I think I made a big mistake buying the new M4 iPad Pro — here’s why
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The M4 iPad Pro is the absolute best. If it was legal to marry a tablet, I would have slapped a ring on Crew Cupertino’s latest slab the first day I bought it. In my mind, there’s no question it's the greatest iPad of all time.
Trouble is, an even better device has kinda ruined it for me.
Enter the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024). We currently rank it as the best gaming laptop, and I was privileged enough that the company loaned a review unit to me for a month. And here’s the hook: when I had to return it, I was pretty heartbroken. I wasn’t just using the portable PC for work purposes while I had the G14; I was playing the best Steam games on it every night just for kicks. That’s how good this wonder of a laptop is.
So when I sent it back to Asus I tried to fill the gaping gaming hole with my trusty Steam Deck OLED. Yet even what I consider the best handheld gaming console there’s ever been couldn’t shake my longing for the latest Zephyrus.
Lo and behold, I then went and bought the ROG Zephyrus G14… which I’m now going to be paying off over the next nine months — thank you installment plans! While my bank balance may regret the decision, my inner child who first fell in love with gaming back in 1991 certainly doesn’t.
I’ve owned Asus’ incredible OLED gaming laptop for a few weeks now, and that’s had a serious impact on how much I’ve been using my 13-inch M4 iPad Pro… which I only bought a couple of months ago.
Make no mistake, it’s an incredible tablet, and thanks to Apple’s renewed interest in gaming, classic titles like Alien: Isolation are perfectly playable on it. The slab to beat also sounds comfortably better than any laptop I’ve ever reviewed, which is pretty astonishing when you consider its the thinnest device Apple has ever manufactured.
G14 NOW
And yet… the G14 is just better in pretty much every way. As my computing colleague Tony Polanco put it brilliantly when he tried using the iPad Pro 2024 as a laptop for a week, “it went exactly as expected.” Spoiler alert: it wasn’t pretty.
iPads are great for web surfing and acting as Netflix machines, there’s no question of that. As someone who suffers from insomnia, I take my M4 Pro to bed every night and stick on YouTube sleeping videos to try and help me get forty winks. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Yet now that’s basically my main reason for using the latest iPad Pro.
I take my M4 Pro to bed every night and stick on YouTube sleeping videos to try and help me get forty winks.
Well, that’s a half-truth. On some evenings, I place it next to the Zephyrus G14 while I’m gaming so if I get stuck on my first run of Elden Ring on PC (which happens alarmingly way too much considering I finished the FromSoftware’s open-world wonder on PS5 after 87 brutal hours), a quick YouTube search on the iPad can guide me to where I should be headed next.
That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement for a product that starts at $1,299, though, right? Bright and beautiful, there’s no tablet that comes close to the M4 iPad Pro. It’s in a league of its own. Yet purely from a practical standpoint, one of the best laptops is just more useful in pretty much every situation; be it work-based tasks or gaming in the case of the G14.
I’m not going to sell Apple’s latest prosumer tablet anytime soon — mainly because iPads come into their own when you’re on holiday and the weather suddenly turns south. Yet when it comes to playing the best PC games or watching the best Disney Plus movies (which sound great on the G14 after I synced it up with a budget yet brilliant pair of Bluetooth speakers), the OLED laptop beats the first ever OLED iPad every time.
