I genuinely don’t get the purpose of these high end processors in a tablet. Like more power is nice but what would I do on it that needs it?
Serious gamers mostly steer clear of Apple. Video editors presumably use desktops/laptops. Browsing doesn’t need power. Video watching doesn’t need it. Programming on iPads is cumbersome.
You'd be surprised by the horsepower some games require, my wife plays Love and Deep Space and she recently just bought a new iPad because the game requires some good specs and a LOT of storage space. She's not a "serious gamer" as your parlance.
But the iPad is not a console … it doesn’t even do Steam. All that horsepower to play … a couple of forever titles and that’s it.
I have the M1 iPad Air and it has never used that processor to its fullest. I think iPad is just an odd device for most people
People are bad with scale, everyone thinks moves make a lot of money. They really don't.
Just Gaming in general made something like $200 BILLION in revenue in 2025. Movies made ... $33B globally.
And of that $200B, mobile games were over half.
If the average HN'er would just think of the money they spend on their hobbies (or don't it usually doesn't end well =P) and now apply that to mobile games. They're a hobby or a way to relax for millions and millions of people.
They pay for the "predatory IAPs" because they consider the $10 spent a good investment on the fun they're having in the game they play.
There's a specific group of people who just have the mindset of "never pay real money for anything in a game" - I'm one of them. But even I have to admit that I'm in the minority.
Exactly. They read headlines like "Game X did 100 MILLION revenue in 2025!" and think that's a lot, meanwhile mobile games nobody's even heard of do 20x that.
But I'd argue that the demographics for "people that read gaming news websites" and "people that play and pay for lucrative mobile games" hardly overlap.
On the go video / photo editing is AMAZING on my iPad! More power speeds up some the effects / transition editing. Batch processing, all with a device that has great battery life and is smaller than a magazine. For super heavy stuff, sure, use my Mac, but when I travel and want to be productive on the go, the iPad is awesome!
But that's the thing, most "gamers" aren't the ones that games that normally on Steam are targeting. Mobile Gaming is almost double the size of Console Gaming by revenue. Some people just like having a huge screen for their games.
I've found a tablet convenient in 3 situations: Watching video, reading ebooks or displaying sheet music. (And a single tablet is rarely very good for more than 2 of these at a time.) Otherwise it's either too cumbersome or the I/O is too useless.
I do wonder about this too… I'm cutting 4K video and doing SwiftUI development on an M1 MacBook Air. My current plan is to upgrade next year, but only if they upgrade the screen. An M4 seems like a dramatic over-spec for a tablet.
This is a very naive take - the iPad and iPhone are both multibillion gaming devices, and to dismiss it is short-sighted.
I'd even claim (but can't look up statistics due to a restrictive company network) that singular mobile games like Honor of Kings generate more revenue than 95% of Steam games. Yet a lot of people that style themselves gamers (like myself) never even heard of it.
Yeah, maybe I'm too much of a "real gamer" but my iPad sits unused. The quality (and greediness!) of games on the iOS App Store is often worse than the direct-download console slop.
No software? DaVinci Resolve? Affinity Designer? Final Cut, Procreate, AUM, Logic Pro etc etc etc. As the processors get more powerful more demanding software can be made for it. Running multiple physical modeling AUVs along with FX loops eat up clock cycles. Final Cut Camera on iPhones along with Final Cut on an iPad allow for full multi camera controls and recording from 4 different iPhones with ProRes and log shooting at the same time.
If Apple hadn't continually upgraded the processing power then none of those programs would work. It's up to Apple to make compelling hardware. Better hardware allows more advanced programs. iPads are amazing.
The Procreate UI literally tells us otherwise. When you create a new image, it tells you exactly how many layers it will allow you to have based on the dimensions you set. This number is smaller for older iPads.
Thats the one I would buy if I were thinking of upgrading right now. We expect new models every year at this point, thats been the strategy of Apple for many years at this point
Music production is the killer feature that benefits a lot from CPU performance.
I only recently bought an iPad for the first time this year after realizing this was feasible. I’ve always preferred digital music workflows, but hated dealing with a laptop and DAW. iOS supports AUv3 plugins and cross app audio, so it’s pretty much a full DAW experience (I use loopy pro). The form factor forces AUv3 devs to design smarter interfaces.
Plus, I dislike using the iPad for literally anything else, so I’m less likely to get distracted :)
Can you expand on this, as im having a hard time comprehending. At the least, a laptop is a tablet with a built in stand :). How is a laptop hard to deal with?
Music production with a DAW is better on a computer. Music performance is much better on an iPad. There is a big difference between direct touch controls and using a trackpad. Apps like AUM and AniMoog Z highlight what makes music making on an iPad amazing.
And people here don't want to hear this but the closed nature of the App Store is why audio is so strong on both ios and iPadOS. There are far more music apps for those OSes than Android. In addition to that, many VSTs made for DAWS are available on iPads as AUV at much lower prices than Mac or Windows. The lack of piracy, narrow build targets, and predictably great audio implementation makes it both easier to build and more profitable than other platforms.
And IIRC for the longest time Android had massive latency issues with audio production. Just the whole framework was a bit shit and then you have small variations between manufacturers.
On iOS the basic system was flawless and there is no variance as every single iPad is the same and there's a finite amount of devices devs need to test on.
It's probably the immediacy. You click an app and you get a fullscreen touch UI with no distractions. Quite different to opening a slow-loading DAW and starting up various plugin windows inside it.
iPad music apps are typically priced far lower than the equivalent PC apps, and there's a thriving community of iOS-only development as well.
For me it's the sweet spot between hardware (which is expensive and annoying to cable up) and PC VSTs (I associate my laptop with work). The fact the iPad can also be used for videos/books/drawing/note taking is just a bonus.
I pretty much agree with all the people who replied. VSTs with heterogeneous interfaces, windowing issues, and having to use a mouse all just get in the way of making music for me. Obviously you wouldn’t produce / master some serious but if you’re jamming it’s leagues better imo
Better chip = better performance per watt = longer batteries for similar levels of performance, running cooler. Also it never hurts the smoothness of the interface.
It just ultimately makes it a nicer device to use.
Artists benefit hugely from the extra horsepower. My brother works in the animation industry and uses an ipad as his primary work device when travelling.
It's a spec bump, soon they'll introduce M5 powered iPads. More GPU cores, more neural engine cores, more unified memory -- eventually iPadOS features will spring up to take advantage of this stuff. I assume the target audience for this is folks who want to make future-proof purchases or those who likely have more money than sense.
iPad is the most absurd device ever. It is fully capable of running a full blown general purpose OS, but artificially restricted to be a YouTube machine. Something you give kids in a restaurant to be quiet. Putting an M4 in it is like Apple rubbing our faces in it. Look at this device that could do everything, but can't do anything.
Comments like yours just go on to show how narrow the worldview of many HN users is. Just because you don't know how people are using their iPads doesn't mean iPads "can't do anything". It defies common sense, too. If iPads couldn't do anything, why would people buy them consistently? I can imagine people buying them once because they don't know any better. But iPad is more than 15 years old now.
I know exactly how it's used. I said in my comment it's used by kids to watch YouTube. By age 4, 58% of children have their own tablet. And YouTube is the #1 app for iPad. This is the majority use case, next to collecting dust on a shelf, or gifts for people's aging parents.
You don't think an M4 chip, amazing, screen, form factor, quality - all for children to watch YouTube videos with is absurd? TSMC all busy making 3nm chips to be used for watching CoComelon. An amazingly powerful, affordable device that is totally locked out of being used for general purpose computing. That doesn't irritate you?
The complaint isn't that iPad is useless, but that it would be equally useful to nearly every happy iPad user if it had a few generations older CPU.
iPad works for lots of people, but the things that iPad is best for don't really need a powerful CPU.
There are few "Pro" apps that you can run to prove it's possible to run them (except for plugins, OS-level helper apps, extra hardware, background processing that doesn't randomly die, scripting more fine-grained than shortcuts, competent file browser, etc.) but you can max out the CPU for a few minutes and go back to a macbook for real work.
They're half a second away from offering an iPad running MacOS (or a tablet MacBook, take your pick). They're baby-stepping their way to this, obviously.
I've yet to figure anything you can do with these but watch videos and play some games; I always end up grabbing the laptop.
Doubt. Apple doesn't see hardware sales as a primary revenue driver, rather they're a rent-seeking company that makes money by being the iron-fisted middleman for the app store. They don't see any benefit from user freedom if it makes them less money in the end.
I genuinely don’t get the purpose of these high end processors in a tablet. Like more power is nice but what would I do on it that needs it?
Serious gamers mostly steer clear of Apple. Video editors presumably use desktops/laptops. Browsing doesn’t need power. Video watching doesn’t need it. Programming on iPads is cumbersome.
Who is the target audience that gains from this?