I think I made a big mistake buying the new M4 iPad Pro — here’s why

An iPad M4 Pro on the left next to an Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024) on the right.

(Image credit: Tom's Guide)

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.

G14 NOW

Cyberpunk 2077 with Alienware Pro Wireless Gaming Mouse on an Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024). — (Image credit: Tom's Guide)

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.

More from Tom's Guide

Dave is a computing editor at Tom’s Guide and covers everything from cutting edge laptops to ultrawide monitors. When he’s not worrying about dead pixels, Dave enjoys regularly rebuilding his PC for absolutely no reason at all. In a previous life, he worked as a video game journalist for 15 years, with bylines across GamesRadar+, PC Gamer and TechRadar. Despite owning a graphics card that costs roughly the same as your average used car, he still enjoys gaming on the go and is regularly glued to his Switch. Away from tech, most of Dave’s time is taken up by walking his husky, buying new TVs at an embarrassing rate and obsessing over his beloved Arsenal.