The iPad Pro is about to turn 10, so hopefully you’ll forgive me for pulling out this well-worn Apple truism one more time. No, it’s not Steve Jobs saying “if you see a stylus, they blew it” (a quote continually used out of context.) It’s the tale of how since day one, the iPad Pro’s hardware often felt far more powerful and capable than the software it runs. If you recall, iPadOS was initially a scaled-up version of iOS, with most of the limitations inherent in software designed first for a phone. Apps could take great advantage of the larger screen, but working across multiple apps was just nowhere near as simple as doing the same thing on a Mac. Yes, the iPad has always been more portable, and accessories like the Apple Pencil make it better-suited for some tasks than a Mac, but the knock is always that the iPad — even the Pro — isn’t ideal for getting “real work” done.The combination of the just-launched iPad Pro’s M5 processor and the massive iPadOS update might finally quiet that debate. Sure, some people will never want to replace their laptop with an iPad, but it’s more feasible than ever thanks to iPadOS 26. It brings a totally revamped windowing and multitasking system, a background tasks API that lets you run heavy processes like rendering video while working in other apps, more robust audio input support and a far better Files app, making the iPad Pro closer in its feature set to a Mac than ever before. As Apple’s premium tablet enters its second decade, I spoke with the company’s Ted Merendino (from the iPad Product Marketing team) and Ty Jordan (Product Manager for System Experiences) to learn more about the evolution of the iPad Pro and iPadOS.Given how many Mac-like features came to iPadOS 26 this year, I was curious to hear how the company approached putting all that Mac DNA into the iPad while still keeping it distinct, as well as the engineering challenges it presented. “One of the things that makes iPad such a unique device is it's extremely versatile, right?” Jordan said. “You can use it with touch, you can use it with a trackpad or a keyboard or the Apple Pencil, and that's really powerful. But it also actually makes an extremely challenging engineering and design problem to try and solve when you're thinking about something like the new windowing experience.”Jordan went on to describe a “multi-year effort” to reconfigure the underlying iPadOS architecture. Apple worked to “maintain the immediacy that you've come to expect with a touch device, while still allowing users to have this freedom and flexibility to work across so many more windows at once,” he said. From there, the company had to figure out how to bring a bunch of familiar tools from the Mac together and make sure they work across touchscreens, trackpads and keyboards.An iPad running multiple windows in iPadOS 26Nathan Ingraham for EngadgetJordan pointed to Expose (a tool in macOS that shows you all your open windows by swiping up on the trackpad with three fingers) as a good example of something they wanted to bring to iPadOS in a way that felt native. “We leveraged the home gesture that people have been familiar with on iPad for a long time,” he said, “so you can easily see a bird's eye view of all your windows.”Swiping up on the iPad’s screen with one finger has brought you home for years, but now swiping up and holding for a second drops you into Expose, the same way it invokes open apps on an iPhone. And you can use the same three-finger swipe up on an iPad with a trackpad as you can on a Mac. “All these pieces have to be reconsidered over and over again in order to make sure that they do feel distinct to iPad,” Jordan said.While iPadOS 26 is a major revision that was just released less than a month ago, the iPad Pro M5 is more of an iterative update, at least on the outside. That’s not a big surprise given that the M4 model released in May 2024 was a complete redesign. The iPad Pro M4 is more capable thanks to the big software update, but this year’s M5 update pushes the tablet even further into a world where AI performance is paramount. “M5 has a faster Neural Engine, which continues to be the most power efficient location on the chip to run on-device AI,” Merendino said, citing features like Live Text and Subject Lift that have been in iOS and iPadOS for a while now. He also noted that the faster CPU in the M5 has had neural accelerators for a few generations, things that help with low-latency AI tasks like speech recognition. But the M5’s redesigned GPU is where the big changes can be found. “Within each GPU core is the new Neural Accelerator that dramatically speeds up GPU-based AI tasks,” Merendino continued. “So if you are segmenting super high-resolution video, this is much, much faster. For on-device image generation, this is much faster.”  Benchmarks I took while reviewing the iPad Pro M5 back this up — all the GPU-based measurements showed huge improvements over the M4.Merendino noted that

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