- The M5 iPad Pro has apparently been leaked on YouTube
- The video shows a familiar chassis and a new M5 chip
- The chip could offer decent performance increases over the current M4 chip
Want to know what’s coming in the as-yet-unreleased M5 iPad Pro? We might have just caught our first glimpse of the device, and it comes via the Russian YouTuber who famously revealed last year’s M4 MacBook Pro before it was officially announced.
That YouTuber goes by the name Wylsacom, and they’ve just shared an unboxing video that reveals the M5 iPad Pro in meticulous detail, in which they comment on the look and feel of the device, its internal configuration, and a smattering of performance metrics.
So, what can we expect? According to Wylsacom, the M5 iPad Pro will, as the name suggests, come with Apple’s M5 chip. The YouTuber put this chip through its paces using the Geekbench 6 benchmarking tool, and it scored 4,133 in the single-core test and 15,437 in the multi-core benchmark – those scores are roughly 10% and 16% faster than an M4 iPad Pro tested by Wylsacom.
As for graphics performance, the M5 model blazed ahead with a score of 74,568 in Geekbench 6, which is about 34% better than the 55,702 score the M4 iPad Pro achieved. That’s a much more significant performance difference, and may in part be down to Wylsacom’s M5 chip having 12GB of memory, as opposed to the 8GB in the M4 iPad Pro.
On the outside, the iPad Pro handled by Wylsacom doesn’t appear to have many external changes compared to the M4 iPad Pro. It’s got a single rear camera, Apple’s Smart Connector, and four speakers, for instance, and the only difference of note here is that the words ‘iPad Pro’ don’t appear to be present on the back of the tablet; otherwise, this seems to mostly be a chip upgrade and not much else.
Reading between the lines
Incredibly, it’s not the only M5 iPad Pro leak we’ve seen this week. At the same time as Wylsacom was testing out an apparently functional unit, the FCC, the US telecoms regulator, appeared to accidentally leak the device’s details on its website, according to MacRumors.
Specifically, the FCC revealed model numbers for unknown iPads and MacBooks – inferred to be the 11-inch and 13-inch iPad Pro (with and without cellular connectivity) and an M5 MacBook Pro, based on past model numbers. That gives Wylsacom’s leak some credence, and suggests Apple is nearing a release date for all of these products.
Reading between the lines, the M5 iPad Pro might also give us some clues about the upcoming M5 MacBook Air. That’s because both devices are expected to use the same chip, and both will operate without a fan, instead relying on passive cooling. With that in mind, there’s a decent chance that the M5 MacBook Air will achieve similar performance numbers to the M5 iPad Pro, since the chips in both devices will be operating under similar thermal conditions.
Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that. For one thing, Wylsacom’s M5 iPad Pro featured a nine-core CPU, whereas the M5 in the MacBook Air will likely have 10 CPU cores (at least if it follows the pattern set by the M4 chip). So performance could vary a little, although we wouldn’t expect the differences to be huge.
With the M5 iPad Pro expected to arrive before the end of the year, and the M5 MacBook Pro rumored to be launching somewhere between late 2025 and early 2026, we don’t have long to wait to see how these devices perform in real-world tests – and that could give us even more insight into the M5 MacBook Air.
