iPad Pro M4 Review: The Best Tablet Money Can Buy in India

Last November, I was three hours into colour-grading a wedding video for a client in Koramangala when the power went out. Not the brief flicker kind — the "BESCOM has abandoned your neighbourhood" kind. My desktop monitor went black, the AC died, and the only thing still running in my studio apartment was the iPad Pro M4, sitting on a folding table next to a cup of cold filter coffee, hooked up to my inverter through its USB-C charger. The timeline in LumaFusion was still right where I left it. I sat in the dark, sweating, and finished the rough cut on battery power alone. Two hours and forty minutes later, the iPad still had 38% battery left.

That night pretty much summed up my entire relationship with this device. The iPad Pro M4 is, without question, the most capable piece of hardware I have ever held in my hands. And yet, almost every single day, it finds a new way to remind me that capability and completeness are not the same thing.

I have been using the 13-inch iPad Pro M4 as a working tool — not a content consumption device, not a "laptop replacement experiment," but an actual tool I bill clients with — for about five months now. I am a freelance graphic designer and occasional video editor based in Bangalore. I work with small businesses, wedding clients, and a couple of e-commerce brands. This review is not a specs breakdown. You can find the chipset details and Geekbench numbers on GSMArena. What I want to talk about is what this tablet actually does and does not do when your rent depends on it.

Drawing and Illustration Work: Where the iPad Pro Earns Its Price

Let me start with the thing this machine does better than anything else on the planet, and I am not being dramatic. If you draw for a living — illustration, UI design, storyboarding, concept art — the iPad Pro M4 with the Apple Pencil Pro is the single best tool available. Period. Nothing else comes close.

I use Procreate daily. Logo concepts, social media illustrations for clients, quick mockups during calls. The M4 chip means I can work with canvases that have 50+ layers at 4K resolution without any slowdown. The tandem OLED display — Apple calls it "Ultra Retina XDR" which is marketing gibberish, but the actual panel is genuinely excellent — renders colours with an accuracy that I previously only trusted my calibrated desktop monitor to deliver. I have done final colour checks on illustrations directly on this screen and sent them to print. They came out right.

The Apple Pencil Pro deserves its own paragraph. The haptic feedback when you switch tools is subtle but genuinely useful — you feel a tiny click when you rotate the barrel to change brush angle in Procreate. It sounds like a gimmick until you are sketching for three hours straight and you realise you have not looked at the toolbar once because your muscle memory learned the squeeze gesture for the tool palette in about two days. The hover detection is also practical, not just a party trick. When I am doing detailed vector work in Vectornator (now Linearity Curve), seeing the cursor position before the pencil touches glass helps with precision in a way that is hard to explain but impossible to go back from.

For anyone doing illustration or design work specifically, the iPad Pro M4 is not competing with other tablets. It is competing with Wacom Cintiq displays that cost roughly the same but require a desktop computer behind them. The iPad is portable, self-contained, and the drawing experience is — I will say it plainly — better than a Cintiq for most workflows. The only thing Wacom still wins on is pressure sensitivity at the extreme light end, which matters for certain brush techniques but not for 90% of commercial illustration work.

Video Editing: Capable But Frustrating

This is where things get complicated, and where my feelings about the iPad Pro start splitting in two directions.

I primarily use LumaFusion for video editing on the iPad. It is the best video editor available on iPadOS, it costs a one-time Rs 2,400 or so, and for what it does, it is remarkably well-made. I can edit 4K footage, do multi-track audio, apply colour correction with LUT support, and export at high quality. The M4 chip handles 4K ProRes playback without dropping frames. When I was finishing that wedding video during the power cut, I was scrubbing through two hours of 4K footage from a Sony A7 IV and it was smooth. Genuinely, impressively smooth.

But here is the thing — LumaFusion is not DaVinci Resolve. It is not Final Cut Pro. It is not even close. And while DaVinci Resolve does technically exist on iPad now, the iPad version is so stripped down compared to the desktop version that it feels like a different application wearing the same logo. No Fusion (the compositing tool), limited colour grading compared to the full version, and the file management is painful because iPadOS makes accessing footage from external drives more cumbersome than it should be.

Final Cut Pro for iPad is beautiful to look at and Apple clearly put thought into the touch interface. But it lacks features that professional editors need. No multicam editing. No advanced audio mixing. No third-party plugin support. You cannot even import custom LUTs in the same straightforward way you can in the desktop version. For a quick social media edit or a simple YouTube video, it is fine. For client work where someone is paying you money and has specific expectations, it falls short.

The M4 chip can absolutely handle professional-grade video editing workloads. The hardware is there. The 16GB of RAM in the higher-end models is sufficient for most editing tasks. The problem is entirely software. Apple has built a Formula 1 car and then installed a speed limiter that tops out at 120 km/h.

The Specific Video Workflow Problem

Let me give you a concrete example that happens to me at least once a week. A client sends me raw footage on a hard drive. On my MacBook, I plug in the drive, open DaVinci Resolve, import the footage directly from the drive, edit, and export. The whole workflow is drag-and-drop intuitive.

On the iPad Pro, I plug in the same drive through a USB-C hub. The Files app sees it, but some video editing apps have inconsistent access to external storage. Sometimes LumaFusion can read from the drive directly. Sometimes it wants me to import files first, which means copying 50GB of wedding footage to the iPad's internal storage — and even the 1TB model fills up fast when you are working with raw 4K. Then there is the export: I cannot just throw a finished video onto a client's Google Drive folder with the same ease as on macOS, because background processes in iPadOS are still limited and large uploads sometimes get interrupted when the app goes to the background.

These are not dealbreakers for everyone. But when you are billing a client by the hour and you spend 20 minutes fighting the file system instead of editing, it adds up. And it reminds you, every single time, that the iPad Pro is running an operating system designed for a phone, not a workstation.

The iPadOS Problem: Hardware From 2025, Software From 2019

I need to be blunt here because I think Apple deserves the criticism. The iPad Pro M4 has a chip that benchmarks higher than most laptops. It has a display that is better than what you find on Rs 2 lakh MacBook Pro configurations. It has Thunderbolt connectivity, support for external displays, and enough RAM to handle real work. The hardware is laptop-grade. The software is not. Still.

Stage Manager was supposed to fix the multitasking problem. It did not. It added floating windows that feel like a compromise — not as fluid as the old split-screen iPad multitasking, and not as capable as real desktop window management. I can technically have four apps on screen at once, but the windows overlap awkwardly, resizing is fidgety, and on the 13-inch display it still feels cramped compared to even a basic 14-inch laptop.

The file management situation remains the biggest pain point. The Files app is better than it was three years ago, but it still cannot do things that Finder on macOS handles without thinking. Batch renaming files requires workarounds. Moving large numbers of files between folders is slow and unreliable. Connecting to SMB shares on a local network works sometimes and refuses to connect other times for no apparent reason.

Then there is the app gap. Not in terms of number of apps — the App Store has plenty — but in terms of professional-grade desktop applications. Where is the full version of Adobe Illustrator? Photoshop on iPad has improved but still lacks features like proper Actions support and some filter categories. Affinity Designer on iPad is actually quite good, I will give it credit. But for certain workflows, there is no iPad equivalent of the desktop tool, and the "use the web version" suggestion falls apart when the web version is built for a mouse-and-keyboard interface.

I keep waiting for the iPadOS update that finally unlocks what this hardware can do. Every year at WWDC, I watch the presentation hoping for real changes. And every year, I get incremental improvements that do not address the fundamental limitation: iPadOS still does not trust the user to manage their own device the way macOS does.

Writing and Productivity: Better Than You Expect

Not everything about the iPad Pro as a work machine is frustrating. For writing — proposals, emails, blog posts, client briefs — it is genuinely excellent once you pair it with the Magic Keyboard.

I write all my client proposals on the iPad now. I use iA Writer for long-form text and Notion for project management. The keyboard is comfortable for sessions up to about two hours, after which my wrists start wanting something with more key travel. But the overall experience — sit down at a coffee shop in Indiranagar with the iPad in laptop mode, open a split screen with Notion on one side and iA Writer on the other, and just work — is pleasant in a way that my MacBook never quite matches. The iPad is lighter, the display is better, and something about the slightly constrained environment actually helps me focus because I am not tempted to open 47 browser tabs.

For presentations, I use Keynote. It is fantastic on the iPad. Building slides, dragging in assets, using the Apple Pencil to sketch directly onto presentation layouts — this is one area where the touch interface is genuinely superior to a trackpad. I have walked into client meetings, detached the iPad from the keyboard, connected it to their TV via AirPlay, and presented directly. It feels professional and modern in a way that pulling out a laptop does not quite replicate.

The Apple Pencil Pro and Magic Keyboard: Almost Mandatory, Definitely Expensive

Here is where the pricing conversation gets uncomfortable. The iPad Pro M4 13-inch starts at Rs 1,12,900 for the base model with 256GB storage and the M4 chip with a 9-core GPU. That price is already eye-watering for most Indian buyers. But the dirty truth is that you probably need at least two accessories to make this thing work as a professional tool.

One lakh fifty-seven thousand seven hundred rupees. For a tablet. Let that number sit for a moment.

If you go for the 512GB storage model — which I would genuinely recommend for anyone working with video — the iPad alone jumps to Rs 1,32,900, pushing the total kit past Rs 1,77,000. That is MacBook Pro territory. That is a decent used car in some parts of India. That is nine months of rent for a 1BHK in many Tier 2 cities.

The Magic Keyboard is the more painful purchase of the two because it feels like it should be included at this price point. The iPad Pro without the keyboard is a beautiful tablet, but it is not a work machine. You need the keyboard and its trackpad for any serious text input, file management, or multitasking. At Rs 32,900, it costs more than many budget laptops. The build quality is excellent — the aluminium palm rest, the satisfying key feel, the smooth trackpad — but the price makes you wince.

The Apple Pencil Pro is easier to justify if you draw or annotate. At Rs 11,900, it is expensive for a stylus, but there is nothing else that matches the experience on this screen. The older Apple Pencil (USB-C) works with the M4 model and costs less, but you lose the squeeze gesture, barrel rotation, and haptic feedback. If you are a designer, the Pro version is worth the premium. If you mostly type and occasionally annotate PDFs, save the money.

Where to Buy: Apple Store vs Croma vs Amazon India

I bought mine from the Apple India online store during a back-to-school promotion. Here is my honest assessment of the three main buying channels.

Apple India Online Store

The advantage here is the trade-in programme, education pricing (if you qualify, and Apple India's verification is not very strict — you mostly just need a valid college ID or even an educator email), and the guarantee of a genuine product. The Apple Store also sometimes bundles AirPods or gift cards during seasonal sales. Delivery in Bangalore took three days. Customer service was responsive when I had a question about engraving. The downside: no real negotiation on price. What you see is what you pay.

Croma

Croma occasionally runs offers that bundle accessories at a slight discount or give store credit on large purchases. The advantage of Croma is that you can physically handle the iPad before buying, which I always recommend — the 13-inch model is large and heavy (for a tablet), and some people prefer the 11-inch. Croma's extended warranty plans are reasonably priced and cover accidental damage, which Apple's standard warranty does not. The downside is that Croma staff will sometimes try to upsell you on unnecessary accessories or protection plans. Know what you want before you walk in.

Amazon India

The best time to buy any Apple product on Amazon India is during the Great Indian Festival sale (usually October) or Republic Day sale (January). I have seen the iPad Pro M4 go as low as Rs 1,04,000 during flash sales with bank card discounts and exchange offers stacked together. That is a genuine saving of Rs 8,000-9,000 over MRP. Amazon also tends to have the most flexible EMI options through partner banks. The risk with Amazon, however, is the occasional fulfilment issue — damaged packaging, delayed delivery for high-value items — and returns on electronics can sometimes be a headache. I would suggest buying only from "Sold by Appario Retail" or "Sold by Cloudtail" listings, as these are Amazon's own retail arms and you are more likely to get a smooth experience.

Vijay Sales and Reliance Digital

I should mention these two as well because they are widely available across India. Both run their own finance schemes and can sometimes match or beat Croma on pricing. Vijay Sales in particular has a reputation for better customer service in Mumbai and Pune. Reliance Digital has the JioFinance integration which might offer additional cashback. Your mileage will vary by city and by the specific store manager you deal with.

EMI Options: Because Rs 1,12,900 Upfront Is Not Realistic for Most of Us

Let us talk about money honestly. Most Indian creative professionals — especially freelancers in their twenties, which describes half the people who would want this device — cannot drop over a lakh on a tablet in one shot. I certainly could not when I was starting out. The EMI situation in India has improved significantly, and it is worth understanding your options.

No-Cost EMI

Both Amazon and Flipkart offer no-cost EMI on select credit cards, typically ranging from 3 to 12 months. On a Rs 1,12,900 purchase, a 12-month no-cost EMI works out to roughly Rs 9,408 per month. "No-cost" here means the interest is built into a discount — technically you are paying MRP in instalments, but there is no additional interest charge. This is probably the most sensible option for most buyers. HDFC, ICICI, and SBI credit cards usually have the best EMI offers on Apple products during sale periods.

Bajaj Finserv EMI Card

If you do not have a credit card — and many young freelancers in India do not — the Bajaj Finserv EMI card is worth looking into. It works at Croma, Vijay Sales, Reliance Digital, and the Apple India online store. You can get approval relatively quickly if you have a decent CIBIL score, and they offer EMI tenures from 3 to 24 months. The 24-month option brings the monthly payment down to around Rs 5,200 per month, though there is an interest component on longer tenures that you should factor in. Read the terms carefully.

Apple Trade-In and Apple Card (When It Arrives)

Apple's trade-in programme gives you credit for your old device. I traded in a 2020 iPad Air and got about Rs 14,000 off, which helped. The values are not spectacular compared to what you might get selling privately on OLX or Cashify, but the convenience of a direct deduction at checkout is nice. Apple Card is not available in India yet, but if it launches here, it will likely offer monthly instalment plans similar to what US buyers get.

A practical tip: if you are a freelancer, check if your business account or current account offers a credit card with higher EMI eligibility. HDFC SmartBuy and ICICI EMI options often have better terms on business cards than personal cards. Also, remember that you can claim the iPad as a business expense for tax purposes if you are registered as a freelancer or sole proprietor — talk to your CA about this.

Can the iPad Pro M4 Replace a MacBook for Professional Work in India?

This is the question everyone asks. And the answer, I have learned after five months of trying, is genuinely complicated. So let me break it down by use case instead of giving you a single yes or no.

When the iPad Pro DOES Replace a Laptop

• Illustration and digital art: Full stop, the iPad Pro is better than any laptop for this. The direct-on-screen drawing experience with the Apple Pencil cannot be matched by a trackpad. If your primary work is illustration, concept art, or digital painting, the iPad Pro is your primary machine and a desktop or laptop becomes the secondary device.
• Light photo editing: Lightroom on iPad is mature and well-optimised. For photographers who shoot events and need to do quick edits, culling, and delivery, the iPad Pro handles the full workflow. I know wedding photographers who carry an iPad Pro as their only editing machine on shoot days.
• Presentations and client meetings: The portability, the beautiful screen, the ability to annotate with the Pencil during a presentation — the iPad is superior to a laptop for client-facing work.
• Content consumption and research: Reading reference material, watching tutorial videos, browsing inspiration on Behance — the tandem OLED display makes all of this better than any laptop screen short of a MacBook Pro with the XDR display.
• Note-taking and brainstorming: With the Pencil, the iPad is the best digital notebook ever made. GoodNotes and Notability are exceptional apps. If you attend a lot of meetings or workshops, this alone might justify the purchase.

When the iPad Pro CANNOT Replace a Laptop

• Professional video editing: If you use DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro, or Final Cut Pro (full version) as your primary editing tool, the iPad versions are not there yet. You will hit walls — plugin limitations, file management issues, export restrictions. For YouTube content or social media reels, the iPad is fine. For wedding films, corporate videos, or anything where a client expects broadcast-quality output, you still need a laptop or desktop.
• Web development and coding: This is a hard no. Yes, there are code editors on iPad. Yes, you can SSH into a remote server. But the reality of web development — running local servers, using terminal commands, managing git repositories, testing across browsers — is not practical on iPadOS. If you code for a living, the iPad is a companion device at best.
• Complex design work with desktop applications: If your workflow requires the full Adobe Creative Suite — InDesign for print layouts, After Effects for motion graphics, full Illustrator with all plugins — the iPad cannot replace your desktop setup. Affinity apps on iPad are capable, but they are not identical to their desktop counterparts, and InDesign has no iPad equivalent worth mentioning.
• Multi-monitor workflows: The iPad supports one external display now, which is a big improvement. But if your work involves having Photoshop on one screen, reference material on another, and a chat window on a third — the kind of setup that is common in design studios — the iPad is not going to work as your only machine.
• Heavy file management and transfer: If you regularly deal with large files from clients, external drives, network storage, and need to organise and move things around quickly, iPadOS will slow you down. The Files app has improved but it is still not a replacement for Finder or Windows Explorer for heavy file operations.

The Honest Middle Ground

For me, the iPad Pro has become my primary device about 60% of the time. I do all my illustration work on it. I write on it. I present from it. I do light video edits on it when I am away from my desk. But when a big video project comes in, or when I need to work with InDesign, or when a client sends me a complex After Effects project file, I reach for my MacBook Pro. The iPad Pro has not replaced my laptop. It has replaced about 60% of what my laptop used to do, and it does that 60% better than the laptop ever did.

That is the most honest assessment I can give. Whether that is worth Rs 1.5 lakh to you depends entirely on what your 60% looks like.

Display, Build, and Battery: The Quick Notes

I have focused on workflow in this review because that is what matters to a working professional. But the hardware deserves a few words.

The tandem OLED display is the best screen on any tablet, and honestly one of the best screens on any portable device. The blacks are true blacks. The peak brightness outdoors is high enough to work in a Bangalore café with afternoon sun coming through the window — something my old iPad Air could not manage. The colour accuracy out of the box is excellent, and if you are paranoid (like I am), you can calibrate it with a hardware colorimeter and get Delta E values under 1.0. For design work, that matters.

The build quality is absurd for how thin this thing is. At 5.1mm for the 13-inch model, I genuinely worried about bending it when I first took it out of the box. Five months later, no issues, but I am careful with it. I would not throw it in a backpack without a hard case. This is not a device that tolerates carelessness.

Battery life with actual work — not the "looping a video with the screen at 50%" benchmark that Apple quotes — gives me about 7-8 hours of mixed use. That means Procreate for a couple of hours, some writing, web browsing, and maybe an hour of video editing. Under sustained video editing, it drops to about 5-6 hours. Under sustained Procreate use with large canvases, I get about 8-9 hours. These numbers are real-world, not lab conditions. For a tablet, this is very good. For a laptop replacement, it is about the same as a MacBook Air.

The four-speaker system sounds excellent. I do not mix audio on the iPad's speakers — nobody should mix audio on any device's built-in speakers — but for reviewing cuts, watching reference material, and video calls with clients, the audio quality is noticeably better than my MacBook Air's speakers. FaceTime calls on this thing sound great.

The M4 Chip: Power Without a Purpose (Yet)

The M4 chip in the iPad Pro is, by the numbers, faster than the M3 chip in the current MacBook Air. Read that sentence again. The tablet chip is faster than the laptop chip. In real-world use, the iPad Pro exports video faster than a MacBook Air. It renders 3D objects in uMake and Shapr3D faster than you would expect. It handles Procreate canvases with 100+ layers without stuttering.

And yet, none of this performance translates into doing more things, because iPadOS does not allow the kinds of professional applications that would actually use this power. The M4 chip could run the full version of DaVinci Resolve. Apple will not let it. It could run a proper version of Xcode for app development. Apple has not brought it. It could run virtual machines or local development servers. iPadOS says no.

This is the central frustration of the iPad Pro M4. It is the most powerful mobile chip in any consumer device, sitting inside the thinnest and lightest professional tablet ever made, with the best display in its class — and it spends most of its time running software that could work perfectly fine on an M1 chip from four years ago. The hardware has lapped the software by at least two generations.

Who Should Actually Buy This in India

After five months of daily use, here is who I think the iPad Pro M4 13-inch is actually for:

• Professional illustrators and digital artists who already have a desktop or laptop for heavy work and want the best portable drawing device. This is the primary audience, and for them, the iPad Pro is worth every rupee.
• Photographers who want a portable editing and culling machine with an incredibly accurate display. Pair it with a good card reader and Lightroom, and you have a fantastic on-location editing setup.
• Business professionals who do a lot of presentations, client meetings, and note-taking, and who value the form factor and display quality over raw computing flexibility.
• Students in design programmes who can use the education pricing and who will primarily use Procreate, Affinity apps, and writing tools. The education discount brings the price down meaningfully, and the iPad will last through a 4-year degree easily.

Who should NOT buy this:

• Anyone who thinks it will fully replace a laptop for professional work. It will not, and you will be frustrated.
• Video editors who work with clients and need desktop-class editing tools. Get a MacBook Pro instead.
• Developers. Just get a MacBook. Any MacBook.
• People who want a tablet for watching Netflix and browsing the web. The iPad Air or even the base iPad does that equally well for much less money.

The Question I Cannot Answer

A friend of mine — 24 years old, just finished his design degree from MIT Pune, starting freelance work — asked me last week: "Should I buy the iPad Pro M4 or a MacBook Air M3?" He has a budget of about Rs 1.2 lakh. He does branding work, some illustration, some basic video content for Instagram reels, and he wants to build his freelance career.

I have been thinking about this question for a week and I still do not have a clean answer.

The MacBook Air gives him a full operating system, access to every professional application that exists, the ability to code if he ever wants to learn, proper file management, and a device that every single client and collaborator can work with. If he buys a MacBook Air M3 for Rs 1,14,900 and a basic Wacom tablet for Rs 8,000, he has a complete professional setup for under Rs 1.25 lakh. No compromises. No "I can't do that on iPad" moments.

But the iPad Pro gives him that drawing experience. That display. That feeling of putting pencil to glass and creating something directly, with no layer of abstraction between his hand and the work. It gives him a device that makes presentations feel alive, that fits in a bag he can carry on a crowded BMTC bus without back pain, that turns on instantly and is ready to sketch the moment an idea hits. There is something about creating on the iPad that feels different — more immediate, more intimate — than working on a laptop. It is not better in every measurable way. But it is better in a way that is hard to measure and hard to ignore.

If he buys the iPad Pro, he will need to buy the Pencil and Keyboard, blowing past his budget. And in six months, when his first big client asks him to do a multi-page brochure in InDesign or needs After Effects motion graphics, he will be stuck. He will need a laptop anyway. So the iPad becomes a Rs 1.5 lakh addition to his setup, not a replacement for the computer he still needs to buy.

If he buys the MacBook Air, he can do everything from day one. Everything. But he will never have that drawing experience. He will use a Wacom and it will be fine, but it will not be the same. And when he sits in a client meeting in Koregaon Park with a MacBook, he will look like every other freelancer. The iPad, unfairly or not, makes a different impression.

I told him to buy the MacBook Air. I think that was the right advice. But I am not sure, and I keep going back and forth in my head. Because when I pick up my iPad Pro and the Pencil and start drawing, there is a feeling I get — a directness, a joy in the tool itself — that I never get from my MacBook. And that feeling is worth something. I just cannot tell you how many rupees it is worth.

I suppose that is the iPad Pro M4 in a nutshell. It is the best tablet money can buy. It might even be the best creative tool money can buy. But a tool is only as useful as what you are allowed to do with it, and until Apple decides to let this hardware breathe, there will always be an asterisk next to every recommendation. A big, expensive, beautifully designed asterisk.