Apple – Page 4

Upcoming iOS and macOS 26.1 update will let you fog up your Liquid Glass

Apple, iOS, ios 26, iPadOS, ipados 26, liquid glass, macOS, macos 26 tahoe, Tech / Beth Washington / October 22, 2025

Apple’s new Liquid Glass user interface design was one of the most noticeable and divisive features of its major software updates this year. It added additional fluidity and translucency throughout iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and Apple’s other operating systems, and as we noted in our reviews, the default settings weren’t always great for readability.

The upcoming 26.1 update for all of those OSes is taking a step toward addressing some of the complaints, though not by changing things about the default look of Liquid Glass. Rather, the update is adding a new toggle that will let users choose between a Clear and Tinted look for Liquid Glass, with Clear representing the default look and Tinted cranking up the opacity and contrast.

The new toggle adds a half-step between the default visual settings and the “reduce transparency” setting, which, aside from changing a bunch of other things about the look and feel of the operating system, is buried further down inside the Accessibility options. The Tinted toggle does make colors and vague shapes visible beneath the glass panes, preserving the general look of Liquid Glass while also erring on the side of contrast and visibility, where the “reduce transparency” setting is more of an all-or-nothing blunt instrument.

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Testing Apple’s M5 iPad Pro: Future-proofing for Apple’s perennial overkill tablet

Apple, Apple M5, ipad, ipad pro, Reviews, Tech / Beth Washington / October 21, 2025

It’s a gorgeous tablet, but what does an iPad need with more processing power?

Apple’s 13-inch M5 iPad Pro. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

This year’s iPad Pro is what you might call a “chip refresh” or an “internal refresh.” These refreshes are what Apple generally does for its products for one or two or more years after making a larger external design change. Leaving the physical design alone preserves compatibility with the accessory ecosystem.

For the Mac, chip refreshes are still pretty exciting to me, because many people who use a Mac will, very occasionally, assign it some kind of task where they need it to work as hard and fast as it can, for an extended period of time. You could be a developer compiling a large and complex app, or you could be a podcaster or streamer editing or exporting an audio or video file, or maybe you’re just playing a game. The power and flexibility of the operating system, and first- and third-party apps made to take advantage of that power and flexibility, mean that “more speed” is still exciting, even if it takes a few years for that speed to add up to something users will consistently notice and appreciate.

And then there’s the iPad Pro. Especially since Apple shifted to using the same M-series chips that it uses in Macs, most iPad Pro reviews contain some version of “this is great hardware that is much faster than it needs to be for anything the iPad does.” To wit, our review of the M4 iPad Pro from May 2024:

Still, it remains unclear why most people would spend one, two, or even three thousand dollars on a tablet that, despite its amazing hardware, does less than a comparably priced laptop—or at least does it a little more awkwardly, even if it’s impressively quick and has a gorgeous screen.

Since then, Apple has announced and released iPadOS 26, an update that makes important and mostly welcome changes to how the tablet handles windowed multitasking, file transfers, and some other kinds of background tasks. But this is the kind of thing that isn’t even going to stress out an Apple M1, let alone a chip that’s twice as powerful.

All of this is to say: A chip refresh for an iPad is nice to have. This year’s will also come with a handy RAM increase for many buyers, the first RAM boost that the base model iPad Pro has gotten in more than four years.

But without any other design changes or other improvements to hang its hat on, the fact is that chip refresh years for the iPad Pro only really improve a part of the tablet that needs the least amount of improvement. That doesn’t make them bad; who knows what the hardware requirements will be when iPadOS 30 adds some other batch of multitasking features. But it does mean these refreshes don’t feel particularly exciting or necessary; the most exciting thing about the M5 iPad Pro means you might be able to get a good deal on an M4 model as retailers clear out their stock. You aren’t going to notice the difference.

Design: M4 iPad Pro redux

The 13-inch M5 iPad Pro in its Magic Keyboard accessory with the Apple Pencil Pro attached. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Lest we downplay this tablet’s design, the M4 version of the iPad Pro was the biggest change to the tablet since Apple introduced the modern all-screen design for the iPad Pro back in 2018. It wasn’t a huge departure, but it did introduce the iPad’s first OLED display, a thinner and lighter design, and a slightly improved Apple Pencil and updated range of accessories.

As with the 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro that Apple just launched, the easiest way to know how much you’ll like the iPad Pro depends on how you feel about screen technology (the iPad is, after all, mostly screen). If you care about the 120 Hz, high-refresh-rate ProMotion screen, the option to add a nano-texture display with a matte finish, and the infinite contrast and boosted brightness of Apple’s OLED displays, those are the best reasons to buy an iPad Pro. The $299/349 Magic Keyboard accessory for the iPad Pro also comes with backlit keys and a slightly larger trackpad than the equivalent $269/$319 iPad Air accessory.

If none of those things inspire passion in you, or if they’re not worth several hundred extra dollars to you—the nano-texture glass upgrade alone adds $700 to the price of the iPad Pro, because Apple only offers it on the 1TB and 2TB models—then the 11- and 13-inch iPads Air are going to give you a substantively identical experience. That includes compatibility with the same Apple Pencil accessory and support for all the same multitasking and Apple Intelligence features.

The M5 iPad Pro supports the same Apple Pencil Pro as the M4 iPad Pro, and the M2 and M3 iPad Air. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

One other internal change to the new iPad Pro, aside from the M5, is mostly invisible: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Thread connectivity provided by the Apple N1 chip, and 5G cellular connectivity provided by the Apple C1X. Ideally, you won’t notice this swap at all, but it’s a quietly momentous change for Apple. Both of these chips cap several years of acquisitions and internal development, and further reduce Apple’s reliance on external chipmakers like Qualcomm and Broadcom, which has been one of the goals of Apple’s A- and M-series processors all along.

There’s one last change we haven’t really been able to adequately test in the handful of days we’ve had the tablet: new fast-charging support, either with Apple’s first-party Dynamic Power Adapter or any USB-C charger capable of providing 60 W or more of power. When using these chargers, Apple says the tablet’s battery can charge from 0 to 50 percent in 35 minutes. (Apple provides the same battery life estimates for the M5 iPads as the M4 models: 10 hours of Wi-Fi web usage, or 9 hours of cellular web usage, for both the 13- and 11-inch versions of the tablet.)

Two Apple M5 chips, two RAM options

Apple sent us the 1TB version of the 13-inch iPad Pro to test, which means we got the fully enabled version of the M5: four high-performance CPU cores, six high-efficiency GPU cores, 10 GPU cores, a 16-core Neural Engine, and 16GB of RAM.

Apple’s Macs still offer individually configurable processor, storage, and RAM upgrades to users—generally buying one upgrade doesn’t lock you into buying a bunch of other stuff you don’t want or need (though there are exceptions for RAM configurations in some of the higher-end Macs). But for the iPads, Apple still ties the chip and the RAM you get to storage capacity. The 256GB and 512GB iPads get three high-performance CPU cores instead of four, and 12GB of RAM instead of 16GB.

For people who buy the 256GB and 512GB iPads, this does amount to a 50 percent increase in RAM capacity from the M1, M2, and M4 iPad Pro models, or the M1, M2, and M3 iPad Airs, all of which came with 8GB of RAM. High-end models stick with the same 16GB of RAM as before (no 24GB or 32GB upgrades here, though the M5 supports them in Macs). The ceiling is in the same place, but the floor has come up.

Given that iPadOS is still mostly running on tablets with 8GB or less of RAM, I don’t expect the jump from 8GB to 12GB to make a huge difference in the day-to-day experience of using the tablet, at least for now. If you connect your iPad to an external monitor that you use as an extended display, it might help keep more apps in memory at a time; it could help if you edit complex multi-track audio or video files or images, or if you’re trying to run some kind of machine learning or AI workflows locally. Future iPadOS versions could also require more than 8GB of memory for some features. But for now, the benefit exists mostly on paper.

As for benchmarks, the M5’s gains in the iPad are somewhat more muted than they are for the M5 MacBook Pro we tested. We observed a 10 or 15 percent improvement across single- and multi-core CPU tests and graphics benchmark improvements that mostly hovered in the 15 to 30 percent range. The Geekbench 6 Compute benchmark was one outlier, pointing to a 35 percent increase in GPU performance; it’s possible that GPU or rendering-heavy workloads benefit a little more from the new neural accelerators in the M5’s GPU cores than games do.

In the MacBook review, we observed that the M5’s CPU generally had higher peak power consumption than the M4. In the fanless iPad Pro, it’s likely that Apple has reined the chip in a little bit to keep it cool, which would explain why the iPad’s M5 doesn’t see quite the same gains.

The M5 and the 12GB RAM minimum does help to put a little more distance between the M3 iPad Air and the Pros. Most iPad workloads don’t benefit in an obvious user-noticeable way from the extra performance or memory right now, but it’s something you can point to that makes the Pro more “pro” than the Air.

Changed hardware that doesn’t change much

The M5 iPad Pro is nice in the sense that “getting a little more for your money today than you could get for the same money two weeks ago” is nice. But it changes essentially nothing for potential iPad buyers.

I’m hard-pressed to think of anyone who would be well-served by the M5 iPad Pro who wouldn’t have been equally well-served by the M4 version. And if the M4 iPad Pro was already overkill for you, the M5 is just a little more so. Particularly if you have an M1 or M2 ; People with an A12X or A12Z version of the iPad Pro from 2018 or 2020 will benefit more, particularly if you’re multitasking a lot or running into limitations or RAM complaints from the apps you’re using.

But even with the iPadOS 26 update, it still seems like the capabilities of the iPad’s software lags behind the capabilities of the hardware by a few years. It’s to be expected, maybe, for an operating system that has to run on this M5 iPad Pro and a 7-year-old phone processor with 3GB of RAM.

I am starting to feel the age of the M1 MacBook Air I use, especially if I’m pushing multiple monitors with it or trying to exceed its 16GB RAM limit. The M1 iPad Air I have, on the other hand, feels like it just got an operating system that unlocks some of its latent potential. That’s the biggest problem with the iPad Pro, really—not that it’s a bad tablet, but that it’s still so much more tablet than you need to do what iPadOS and its apps can currently do.

The good

A fast, beautiful tablet that’s a pleasure to use.
The 120Hz ProMotion support and OLED display panel make this one of Apple’s best screens, period.
256GB and 512GB models get a bump from 8GB to 12GB of memory.
Maintains compatibility with the same accessories as the M4 iPad Pro.

The bad

More iPad than pretty much anyone needs.
Passively cooled fanless Apple M5 can’t stretch its legs quite as much as the actively cooled Mac version.
Expensive accessories.

The ugly

All other hardware upgrades, including the matte nano-texture display finish, require a $600 upgrade to the 1TB version of the tablet.

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

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MacBook Pro: Apple’s most awkward laptop is the first to show off Apple M5

Apple, Apple M5, Apple silicon, Features, MacBook, MacBook Pro, macOS, Reviews, Tech / 9u50fv / October 21, 2025

the apple m5: one more than m4

Apple M5 trades blows with Pro and Max chips from older generations.

Apple’s M5 MacBook Pro. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

When I’m asked to recommend a Mac laptop for people, Apple’s low-end 14-inch MacBook Pro usually gets lost in the shuffle. It competes with the 13- and 15-inch MacBook Air, significantly cheaper computers that meet or exceed the “good enough” boundary for the vast majority of computer users. The basic MacBook Pro also doesn’t have the benefit of Apple’s Pro or Max-series chips, which come with many more CPU cores, substantially better graphics performance, and higher memory capacity for true professionals and power users.

But the low-end Pro makes sense for a certain type of power user. At $1,599, it’s the cheapest way to get Apple’s best laptop screen, with mini LED technology, a higher 120 Hz ProMotion refresh rate for smoother scrolling and animations, and the optional but lovely nano-texture (read: matte) finish. Unlike the MacBook Air, it comes with a cooling fan, which has historically meant meaningfully better sustained performance and less performance throttling. And it’s also Apple’s cheapest laptop with three Thunderbolt ports, an HDMI port, and an SD card slot, all genuinely useful for people who want to plug lots of things in without having multiple dongles or a bulky dock competing for the Air’s two available ports.

If you don’t find any of those arguments in the basic MacBook Pro’s favor convincing, that’s fine. The new M5 version makes almost no changes to the laptop other than the chip, so it’s unlikely to change your calculus if you already looked at the M3 or M4 version and passed it up. But it is the first Mac to ship with the M5, the first chip in Apple’s fifth-generation chip family and a preview of what’s to come for (almost?) every other Mac in the lineup. So you can at least be interested in the 14-inch MacBook Pro as a showcase for a new processor, if not as a retail product in and of itself.

The Apple Silicon MacBook Pro, take five

Apple has been using this laptop design for about four years now, since it released the M1 Pro and M1 Max versions of the MacBook Pro in late 2021. But for people who are upgrading from an older design—Apple did use the old Intel-era design, Touch Bar and all, for the low-end M1 and M2 MacBook Pros, after all—we’ll quickly hit the highlights.

This basic MacBook Pro only comes in a 14-inch screen size, up from 13-inches for the old low-end MacBook Pro, but some of that space is eaten up by the notch across the top of the display. The strips of screen on either side of the notch are usable by macOS, but only for the menu bar and icons that live in the menu bar—it’s a no-go zone for apps. The laptop is a consistent thickness throughout, rather than tapered, and has somewhat more squared-off and less-rounded corners.

Compared to the 13-inch MacBook Pro, the 14-inch version is the same thickness, but it’s a little heavier (3.4 pounds, compared to 3), wider, and deeper. For most professional users, the extra screen size and the re-addition of the HDMI port and SD card slot mostly justify the slight bump up in size. The laptop also includes three Thunderbolt 3 ports—up from two in the MacBook Airs—and the resurrected MagSafe charging port. But it is worth noting that the 14-inch MacBook Pro is nearly identical in weight to the 15-inch MacBook Air. If screen size is all you’re after, the Air may still be the better choice.

Apple’s included charger uses MagSafe on the laptop end, but USB-C chargers, docks, monitors, and other accessories will continue to charge the laptop if that’s what you prefer to keep using.

I’ve got no gripes about Apple’s current laptop keyboard—Apple uses the same key layout, spacing, and size across the entire MacBook Air and Pro line, though if I had to distinguish between the Pro and Air, I’d say the Pro’s keyboard is very, very slightly firmer and more satisfying to type on and that the force feedback of its trackpad is just a hair more clicky. The laptop’s speaker system is also more impressive than either MacBook Air, with much bassier bass and a better dynamic range.

But the main reason to prefer this low-end Pro to the Air is the screen, particularly the 120 Hz ProMotion support, the improved brightness and contrast of the mini LED display technology, and the option to add Apple’s matte nano texture finish. I usually don’t mind the amount of glare coming off my MacBook Air’s screen too much, but every time I go back to using a nano-texture screen I’m always a bit jealous of the complete lack of glare and reflections and the way you get those benefits without dealing with the dip in image quality you see from many matte-textured screen protectors. The more you use your laptop outdoors or under lighting conditions you can’t control, the more you’ll appreciate it.

The optional nano texture display adds a pleasant matte finish to the screen, but that notch is still notching. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

If the higher refresh rate and the optional matte coating (a $150 upgrade on top of an already pricey computer) don’t appeal to you, or if you can’t pay for them, then you can be pretty confident that this isn’t the MacBook for you. The 13-inch Air is lighter, and the 5-inch Air is larger, and both are cheaper. But we’re still only a couple of years past the M2 version of the low-end MacBook Pro, which didn’t give you the extra ports or the Pro-level screen.

But! Before you buy one of the still-M4-based MacBook Airs, our testing of the MacBook Pro’s new M5 chip should give you some idea of whether it’s worth waiting a few months (?) for an Air refresh.

Testing Apple’s M5

We’ve also run some M5 benchmarks as part of our M5 iPad Pro review, but having macOS rather than iPadOS running on top of it does give us a lot more testing flexibility—more benchmarks and a handful of high-end games to run, plus access to the command line for taking a look at power usage and efficiency.

To back up and re-state the chip’s specs for a moment, though, the M5 is constructed out of the same basic parts as the M4: four high-performance CPU cores, six high-efficiency CPU cores (up from four in the M1/M2/M3), 10 GPU cores, and a 16-core Neural Engine for handling some machine-learning and AI workloads.

The M5’s technical improvements are more targeted and subtle than just a boost to clock speeds or core counts. The first is a 27.5 percent increase in memory bandwidth, from the 120 GB/s of the M4 to 153 GB/s (achieved, I’m told, by a combination of faster RAM and the memory fabric that facilitates communication between different areas of the chip. Integrated GPUs are usually bottlenecked by memory bandwidth first and core count second, so memory bandwidth improvements can have a pretty direct, linear impact on graphics performance.

Apple also says it has added a “Neural Accelerator” to each of its GPU cores, separate from the Neural Engine. These will benefit a few specific types of workloads—things like MetalFX graphics upscaling or frame generation that would previously have had to use the Neural Engine can now do that work entirely within the GPU, eliminating a bit of latency and freeing the Neural Engine up to do other things. Apple is also claiming “over 4x peak GPU compute compared to M4,” which Apple says will speed up locally run AI language models and image generation software. That figure is coming mostly from the GPU improvements; according to Geekbench AI, the Neural Engine itself is only around 10 percent faster than the one on the M4.

(A note about testing: The M4 chip in these charts was in an iMac and not a MacBook Pro. But over several hardware generations, we’ve observed that the actively cooled versions of the basic M-series chips perform the same in both laptops and desktops. Comparing the M5 to the passively cooled M4 in the MacBook Air isn’t apples to apples, but comparing it to the M4 in the iMac is.)

Each of Apple’s chip generations has improved over the previous one by low-to-mid double digits, and the M5 is no different. We measured a 12 to 16 percent improvement over the M4 in single-threaded CPU tests, a 20 to 30 percent improvement in multicore tests, and roughly a 40 percent improvement in graphics benchmarks and the Mac version of the built-in Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark (one benchmark, the GPU-based version of the Blender rendering benchmark, measured a larger 60 to 70 percent improvement for the M5’s GPU, suggesting it either benefits more than most apps from the memory bandwidth improvements or the new neural accelerators).

Those performance additions add up over time. The M5 is typically a little over twice as fast as the M1, and it comes close to the performance level of some Pro and Max processors from past generations.

The M5 MacBook Pro falls short of the M4 Pro, and it will fall even shorter of the M5 Pro whenever it arrives. But its CPU performance generally beats the M3 Pro in our tests, and its GPU performance comes pretty close. Its multi-core CPU performance beats the M1 Max, and its single-core performance is over 80 percent faster. The M5 can’t come close to the graphics performance of any of these older Max or Ultra chips, but if you’re doing primarily CPU-heavy work and don’t need more than 32GB of RAM, the M5 holds up astonishingly well to Apple’s high-end silicon from just a few years ago.

It wasn’t so long ago that this kind of performance improvement was more-or-less normal across the entire tech industry, but Intel, AMD, and Nvidia’s consumer CPUs and GPUs have really slowed their rate of improvement lately, and Intel and AMD are both guilty of re-using old silicon for entry-level chips, over and over again. If you’re using a 6- or 7-year-old PC, sure, you’ll see performance improvements from something new, but it’s more of a crapshoot for a 3- to 4-year-old PC.

If there’s a downside to the M5 in our testing, it’s that its performance improvements seem to come with increased power draw relative to the M4 when all the CPU cores are engaged in heavy lifting. According to macOS built-in powermetrics tool, the M5 drew an average 28 W of power in our Handbrake video encoding test, compared to around 17 W for the M4 running the same test.

Using software tools to compare power draw between different chip manufacturers or even chip generations is dicey, because you’re trusting that different hardware is reporting its power use to the operating system in similar ways. But assuming they’re accurate, these numbers suggest that Apple could be pushing clock speeds more aggressively this generation to squeeze more performance out of the chip.

This would make some sense, since the third-generation 3nm TSMC manufacturing process used for the M5 (likely N3P) looks like a fairly mild upgrade from the second-generation 3nm process used for the M4 (N3E). TSMC says that N3P can boost performance by 5 percent at the same power use compared to N3E, or reduce power draw by 5 to 10 percent at the same performance. To get to the larger double-digit performance improvements that Apple is claiming and that we measured in our testing, you’d definitely expect to see the overall power consumption increase.

To put the M5 in context, the M2 and the M3 came a bit closer to its average power draw in our video encoding test (23.2 and 22.7 W, respectively), and the M5’s power draw comes in much lower than any past-generation Pro or Max chips. In terms of the amount of power used to complete the same task, the M5’s efficiency is worse than the M4’s according to powermetrics, but better than older generations. And Apple’s performance and power efficiency remains well ahead of what Intel or AMD can offer in their high-end products.

Impressive chip, awkward laptop

The low-end MacBook Pro has always occupied an odd in-between place in Apple’s lineup, overlapping in a lot of places with the MacBook Air and without the benefit of the much-faster chips that the 15- and 16-inch MacBook Pros could fit. The M5 MacBook Pro carries on that complicated legacy, and even with the M5 there are still lots of people for whom one of the M4 MacBook Airs is just going to be a better fit.

But it is a very nice laptop, and if your screen is the most important part of your laptop, this low-end Pro does make a decent case for itself. It’s frustrating that the matte display is a $150 upcharge, but it’s an option you can’t get on an Air, and the improved display panel and faster ProMotion refresh rate make scrolling and animations all look smoother and more fluid than they do on an Air’s screen. I still mostly think that this is a laptop without a huge constituency—too much more expensive than the Air, too much slower than the other Pros—but the people who buy it for the screen should still be mostly happy with the performance and ports.

This MacBook Pro is more exciting to me as a showcase for the Apple M5—and I’m excited to see the M5 and its higher-end Pro, Max, and (possibly) Ultra relatives show up in other Macs.

The M5 sports the highest sustained power draw of any M-series chip we’ve tested, but Apple’s past generations (the M4 in particular) have been so efficient that Apple has some room to bump up power consumption while remaining considerably more efficient than anything its competitors are offering. What you get in exchange is an impressively fast chip, as good or better than many of the Pro or Max chips in previous-generation products. For anyone still riding out the tail end of the Intel era, or for people with M1-class Macs that are showing their age, the M5 is definitely fast enough to feel like a real upgrade. That’s harder to come by in computing than it used to be.