The £1,648 question: can the 13-inch iPad Pro M4 and its Magic Keyboard really replace your laptop?

£1,648. That is what the laptop-killer actually costs: £1,299 for the 13-inch iPad Pro with the M4 chip, plus £349 for the Magic Keyboard that turns it into something you can type on for a living. When Apple unveiled the M4 iPad Pro on 7 May 2024, the pitch was unmistakable — this is the tablet that finally retires your MacBook. UK stores had it on shelves from 15 May. The question I keep coming back to is whether “nearly replaces a laptop” is worth the better part of £1,700.

The thinness is the headline — and it earns its billing

At 5.1mm, the 13-inch iPad Pro is, by Apple’s own reckoning, the thinnest product the company has ever made, and up to 103g lighter than the model it replaces. Numbers like that read as marketing until you remember what a 13-inch slab usually weighs in a bag. The genuine appeal here is not the spec-sheet bragging right; it is that a screen this large stops feeling like a commitment. You can carry it the way you carry a magazine, not the way you carry a workstation.

That thinness is the whole emotional case for the device. A laptop, even a featherweight one, announces itself. This does not. And for the kind of buyer MTW writes for — someone who already owns a capable machine and wants the lighter, sharper second device — that restraint is exactly the luxury on offer.

An M4 chip writing cheques the software still can’t fully cash

Inside is the M4, which Apple says delivers 1.5x faster CPU performance than the M2 in the previous iPad Pro. That is desktop-class silicon in a 5.1mm chassis, and on raw capability there is simply no argument: this hardware will not be the thing that slows you down.

Which is precisely what makes the laptop comparison so frustrating. The chip is ready to be a laptop. The point of friction is everything around it — file handling, the way two apps share a screen, the small daily workflows that a Mac does without you thinking. The silicon outpaces the question being asked of it, and that gap between what the M4 can do and what iPadOS lets it do is the real story of “nearly succeeded.”

The Magic Keyboard is where the dream lives or dies

You cannot seriously talk about replacing a laptop without the keyboard, and the 13-inch Magic Keyboard costs £349 on its own. That is not an accessory price; that is a meaningful fraction of a whole second device, and it is the figure that should give every prospective buyer pause. The keyboard is excellent — a proper typing surface, a trackpad, a floating hinge that holds the screen at a usable angle. But the maths is brutal: £1,299 plus £349 lands you at £1,648, which is comfortably MacBook Air territory and then some.

That is the bit that would stop me reaching for my card without thinking hard first. You are paying a premium for the tablet, and a second premium to make the tablet behave like the thing you already could have bought outright.

Ten hours, and what that figure quietly assumes

Apple rates the iPad Pro for up to 10 hours of web browsing over Wi-Fi. That is a respectable working day on paper, and for the email-and-documents crowd it will hold up. But “up to 10 hours” and “web use” are doing quiet work in that sentence. Drive the M4 the way its performance invites you to — heavy editing, a wall of browser tabs, the screen at full brightness — and that figure is the ceiling, not the floor. It is enough to leave the charger at home for a coffee-shop stint; it is not a promise you can lean on for a full untethered day of real work.

The screen is the genuinely premium bit

If anything justifies the tier, it is the display. The 13-inch panel is the standout reason to choose the larger model over its smaller sibling, and the full specifications Apple lists for the M4 iPad Pro make clear this is the most accomplished screen the line has carried. For anyone whose day is photos, video, design or simply reading for hours, the screen is not a nice-to-have — it is the reason to spend here rather than on a conventional laptop with a duller panel. This is the Selfridges-window appeal: you are buying the best display in the room, and you can feel it the moment you turn it on.

Who I’d hand £1,648 to — and who should keep their money

So, can it replace a laptop? Near enough to be tempting, not quite enough to be honest about. If your work is creative and visual, if you already live inside the Apple ecosystem, and if the appeal of the thinnest, sharpest screen Apple sells is worth a genuine premium to you — then yes, this is a glorious object and I would tell you to buy the 13-inch outright and add the keyboard without flinching.

But if you are buying it because you want a laptop and hope this will spare you owning one, I would steer you off. At £1,648 with the keyboard you are paying laptop money to get a device that asks you to adapt to it rather than the other way round. The thing that would change my mind is software, not hardware: the day iPadOS stops getting in the M4’s way, the “nearly” disappears. Until then, buy the iPad Pro because you want the best tablet ever made — and keep the laptop you already trust.