The updated MacPad.

As I hinted in my story on the issues of iPadOS last week, I upgraded from an 11” iPad Pro to a 13” iPad Pro (1 TB, Wi-Fi-only model). While I was very happy with the 11” form factor, I decided to return to the larger model for two reasons:

I wanted to have maximum thinness with the ultimate iPad Pro model Apple makes.

I sacrificed the physical comfort of the 11” iPad Pro to get a larger display for my MacPad as well as portable gaming.

Today, I will explain how I was able to immediately turn the brand-new 13” iPad Pro into a convertible MacPad using a combination of accessories and some new techniques I’ve been exploring. I’ll also share my experience with using the iPad’s glorious Tandem OLED display in a variety of gaming setups ranging from streaming to emulators.

Let’s dive in.

The 13” iPad Pro as a MacPad

For those who may have missed my story a couple of months ago, the MacPad is a convertible Apple computer I created by combining a headless MacBook Air with an iPad Pro. In terms of hardware, the two computers are joined via a modded iPad cover and magnets; from a software perspective, I’m simply relying on Apple’s own Sidecar technology to turn the iPad into a display for the Mac. As I showcased in the story, the MacPad lets me use both iPadOS and macOS at the same time, allowing me to decide which operating system is required for the task at hand. Best of all, when I’m done working with the laptop, I can rip its display off, and it’s a tablet.

A few people have asked me if the MacPad was a joke that I published “for clicks”. Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough months ago: I’ve been using the MacPad as my main computer ever since. I modded my one and only MacBook Air and have been living with the MacPad for the past two months. It’s been a dream so far. So, as you can imagine, I was pretty excited at the prospect of having an OLED MacBook years before Apple releases official OLED laptops thanks to the MacPad.

Probably surprisingly no one, I was ready with accessories to turn the new iPad Pro into a MacPad before my iPad Pro even arrived. A few weeks ago, I noticed that ESR (a brand I knew from early MacPad experiments) had already released smart covers for the 2024 iPad Pro based on leaked schematics. Knowing that I’d want to immediately turn the iPad Pro into a MacPad, I placed an order for the 13” version and hoped ESR had gotten their measurements right. When the iPad Pro arrived, I was glad to confirm that the cover fit perfectly, so I got to work.

I followed the same process as the first MacPad mod. I took the cover, grabbed a knife, and cut it to separate the front cover (which I didn’t need) from the back cover. I also cut off the Apple Pencil protective flap at the top of the back cover.

Cutting the ESR cover.

Half of the cover.

Next, I took the circular magnets that come with the Rolling Square Edge Pro Core mounting system, lined them up with the magnets on the base of the MacPad, and attached them to the back cover, like so:

The magnets on the back cover.

And that was it! With the back cover ready to go, all I had to do was attach the new iPad Pro, initiate Sidecar via my shortcut, and there it was: an OLED Apple convertible running both iPadOS and macOS. I had this ready to go in 10 minutes after I received my iPad Pro last week.

Hello, OLED MacPad.

As you can see from the pictures, the 13” iPad Pro is vastly more visually balanced than the original 11” version of the MacPad. Although this unit is still heavier than a standard MacBook Air, the weight reduction of the 13” iPad Pro compared to the old 12.9” model has made the trade-off more acceptable than it used to be. I can work with this flavor of the MacPad now, despite the heavier form factor.

Using macOS on a 13” OLED display is glorious. In fact, if you think about it, excluding Hackintoshes, the updated MacPad has to be one of the first OLED MacBooks out in the wild. The macOS interface looks fantastic on the iPad Pro’s new display; as Jason Snell pointed out in his review, even black text against white backgrounds (like file names in a Finder window or text in Obsidian) looks crisper and more legible than before. Wallpapers look amazing on OLED, as does – obviously – dark mode with true black interfaces.

As always with the MacPad, at any point I can grab my “display”, close Sidecar, and be back on iPadOS. Or if I don’t want to use macOS at all but still have a nice keyboard, I can rely on Universal Control to work on iPadOS with the MacBook Air’s keyboard and trackpad, which is still bigger than the new Magic Keyboard’s trackpad. I just love this computer so much.

macOS as an app.

I want to share something else I’m working on, though. This is a bit of a work-in-progress experiment, so don’t consider it a finished idea since it’s going to require more testing. I’m playing around with ways to turn Apple’s official Smart Folio into a MacPad mounting system that doesn’t require cutting anything.

What annoys me about my MacPad setup is that I had to cut a back cover and, when I detach the iPad, I don’t have a full Smart Folio to carry it around in or prop it up on my lap with anymore. So last week, when I started using Apple’s new Smart Folio and realized I liked it a lot, I had an idea. I had to find a way to make it work with the MacPad without cutting it, thus retaining all of its features.

I’m pleased to say that I have a working prototype of this. It works, but it’s ugly, and I’m already working on a revision that I should have ready soon. The idea: I attached three magnets to the front of the Smart Folio, which is then folded to be attached to the MacPad. Here’s how I fold the Smart Folio:

Like I said: it’s ugly.

However, when folded like this, the Smart Folio effectively becomes a lever, causing the iPad to tilt backwards. To fix the issue, I applied two strips of Velcro that hold the folded folio together.

The strips of velcro help the folded part not to tilt over when attached to the MacPad.

It’s not nice to see, but it works. With this method, I didn’t have to cut anything, and when I detach the iPad, I can still use the Smart Folio for its intended use case to prop up the device on my desk or lap.

The working prototype.

I didn’t have to cut anything, and the Smart Folio still works as intended.

However, since I’m not happy with this first take, I’m already working on a second version, which will feature the following changes:

Slimmer magnets on the front. I ran out of Rolling Square magnets, and the next version will have smaller and slimmer ones.

I ran out of Rolling Square magnets, and the next version will have smaller and slimmer ones. Microsuction tape instead of Velcro. The Velcro method works, but since the soft side of Velcro is facing the iPad’s display when the Smart Folio cover is closed, it’s thicker than I’d like, causing the cover not to close completely. I’m going to try Sewell’s AirStick microsuction tape next, which leaves no residue and is reusable. My only concern is whether microsuction will be able to latch onto the inner side of the Smart Folio when mounted on the MacPad. If this doesn’t work out, I guess I’ll have to use Velcro again, but maybe less of it. In hindsight, I was afraid Velcro wouldn’t hold and used too much.

I’ll keep you posted on how this goes. In the meantime, I’m loving my 13” MacPad, and I’m also exploring the possibilities when it comes to the M4 iPad Pro and gaming.

The 13” iPad Pro as a Portable Gaming Display

A 13”, 5.1mm thin, 120Hz portable Tandem OLED display is too good an opportunity for portable gaming to pass up. So I leaned into it with the new iPad Pro.

Portable OLED gaming monitors do exist – and I’ve tried some over the years – but the problem is, they’re bulky, not all of them support USB-C video input (sometimes they even come with the terrible micro HDMI connector), they still cost quite a bit of money, and they’re another thing you’re supposed to carry around. An iPad Pro, besides being an incredible display for gaming (at this point, the only missing feature I can think of is support for G-Sync/FreeSync), also happens to be a full-on computer. Is it expensive? Yes. But when you consider that the most portable OLED monitor might be ASUS’ foldable one that is expected to retail around $3,000, now an iPad Pro as a dedicated gaming display doesn’t sound so bad.

As I explained on Club MacStories a few months ago, I modded a GameSir G8 controller to fit large tablets and used it with the 11” iPad Pro at the time. The modded G8 fits around the 13” iPad Pro in landscape just fine, too. Even though extending the exposed spring may feel a little…strange at first, it doesn’t cause any issues.

A giant handheld.

The view from the back.

With the iPad Pro in this configuration, it basically turns into a giant PlayStation Portal: a lightweight, 13” OLED display I can use to stream games from around the house or via cloud gaming. Unlike the PlayStation Portal, however, this is an actual computer, which means I can also enjoy native iPad games and, more importantly these days, emulators for retro consoles.

In my tests with the iPad Pro as a portable gaming display, I used NVIDIA’s GeForce NOW game streaming service with the Ultimate tier to continue playing my Steam save for the excellent Dragon’s Dogma 2. The iPad Pro’s Wi-Fi 6E radio handled the streaming session beautifully with my 6E ASUS setup at home, and I was able to play the game at maximum settings with ray-tracing turned on thanks to GeForce NOW’s powerful 4080s in the cloud.

The big issue, obviously, was the lack of a native GeForce NOW app for iPad. Apple only recently relaxed its stance on game streaming apps on the App Store, and GeForce NOW is still a PWA that you have to install from Safari. I don’t know whether NVIDIA or Apple is to blame here, but as a customer, the reality is that I can’t stream my games in 4K, nor can I enable HDR within the GeForce NOW web app. I hope this improves in the near future, but regardless, the current PWA is still a good showcase of the iPad Pro’s large display and Wi-Fi 6E.

This window size matches the maximum resolution supported by the GeForce NOW web app on iPadOS. Not ideal.

And if you fill the screen instead, you can see the loss in image quality due to the low resolution.

For context, this is what streaming the same game at 4K from my gaming PC looks like on an iPad Pro.

I had an even better experience with Moonlight, the iPad app to stream games from a PC on my local network running the Sunshine streaming service. On a solid 6E network, the combination of Sunshine and Moonlight is incredible: I’ve been able to stream Hades II and Dragon’s Dogma 2 at 4K HDR, 120fps, with a 150 Mbits bandwidth seeing < 5ms latency and 0% dropped frames. With the iPad Pro securely held in the two halves of the controller, it felt like I was playing with PC games “natively” on the device even though I was actually streaming them. Plus, they looked amazing thanks to OLED. Even Hades, which is a fast-paced action game that requires good reflexes and timely button presses, felt great to play. In this configuration, the iPad Pro felt like a larger, lighter, OLED version of the Legion Go – except that my eGPU can stay in the other room and there are no wires involved.

Streaming in 4K on my local network is a dream.

The iPad Pro’s Wi-Fi performance and OLED display are the absolute stars here, but I want to highlight the Wi-Fi radio in particular. In researching this story, I thought it’d be interesting to compare the wireless performance of the latest iPad Pro to my Legion Go and the Logitech G Cloud, a handheld built specifically for streaming purposes that I purchased for this article.

Comparing handhelds. For streaming, the iPad Pro beat them all.

Long story short, the iPad Pro absolutely crushed the two consoles both in terms of image quality and performance. I was mostly disappointed with the G Cloud: while I find it one of the most comfortable handhelds I’ve ever used (I wish more companies would copy its design), its low-power specs meant that Wi-Fi reception wasn’t solid enough and its SoC was lagging behind in terms of video decoding latency. For a handheld that is primarily advertised for streaming, I find its lack of Wi-Fi 6 perplexing to say the least. The G Cloud is stuck on Wi-Fi 5; as a result, in my tests I saw frequent fluctuations in network latency as the device couldn’t keep a stable connection when streaming 1080p content.

I had a better experience with the Legion Go, which was able to stream 1440p content, decode the video signal more quickly than the G Cloud, and keep a more stable connection as well thanks to its support for Wi-Fi 6E. However, I experienced the occasional dip in streaming quality, stuttering, or latency in fast-paced action sequences. My overall experience was much better than with the G Cloud, but I wouldn’t call it flawless.

The iPad Pro, on the other hand, was close to perfection. Of all the devices I tested for Moonlight streaming, the M4 iPad Pro had, by far, the strongest and most reliable Wi-Fi 6E connection combined with excellent video decoding performance – all of this, mind you, while streaming games at a higher resolution than the other handhelds (4K) with a higher bandwidth cap (150 Mbits) and while displaying content on a gorgeous OLED display. In fact, playing games via Moonlight streaming on the iPad Pro with a USB-C controller was so smooth and consistent, it often gave me the illusion I was playing the game right on my iPad rather than on a different computer in another room. I don’t know how Apple achieved this kind of Wi-Fi performance in a thin tablet, but the mix of solid Wi-Fi, excellent decoding times, and image quality have made the iPad Pro the best device I’ve ever tested for local PC game streaming. (Yes, even better than a Steam Deck OLED because of the lighter form factor.)

As for non-streaming games, I’m not particularly interested in the catalog of Apple Arcade content, nor do I want to play AAA games available on iPad that I already played years ago elsewhere (the day-one release of Assassin’s Creed Shadows later this year may be my first exception), but I’m very much intrigued by the newfound potential of emulators. I primarily tested Delta, for Nintendo games, and PPSSPP, for Sony PSP games.

I’ve been building my personal collection of retro Nintendo games in Delta using a cartridge reader that lets me rip my own SNES and GBA cartridges, which I will cover in the future. I’ve also been using a pre-release version of Delta for iPad, which cleverly relies on a custom keyboard to show you a virtual Nintendo controller in the lower half of the screen. Given that Delta doesn’t offer any upscaling features and that old Nintendo games are relatively easy to emulate, I didn’t encounter any performance issues, and all games looked great on OLED. I recently started a new playthrough of the original Chrono Trigger on cartridge, and it’s fun to be able to transfer my save back and forth between Delta and the physical SNES cartridge using only my iPad and a USB-C cable.

Ripping SNES cartridges to transfer to my iPad. What a time to be alive.

I love this little thing so much.

Transferring the ROM and save file to my iPad…

…which I can continue playing in Delta.

PPSSPP also worked well, but this is where – even with the sheer horsepower of the M4 – I started seeing the issues inherent to the absence of JIT compilation on iPadOS.

On my gaming PC and Android gaming phone, I can upscale PSP games with PPSSPP to 4K (8x resolution) and play them at 60fps with no lag thanks to JIT support in the emulator’s CPU core. On an M4 iPad Pro with 16 GB of RAM, I cannot go above 1080p upscaling without seeing dropped frames, choppy audio, and other slowdowns. All the advances in the M-series chips and higher memory can’t do anything against the simple fact that 3D emulators are CPU-heavy and require just-in-time compilation of a game’s code if they want to run well and go beyond the limitations of original hardware. For certain types of console architectures, there’s no away around it: they need JIT to run well.

A PSP game emulated on my iPad Pro and displayed on an external monitor.

The limitations of iPadOS notwithstanding, I’ve had a great time with PPSSPP playing classics such as God of War: Chains of Olympus and the evergreen masterpiece that is Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions. I plan on spending some time over the next few weeks digitizing my entire collection of UMDs to ISO files that I can use in PPSSPP. Now that emulators are proving to be a popular category on the App Store, I hope Apple will figure out a way to open up the JIT entitlement to more apps beyond web browsers in the EU.

As this story shows, the problems of iPadOS I’ve documented do not change the fact that the iPad hardware remains my all-time favorite Apple computer. The flexibility and modularity made possible by the iPad have no equal. The M4 iPad Pro’s OLED display and lighter form factor make these setups even better since the device is easier to hold and software running on it looks better than ever.

Sure, the MacPad continues to be a strange experiment that I do not recommend others follow. But given the state of iPadOS at the moment, isn’t the whole point of the iPad experience to push the limits of its hardware and see what happens?

Well, at least that’s my approach. Expect more of it soon.

Today, Apple said goodbye to what has been the most important MacBook in recent memory. The M1 MacBook Air is longer being sold by Apple, having been replaced by the M2 MacBook Air directly, which itself has been bumped down the product line by the new M3 models.

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Now almost three-and-a-half years old, it was certainly time for this laptop to head into the sunset. It uses an old chassis and a fairly old chip, and it was no longer competitive at $999.

But let’s take a moment and appreciate what an important laptop the M1 MacBook Air was — and what it’s represented for Apple over the past few years.

The M1 MacBook Air was first launched in the fall of 2020, a few months after the M1 chip itself was announced at WWDC 2020. Of course, this wasn’t just a chip — this was the beginning of Apple’s two-year transition from Intel to its own Apple Silicon. You might think you’d also want to release some dazzling new laptops that showcase the chips and punctuate the moment. In particular with the M1, you might want to redesign the MacBook Air, let’s say, to demonstrate the efficiency of these chips. But no, that wouldn’t come until almost two years later with the M2 MacBook Air.

For this first M1 MacBook, the focus was squarely on the M1 chip itself. The same was true of the 13-inch MacBook Pro and Mac mini that launched alongside it. All three kept the same chassis as was used in the Intel days. In the case of the M1 MacBook Air, this design had been in use since 2018. The continuity in design, however, allowed Apple to spotlight just how big of a difference the M1 made, especially against the dual-core Intel chips used previously. And man, the difference couldn’t have been more drastic.

The apples-to-apples comparison in performance and battery life showed just how far ahead Apple was jumping with the M1. At the time, many apps hadn’t been recompiled to run natively on Apple Silicon (because it’s ARM-based instead of x86), which in theory would have caused concern about performance. But no, everything ran amazingly smooth, allowing for developers to adopt the new platform over the coming months. People were still discovering just how significant the M1 was, upgrading to it years after its release.

So, while the M1 MacBook Air was the perfect vehicle for building Apple Silicon buzz, it also had a long life — hence why it’s still being sold many years later. In the past, the MacBook Air would get updated with new Intel chips each year, immediately replacing the previous version. But as the M1 MacBook Air would prove, Apple would find space in its lineup to keep around old models sold at a discount. The M1 MacBook Air was actually so good that, for a while, it was to the detriment of the M2 MacBook Air when it launched at $1,199. I found myself happily recommending the cheaper M1 MacBook Air to many, especially since it was often discounted.

This calculus changed once the M2 MacBook Air dropped to $1,099, but the M1 MacBook Air continued to drop to prices as low as $750. That’s an astounding value considering the build quality, battery life, and performance of this laptop. A previous era in Apple marketing might have been ashamed to devalue a product to prices this low, but Steve Jobs’ quadrant approach to Macs was abandoned long ago. And you better believe the M1 MacBook Air will continue to be sold at online retailers for low prices long after its official retirement.

The M2 MacBook Air very well may have the same kinds of legs as its predecessor — it’s already on its way to a two-year anniversary. But it was the M1 MacBook Air that proved it could be done, establishing Apple Silicon in this new era.

Apple fired on all cylinders throughout 2024 with big revamps to the iPad and Mac lineups, the iPhone 16, and the Apple Watch Series 10.

None of those products, however, have had and will continue to have the impact of Apple Vision Pro. For that reason, we are crowning the Apple Vision Pro as the 9to5Mac Product of the Year for 2024.

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac Editor-in-chief

Even though picking Apple Vision Pro as our Apple product of the year will be controversial, I’m certain we’ve made the right choice.

I’ve had very few if any, technological experiences as magical as interacting with Apple Vision Pro. Watching my first spatial video is a moment I’ll never forget. Watching my favorite movie (Back to the Future) immersed in the Cinema Environment was stunning. In fact, I’ve watched more movies this year than ever before, thanks to Apple Vision Pro.

Apple’s human interface design choices with Apple Vision Pro have already influenced its biggest competitor. Meta fired up its photocopiers right as Vision Pro launched to mimic Apple’s innovative spatial computing design paradigms. The company has also rolled out upgraded hand tracking and gestures, spatial video support, and more. The Apple Vision Pro’s influence is clear.

Then, of course, there’s Mac Virtual Display. This turns Apple Vision Pro into a truly versatile powerhouse computer. The initial version of Mac Virtual was impressive, but visionOS 2.2 took the experience to the next level with new wide and ultrawide options, improved visual fidelity, and proper audio routing.

Apple has work to do if it wants Apple Vision Pro (or whatever “Vision” product comes next) to truly become the future of computing. The good news is that I think Apple is taking the feedback in stride and will continue to perfect the spatial computing experience in years to come. We’ve also seen a notable uptick in the amount of Immersive Video and an increasingly impressive collection of third-party apps.

The clear honorable mentions for me are the M4 Mac mini and M4 iPad Pro. As impressive as those upgrades are, however, I don’t think they rival Apple Vision Pro. Nonetheless, I look forward to all the feedback from people telling me I’m wrong.

Zac Hall, Senior Summer Intern

Apple Vision Pro is undeniably the Apple product of the year. It didn’t exist as a product you could buy last year, and it won’t be novel next year. Every other Apple product is iterative this year. Apple Vision Pro is both technologically impressive and entirely new for Apple.

Sure, it’s astronomically priced, but it’s astronomically more impressive than all the affordable headsets out there. In short, AVP is a Mac and everything other headset is a Nintendo Wii. Yeah, affordable game consoles are better for entertaining games, but the Mac is a workhorse.

Apple Vision Pro is also a much better 1.0 product than the original iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. Each aforementioned product was replaced within a few years with a version that made the original hardware look long in the tooth. Maybe that will happen with Apple Vision Pro, but my expectation is that the gen-one AVP will be seen as futuristic and ahead of its time by the end of 2025 and mid-2026.

This is not to say that Apple Vision Pro is the technology of the year. The combination of ChatGPT and Claude share that honor. But with the narrow focus of Apple’s contributions to technology, I’m certain 2024 will be marked as the year Apple Vision Pro became reality. What about Apple Intelligence? Apple’s suite of generative AI features needs a dedicated chatbot before it should be considered comparable to ChatGPT and Claude.

Honorable mentions: Project Titan getting canceled (RIP Apple Car), 16GB RAM upgrade for M2 and M3 MacBook Air, and the demise of FineWoven iPhone cases.

Ryan Christoffel, News Writer

There’s no doubt Apple’s other 2024 products have been more ‘successful’ by typical benchmarks. But the Vision Pro is anything but typical.

Vision Pro launched a new product that put a classic Apple twist on an existing category. It’s technically a VR headset, but functionally an AR and VR device. Apple calls it a spatial computer.

While it may take years to see if spatial computing takes off, Vision Pro is undeniably a bold, innovative take on the future of computing.

Vision Pro deserves Product of the Year because it offers something radically unique among Apple’s 2024 lineup.

My most-used device of the year, the M4 iPad Pro, packs some impressive upgrades—but it’s still basically an iPad. The iPhone 16 Pro and M4 Mac mini are similarly strong products, but nothing altogether new.

These days, every new Apple product is expected to be a hit. Vision Pro certainly isn’t that yet. But Tim Cook’s grown accustomed to calling it an “early adopter product,” and I think that rings true.

I can’t wait to see where Apple takes the Vision Pro next.

Jeff Benjamin, Head of Video Content Production

There are a few unforgettable first tech experiences in my life: the first time I jumped over a Goomba while holding an NES controller, the first time I clicked the mouse on an original Macintosh, the first time I swiped on an iPhone’s 3.5-inch display, and yes, the first time I mashed the accelerator in a Tesla. These moments are rare, but when you’re in the midst of one, you just know.

The Apple Vision Pro gave me that feeling again—a feeling I’ve only experienced a handful of times in my lifetime.

To be honest, I was all set on crowning the M4 Mac mini because it offers unparalleled value and arguably the best bang for your buck in Apple’s history. However, the Apple Vision Pro deserves recognition because it genuinely feels like someone from the future dropped this headset in my lap. It’s not just a new product with a fancy exterior; it’s an entirely new device with groundbreaking UX and UI paradigms that still leave me in awe, almost a year after its release.

The Apple Vision Pro is hands down the best TV and movie-watching experience I’ve ever had. It surpasses any movie theater on the planet. It’s an isolating, single-user device, but I’d argue that smartphones themselves can be equally isolating, perhaps not physically, but mentally—perhaps even more so because they afford a false sense of presence when your mind may actually be a thousand miles away.

With the Apple Vision Pro, there’s no pretending. You’re transported to a completely different realm, sometimes even a completely different world – hey, I like to use visionOS 2’s Mac Virtual Display Ultrawide screen to edit videos in Final Cut Pro from the surface of the moon – don’t judge me.

It’s not perfect, but few first-generation devices are. Apple has laid an incredible foundation with Vision Pro and visionOS, and I’m incredibly excited to see where this journey takes us.

Filipe Esposito, Editor

The Vision Pro hasn’t quite lived up to Apple’s expectations of success. Yet, even if you don’t own one or plan to buy one, you’ve likely heard a lot about it. While the first iteration of the Apple Vision Pro may one day fade from our memories, I’m sure the Vision platform will eventually evolve into more compact headsets and perhaps even sleek glasses.

Although only a few hundred thousand people worldwide currently have access to the headset, the Apple Vision Pro has already made waves in the AR/VR industry. And I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Fernando Silva, Video Producer

The Apple Vision Pro has earned its place as Apple’s Product of the Year for one simple reason: it’s the first product since the original iPhone that has left me completely in awe. From the moment I experienced it, the entire device felt like pure magic. The way you can seamlessly manipulate UI elements with nothing but your eyes is nothing short of revolutionary, and the precision with which it detects finger taps, no matter where your hands are, feels like it should not be possible. It’s like stepping into the Iron Man helmet, where technology feels both futuristic and intuitively human at the same time.

The Mac Mini and the M4 iPad Pro were also strong contenders for this title. Both devices are incredibly impressive, showcasing Apple’s continued commitment to innovation and performance. However, even though I was thoroughly impressed by these products, the Vision Pro was the device that truly made my jaw drop.

What really makes the Vision Pro deserving of this title is its versatility. Whether you’re diving into productivity tasks, perfectly synced with your Apple ecosystem, or immersing yourself in content while traveling, it excels at both with effortless grace. As a content consumption machine, it’s unparalleled, bringing cinema-like experiences directly to your face wherever you are. It’s not just a gadget; it’s a glimpse into the future of computing and entertainment, redefining what’s possible. That’s why, for me, it’s not just the best Apple product this year, it symbolizes a future that I want to be a part of.

Ben Lovejoy, European Editor

Vision Pro is of course a very controversial pick, with the redesigned M4 Mac mini a more obvious choice. Apple’s spatial computer is an expensive niche product with relatively few native apps, and I’m one of many Apple fans who enjoyed trying it but wasn’t remotely tempted to buy one.

Even those who did lay out the cash mostly ended up using it for immersive movie viewing, which could be far more comfortably and affordably achieved with a $440 face monitor.

But what’s important about Vision Pro is not what it is today, but the direction it sets for Apple. This is the iPhone maker taking its first small step toward an eventual Apple Glasses product. That, when it finally arrives, will be not Apple product of the year, but probably of the decade. The iPhone maker reportedly even believes that it could eventually replace the iPhone.

I’m not so sure about that, but I do believe that the advent of Apple Intelligence makes it at least a significantly more plausible prospect. Maybe I’ll pick up my Apple Glasses when I want to quickly use an app in much the same way I pick up my Viture glasses when I want to watch YouTube.

Either way, I’m really excited about the future of this form factor, and fully expect Apple to do it better than anyone else. We can’t get there without Apple beginning that journey now, so for that reason Vision Pro earns its title despite its undeniable niche status today.

Michael Bower, Graphics Editor

Some people have claimed that Apple Vision Pro is the “future of computing.” I don’t know about that. But what I do know is that I’d love to see it become available in the Apple Store for Veterans and Military in the foreseeable future, ideally within my lifetime.

Benjamin Mayo, European Contributor

While some have deemed it as a dead-end, I think the Vision Pro is setting a course for Apple’s future. People expecting Vision Pro to make an impact on culture in its first year had misguided expectations.

At an eye-watering $3,500 price point and riddled with various compromises like weight and battery life, the ideal hardware is still being crafted but this first-generation device sets the vision for a new product line that will become successful sooner rather than later. It only needs a couple of hardware iterations to come into its own, and you have the long-term goal for augmented reality glasses simmering beyond that as well.

With the Vision Pro, Apple set out to build “a tool, not a toy” (to quote Apple VP Mike Rockwell), and it got surprisingly far along to that goal in its first outing. We’ve already seen competitors change their software significantly to ape what Apple nailed out the gate in terms of productivity and window management in augmented reality.

Michael Burkhardt, Weekend Editor

Apple Vision Pro is a clear choice for product of the year. The hardware itself may not be the ultimate expression of what spatial computing can be – but the software certainly is. visionOS has had a profound impact on the rest of the mixed reality industry, and almost certainly caused Meta to rethink things. Apple’s software design was incredibly thoughtful and features like Mac Virtual Display (which got even better this year thanks to Wide and Ultra Wide support!) are just the cherry on top.

I’m excited for the future of this product category. It needs to get smaller, lighter, and certainly cheaper before any sort of mass adoption, but Apple laid an extremely solid foundation with visionOS. In the meantime, you can start taking spatial photos and videos with your iPhone 15 Pro (or later) to enjoy in future Vision headsets.

There’s simply nothing else like Vision Pro on the market, and that’s why it takes the crown for product of the year. Many would suggest Mac mini instead, but it’s more of a great value than an ultimate product. If the redesign happened separately from the upgrade to 16GB of RAM, there wouldn’t be as much hype here. Vision Pro was the first truly new Apple product since the HomePod in 2018 — and Apple did a remarkable job here.

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The Apple Mac mini M4 is arguably the biggest bargain in computing. This (almost) pocket-sized mini Mac is fast, powerful, near-silent and costs around half the price of the cheapest equivalent MacBook Air. It’s almost too good to be true.

I bought one last month, my first new Mac since the MacBook Air M1 in 2020, and it’s given me that same sense of ‘how did they do that?’ wonder.

We described it as “the best small form factor PC” in our Mac mini M4 review – and with good reason. I can’t believe how quiet it is, how small it is, how swift it is at doing things that my now-slightly creaking M1 MacBook Air struggles with (such as opening more than 10 Chrome tabs at once).

But if you’re thinking of buying one – and you totally, definitely, absolutely should – I have one bit of advice for you: do not waste your money on Apple’s own internal SSD upgrades.

Seriously, don’t even consider it. Because while the Mac mini is an undoubted bargain, Apple’s storage is so overpriced that it’s a joke.

Instead, you’ll want to buy an external enclosure and NVMe storage. That’s exactly what I did, and it’s saved me a fortune.

The problem: Apple SSD storage is too expensive

(Image credit: Apple)

The simple fact is that Apple charges too much for SSD storage. Like way too much.

The base Mac mini M4, with 16GB RAM and a paltry 256GB SSD, costs $599 / £599. And while it really is one of the best bargains in computing history, that’s despite the storage on offer, rather than because of it.

Doubling it to 512GB costs another $200 / £200, and bumping it up to 1TB doubles that again.

The maximum SSD size available on the base M4 is 2TB – and for that you’d pay a whopping $1,399 / £1,399. That’s $800 / £800 extra for another 1.75TB of SSD storage.

There’s no 4TB model available on the base M4, but if you step up to the M4 Pro – which has other benefits, such as a more powerful 12- or 14-core CPU and 16- or 20-core GPU – you can upgrade to a 4TB or 8TB SSD.

For that privilege, you would pay an astonishing $600 / £600 extra for the jump from 2TB to 4TB, and then a further $1,200 / £1,200 to take you to 8TB.

Swipe to scroll horizontally Model Storage Price US Price UK Mac mini M4 16GB 256GB $599 £599 Mac mini M4 16GB 512GB $799 £799 Mac mini M4 16GB 1TB $999 £999 Mac mini M4 16GB 2TB $1,399 £1,399 Mac mini M4 Pro 24GB 512GB $1,399 £1,399 Mac mini M4 Pro 24GB 1TB $1,599 £1,599 Mac mini M4 Pro 24GB 2TB $1,999 £1,999 Mac mini M4 Pro 24GB 4TB $2,599 £2,599 Mac mini M4 Pro 24GB 8TB $3,799 £3,799

You can easily calculate what Apple is charging per GB for its upgrades, so I did just that.

Swipe to scroll horizontally Model Extra storage (GB) Extra cost ($/£) Cost per GB ($/£) Mac mini M4 16GB / 512GB 256 200 0.78 Mac mini M4 16GB / 1TB 488 200 0.41 Mac mini M4 16GB / 2TB 1000 400 0.40 Mac mini M4 Pro 24GB / 1TB 488 200 0.41 Mac mini M4 Pro 24GB / 2TB 1000 400 0.40 Mac mini M4 Pro 24GB / 4TB 2000 600 0.30 Mac mini M4 Pro 24GB / 8TB 4000 1200 0.30

So, leaving aside the jump from 256GB to 512GB – which is just ridiculously bad value at 0.78 US dollars or pounds per gigabyte extra – you’re generally paying 30-40 cents/pence per GB.

How does that compare to third-party storage? Not well.

Our best SSD buying guide lists nine options, that have all been thoroughly tested and TechRadar-approved.

Number one in the list, the Samsung 990 Pro, currently costs $100/£90 for 1TB – which works out at around 10 cents / 9 pence per GB. Jump up to the 4TB model and the price per GB drops to 7.5 cents, or 6 pence.

Factor in that the 990 Pro is one of the most expensive options and you can see the difference here – it’s roughly a quarter of the price of going direct with Apple.

The flipside is that you will need to buy an external enclosure too, but these are not expensive.

And nor do you need to worry about it being a difficult installation process. The most complicated thing about all of this, if you’re not particularly techie, is simply the terminology around it all.

The solution: What you need to buy

(Image credit: Future)

You have two options for upgrading your Mac mini’s storage: a portable SSD or an internal SSD plus an external enclosure.

The former is simpler, in that you just buy one off the shelf and plug it in to a port on the mini, but they’re generally more expensive per GB and almost certainly slower.

Still, if you want to take your storage on the road with you, this might be your best bet; our guide to the best portable SSDs has plenty of options.

I took the other route, which involved buying an internal SSD and a separate enclosure, or case, to put it in; I’ll go into details on that below.

This has the advantage of being fast enough to rival the mini’s internal SSD – well, so long as you buy the right one.

Know your ports

(Image credit: Future)

If you’re coming to the Mac mini M4 from a MacBook, the ports on offer will be a welcome surprise: you get two USB-C 3 ports and a 3mm headphone socket on the front, plus three Thunderbolt 4 / USB-C 4 ports, HDMI and Ethernet on the rear.

Jargon buster M.2: The SSD’s form factor; small, rectangular, like a stick of gum NVMe: The SSD type; massively faster than the older SATA PCie 4.0: The interface bus standard the SSD will connect to. For the fastest speeds this would be 4.0, but the older 3.0 will also do just fine Thunderbolt 4: The connectivity standard used by the Mac mini 4’s rear ports. It can charge devices, handle two 4K displays and transfer data via USB USB 4: The USB protocol used by Thunderbolt 4, enabling speeds of up to 40Gb/s USB 3.2: The previous generation of USB standard has a maximum speed of 10Gb/s. The mini’s two front USB-C ports have this spec

External storage can plug into any of those five USB-C ports, but you’ll get the fastest speeds from the Thunderbolt 4 options on the rear. These use USB 4, and have a maximum data transfer speed of 40Gb/s, compared to 10Gb/s for the front ports.

(The Mac mini M4 Pro, meanwhile, has Thunderbolt 5, which can handle up to 120Gb/s. That’s arguably overkill, but then so is the CPU…)

Theoretically, the absolute fastest speeds will come from an SSD that can take advantage of USB 4 – look for SSDs listed as PCIe 4.0 or ‘Gen4’, with above 7,000MB/s read and 6,000MB/s write. The Samsung 990 Pro mentioned above is one such SSD.

That said, you won’t get those kind of speeds in real-world use, due to USB 4’s 40Gb/s limit. You could therefore buy a cheaper PCIe 3.0 card such as the Samsung 970 EVO Plus. It might be a tiny bit slower than a 4.0 SSD, but you won’t notice it outside of benchmarks.

In terms of form factor and type, meanwhile, there’s a dizzying array of jargon associated with SSDs – but there’s no need to be confused by it all.

Simply make sure you buy an M.2 NVMe SSD, ideally Gen4 / PCIe 4.0 if you can afford it, and all will be well.

The enclosure

Once you’ve chosen your SSD you’ll need something to put it into. It is technically possible to upgrade the Mac mini’s internal storage, but this would void your warranty, and given how easy it is to use an enclosure I’m not sure it’s worth it.

There are dozens of suitable enclosures for SSDs, but all simply provide a home for the storage to slot into, plus a cable to connect to a USB port.

Some have active cooling fans, some use passive cooling; given that the Mac mini is almost silent, I hated the idea of spoiling that quiet, so went with a passive option.

Once again, you’ll need to ensure the enclosure can handle the speed of your SSD and then transfer that speed to the Mac.

Therefore, searching for ‘M.2 enclosure’ will not suffice – you might end up with something that only works with USB 3.2.

Instead, you specifically need an M.2 NVMe USB 4 or Thunderbolt 4 enclosure. You can use USB 3.2 if you want, but you’ll be limited to about a third of the speed.

What I bought

(Image credit: Samsung)

SSD: Samsung 990 Pro M.2 NVMe 4TB

In terms of the SSD, I ended up buying the Samsung 990 Pro M2 NVMe in its 4TB guise. This cost me £257 – which works out at 6 pence per GB.

This is definitely overkill for the Mac mini M4, in that I’m only getting about half of its potential speed, with USB 4 being the bottleneck.

However, I figured that I may well upgrade the Mac in the next couple of years, and if I do the Samsung SSD can come along for the ride. Plus, we gave it 5 stars in our Samsung 990 Pro SSD review, so it would seem rude not to pick this.

As I said above, you could spend less on a PCIe 3.0 SSD and not lose too much in terms of performance. Either way, you will definitely save money over taking the Apple upgrade.

Enclosure: OWC Express 1M2

For the enclosure, I went with the OWC Express 1M2, which cost another £149.

This is one of the highest-rated USB 4 enclosures around; we awarded it 4.5 stars in our OWC Express 1M2 review, and on Amazon it has the same score from more than 200 user reviews.

It’s a beautifully made thing, with an entirely metal body covered with fins that make possible its passive cooling. It’s not small – about the length of the Mac mini itself, albeit much more narrow – and weighs about 250g, but that didn’t worry me as it isn’t something I’ll be moving around very much.

(Image credit: Future)

More importantly (to me), it looks great next to the Mac mini; many of the cheaper enclosures are black plastic affairs, but I would rather pay slightly extra for the aesthetics.

It also has rubber feet on the bottom that keep it stable, plus a USB-C port in which to plug the all-important (and supplied) data cable. I can’t praise it enough.

Putting it all together

I’m no stranger to SSD or RAM upgrades, but even a complete novice will find the OWC Express 1M2 easy to set up – not least because there’s a super-helpful video tutorial on the OWC website.

You’ll need to remove a couple of screws, then slide off the bottom of the case to reveal the NVMe slot inside. Remove one more screw, insert the SSD, push down to make contact with the thermal pads, put the screws back in and you’re away.

The whole thing takes about five minutes, max; it’s really not a complicated process.

Next, you’ll need to hook it up to one of the Thunderbolt 4 ports on the back of the Mac mini, then format the drive for use.

Make sure you choose APFS, unless you want to also use it with Macs running an older version of macOS (in which case go for Mac OS Extended) or Windows (ExFAT, generally).

(Image credit: Future)

Performance gains

(Image credit: Future)

Any SSD will be fast enough for most people, particularly if you’re used to an old-school hard drive. However, if you’re going down the external route rather than buying an Apple upgrade, you’ll want your solution to be at least comparable to the internal SSD.

It’s worth noting that the SSDs in Apple’s mac Mini M4s vary in speed depending on the size; the 512GB SSD is about 30% faster than the 256GB model, according to discussions on Reddit at least, and the 1TB model is faster still.

I’m only using the 256GB model, of course, and get a speed of around 2,000 MB/s write and 2,800 MB/s read, based on BlackMagicDesign’s Disk Speed Test.

The Samsung 990 Pro plus OWC 1M2 combo, meanwhile, gives me 3,100 for both write and read – so, slightly faster than the internal SSD.

Nor does it get too hot. The 1M2 does a fantastic job of keeping it cool whilst in use, and while you can feel it heating up, it’s never uncomfortably warm.

(Image credit: Future)

In real life, the difference in speed between the internal and external drives is irrelevant; either one can copy a 5GB file in a matter of seconds. But psychologically, it’s great – not only have I saved myself at least £400, but I’ve even improved the performance, too.

The result is that I can treat my external storage almost as if it’s internal. I have folders on it, I have applications running from it, I have lots and lots of music and photos stored on it – and I’d never know it wasn’t sitting inside the Mac mini itself if I didn’t look at it. It’s one of the best upgrades I’ve ever made.

By Jason Snell

The iPad Pro is no longer the future, so what’s next?

iPad Pro and keyboard, circa its October 2018 announcement.

It’s hard to believe that it was more than five and a half years ago that I flew home from a New York Apple event, my mind spinning with the announcement of a new iPad Pro at a unique Apple event in Brooklyn.

Now all signs point to a new era in the iPad Pro beginning on Tuesday. It’s made me reflective about what’s happened to the iPad since the fall of 2018.

In hindsight, that event was a bit of a foreshock for the arrival of Apple Silicon. During the event, Apple introduced a new iPad Pro processor—clearly a forerunner of the M series that would power Macs in a couple of years—and boasted about how much more powerful it was than almost every PC laptop being sold. It was the first big brag about Apple’s chip-design prowess that went beyond the iPhone, which had been already running circles around Android phones powered by Qualcomm chips.

But that boast also drew the iPad into direct comparisons with PC laptops, and while its sheer hardware power might have defeated most of those laptops, power isn’t everything. It’s what you do with the power. And in many ways, that’s been the story of the iPad Pro since then: This is a device with computer power, but running a phone-adapted operating system that’s not nearly as capable or flexible as macOS. And thanks to the Apple silicon transition, today’s core iPad Pro hardware is almost indistinguishable from the chips that power a MacBook Air.

If this narrative sounds familiar, it’s because despite it coming up in 2018, it’s never really gone away since then. Apple has evolved iPadOS quite a bit since then, adding Stage Manager and a revamped Files app and even introducing versions of its pro apps, Final Cut and Logic.

But over this same span, it’s become clear to me that Apple no longer views the iPad as the future of personal computing. This is to the Mac’s credit: Now that it’s on Apple silicon itself, the Mac’s battery life can rival the iPad, and it can pick up all the new features and apps that come to the iPhone and iPad thanks to a much more aligned base operating system and platform-smoothing features like Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI.

So where does that leave the iPad? More specifically, where does it leave the iPad Pro? What’s the role of a professional iPad, when the Mac is now much more capable of doing professional jobs with similar power and at a similar price?

It comes down to physical attributes. The iPad is something a Mac can basically never be, at its core: a touch-driven tablet that’s thin and light, with literally nothing else attached. From that base, the iPad can be whatever a user wants it to be—just a tablet, or a tablet with a pencil, or a tablet with a laptop-style keyboard and trackpad. It can even be docked to an external display and drive multiple windows.

The iPad’s adaptability takes me back, once again, to 2018. That was the event that introduced the Apple Pencil 2, and in some ways generations of iPad hardware are defined more by their accessories than any other characteristic. The Apple Pencil 2 was a solid update on the original, with a magnetic charging system that’s simple and elegant—a far cry from the approach of the original Pencil, with its Lightning port hiding under a little plastic cap.

(However, one feature of the Pencil 2 was a bit of a flop—I never could get the hang of its subtle, accelerometer-based double tap. It seemed to never trigger when I wanted it to, but would accidentally trigger all the time. I’m hopeful that Tuesday will bring another, improved take on letting Pencil users get some more control while still holding the implement in their hand.)

Still, it’s funny to think that perhaps the most defining accessory of this iPad Pro generation didn’t ship until more than a year later: the Magic Keyboard. That keyboard—now with a trackpad, and proper pointer support on iPadOS for the first time!—made the iPad into a tablet that could truly convert into a laptop. Apple’s first true convertible computer didn’t run macOS, but iPadOS.

But again… that was the problem. I’ve been an iPad Pro user since the beginning, and have spent plenty of time trying to coax the platform into fulfilling all the needs as a creative professional. I’ve been successful far more often than not, but that made the failures all the more frustrating. My standard travel backpack is a microcosm of this storyline: After years of trying to make it work with just the iPad Pro, the advent of Apple silicon has made me go back to traveling with a MacBook Air. It’s small enough, powerful enough, and can do literally everything I need—something the iPad Pro just can’t.

So what’s the way forward for the iPad Pro? I’ve spent the last year trying to figure out what I’d do, if I were one of the people inside Apple with the future of the iPad in my hands. There are no easy answers. For the iPad Pro to be a viable product, it needs to justify its higher price—at this point, the cheaper iPad Air can do everything that 2018 iPad Pro could do. So why buy an iPad Pro at all?

Accessories have to be part of the story—this is the iPad we’re talking about, after all. Reports abound that in addition to that upgraded Apple Pencil, there will be a new Magic Keyboard, one that’s more laptop-like. That’s a good start, because it leans into the idea that the iPad is Apple’s convertible device, a tablet that can be a laptop when you need it to be. If that keyboard is sheathed in aluminum and connects to the iPad Pro less awkwardly, it just reinforces that the iPad Pro can be a laptop when you want it to be.

(As an aside, I’m so tired of the people who come out of the woodwork to ask why people who use the iPad as a laptop don’t just buy a Mac. Let me answer the question one more time: I can’t rip the screen off a Mac and use it as a touch tablet. But I can make an iPad into a laptop when I need it to be. Not everyone needs or wants a convertible computer, but it has advantages that the Mac is incapable of matching.)

It’s funny how the Mac keeps coming back into this, isn’t it? There’s a good reason. The Mac is Apple’s do-it-all computing platform, and thanks to the boost from Apple silicon, it’s really doing better than ever. That mid-2010s malaise when it felt like Apple had no clear idea about the Mac’s future, which coincided with the possibility that the iPad would ultimately replace it, is gone.

Instead, the Mac is a key that can unlock the limitations of Apple’s platforms. One of the best features of the Vision Pro is its ability to connect to a Mac and display the Mac’s interface in a large virtual space. The Vision Pro becomes a stronger product because macOS exists, and integrates with visionOS.

This brings me to the issue I’ve been championing for a while now, which I think is the ultimate solution to the problem of the iPad Pro: the Mac. The iPad Pro is already capable of transforming from a tablet into a laptop, when needed. It’s got the same power as a MacBook Air. Apple’s built virtualization and a hypervisor framework into its products.

iPad Pro buyers already value the product for its flexibility. Imagine how much more flexible it would be if it could run macOS, virtualized, when connected to an external keyboard and trackpad. Apple’s first convertible device would be able to becomes a Mac when it needed to—and exit that mode when it doesn’t. Travelers could invest in the iPad Pro and all its accessories—at a price comparable to a MacBook Air, by the way—and know that they’re getting the best of Apple’s tablet experience and its traditional computer experience.

If Apple were to accept that at the top of the iPad product line, the iPad literally transforms into a Mac, that choice would also take a lot of the pressure off of iPadOS. Does Files in iPadOS really need to keep slowly trudging toward life as an ersatz Finder? And more to the point, does anyone who has used Files over the past five and half years really believe it’ll ever get there? And should it even try, or is that stuffing way too much functionality into a much more basic, iPad-like file manager?

The iPad no longer feels like the future of computing, and that’s fine. The Mac is here to stay, something that didn’t seem like a sure thing five and a half years ago. It feels like it’s time for Apple to accept this state of affairs. macOS isn’t just one of Apple’s platforms—it’s a feature, a secret weapon that it can use to make all its other platforms more powerful when they need to be.

I don’t have any idea if Apple really has any intention of letting macOS run on other devices, whether it’s an iPad or a Vision Pro or even an iPhone plugged into an external display. But it seems to me that if there’s any Apple product that is flexible enough to make it work, it’s the iPad Pro.

I still love my iPad Pro. I look forward to Tuesday’s announcements, whatever surprises they might bring.

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