth moving the mouse and scrolling windows can feel on the monitor. It should also, in theory, improve gaming performance on external displays as games can take advantage of this technology, the same way they do on PCs and consoles.
I don’t know of any iPadOS games that even support running on an external display, but any variable refresh rate support they’ve built in to support ProMotion should just work on supported monitors.
This is such a classic iPad thing for me: "iPadOS can technically do this cool thing…not that I can point to something that does it". Since the first iPadOS 26 beta, I've been trying to use my iPad with an external monitor more, and the fact that games literally can't seem to run on the external display was a real shocker to me.
Honestly, I find external display mode on the iPad truly shocking. Numerous apps simply don't work nicely, mouse acceleration feels very strange, Control Center can be opened on the external display but appears on the iPad screen (WHAT?), Spotlight works about 40% of the time, you can't screen record the external monitor, it's unclear what screen new windows will open on, and oh yeah, the iPad itself can't be used in "clamshell mode" because…well I guess how else would you access Control Center? For all the improvements to window management this year, I really do find it frustrating how unpleasant I find using the external display mode. I'd rather just work from my 11" iPad than use it with my 32" monitor, which is wild.
Why does this matter when the new windowing brings a lot more flexibility in many other ways? Well, it turns out that if you’re not using a 13-inch iPad, there’s not really enough screen real estate to have a bunch of apps open at one time. Even if you take advantage of the window tiling feature, the windows are borderline too small to be useful.
This also resonates with me and I think speaks to my mixed feelings on the new windowing system. I totally get how this would work and be useful on a 13-inch screen, but on an 11-inch iPad, I never ever want to use multiple windows at the same time. I understand that Apple wants to have one windowing system rather than disparate experiences across their iPads, but a part of me thinks that 11-inch iPads and smaller are best served by the old split view, while 13-inch and larger screens are better served by the multi-window support introduced this year. Given that Apple keeps making significant mid-cycle changes to windowing, it seems Apple feels they didn't nail it this year and are trying to lock it in.
The display scaling “issues” people report with macOS on 4k vs 5k displays feel less pronounced on iPadOS. Text on a 4k display isn’t quite as sharp as it is on the Studio Display, but for some, the higher refresh rate more than makes up for it.
How could I not comment on this one? I run a 4K monitor as well, and while I freely admit it's not as crisp as a 5K monitor would be, it's still quite good and easily falls into the "retina" window that people like to reference. And scaling issues? I don't have any because I do a proper 2x scale with the UI perfectly doubling. Those who set their 4K monitor to a logical 1440p will indeed get blurry text, but those of us using a logical 1080p get perfect pixel doubling. Yes, my UI is a bit larger than if I set the internal res to 1440p, but that's how I prefer it, it lets me get crisp text, and it drives me crazy when reasonable people suggest this is simply impossible at 4K. /rant