Although they share the same chip and both are passively cooled, keep in mind the iPad has a significantly lower thermal capacity due to its thinness and the fact that one half of its body is a screen which not only is less effective at drawing heat away but also produces more heat, and so sustained performance will likely not be as good as in a MBA. But I’m sure it will be adequate for certain workflows.
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Blender iPad Pro App in Development with Apple Pencil Support
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To that point, though, I am looking forward to what sort of improvements can be made with new background task apis on iPadOS 26… maybe some tasks can be done in the background or with the screen off?
I’m sure it will do background rendering. I’d be surprised if any rendering app didn’t utilize the new background task API.
The M4 with ray-tracing especially on the Max is pretty darn good. Apple is on on the right path. Having said that, I don't think anyone will seriously consider Blender rendering on an iPad Pro. The reason I look forward to Blender on the iPad Pro will be for sculpting, painting, compositing, animation and even video editing. Even on my M4 Max Studio while it is good, real good for rendering, it is not yet reason enough to buy an Apple device for rendering. But it's on the right path. I can see the M5 or M6 making the Max Studio a killer all around computer for most everything. The iPad Pro with its pencil support and mobility being a great accessory for it.
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Apple is a financial and developer of Blender and provides the Foundation with Apple Devs to keep the macOS port current.If Apple is involved in this port, you should feel lucky they allow you to run it on the least expensive iPad Pro
I think they are not. I know that when the M series was launched they funded Blender in a big way but I cannot confirm how many years they sustained that funding.
I checked a year ago (or maybe two) and I couldn’t find Apple in the funder website and I have just checked again now.
But the developer that Apple put to work in Blender may still be working because some time ago, even though Apple was not mentioned he still was working to bring full M3 support of Metal in Cycles.
Blender Development Fund
Join the Development Fund and support Blender Foundation to work on core Blender development.
fund.blender.org
Here is the Apple developer and he still is working in Cycles Metal (only Apple silicon support that I know off), activity shows he is still active and the responsable member.
Michael Jones (Apple)
Discover and collaborate on official Blender development projects. Join developers and contributors working together to advance Blender.
projects.blender.org
So I don’t know if Apple is funding Blender or why it does not appear in the funds website.
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iPad hardware is not the same as Mac hardware. Geekbench tests which are short bursts trick people into believing they are equally powerful with the same chip.
The M chip in the iPad is a lower power version to reduce heat and energy consumption even further and prevent it from heating up the touch display where users put their fingers.
If you tried to do a long high res Blender render on the iPad you better not be holding the device and pray the glass doesn’t crack and battery doesn’t swell. That’s why lower power and throttling will be important in a tablet.
Running apps like Blender on iPads with their limiting hardware will be interesting to observe, especially things like i/o, lesser RAM and the lesser versions of M-series chips used in tablets [probably due to heat management issues]. The devs call it an uncompromised Blender, but my guess is that hardware shortcomings inherent to iPads will make the app self-limiting. Hopefully the important tablet functions like sculpting will not be limited.
Blender on Mac Apple silicon should be fine since Macs accept Max M-series chips with their very strong hardware. Note that the next Blender, v5, will no longer run on Intel Macs.
Blender on Mac Apple silicon should be fine since Macs accept Max M-series chips with their very strong hardware. Note that the next Blender, v5, will no longer run on Intel Macs.
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I think everyone is missing the true potential of blender on the iPad and looking at rendering. No-one should be attempting to use an iPad as a rendering machine, but the implications to modelling and sculpting will be tremendous. Let us not forget that animation with greasepencil could be a real game changer!
iPads no longer have limited hardware. The M4+OS 26 superchargers everything. [iPads were never hardware limited, but software limited]
As someone who pushes their M4 13” 2TB/16GB to the limit with Sharper 3D, Nomad Sculpt, Procreate Dreams, and DaVinci Resolve. With background tasks with OS 26, the M4 is no longer limited with hardware.
I am glad that your workflow is working for you. It says good things for the Pro tablet as a tool, especially apps like Procreate that are designed for tablet hardware. But yes the limited RAM, limited memory bandwidth, limited CPU/GPU cores and limited i/o of iPad hardware does remain limiting to apps like DaVinci Resolve, Photoshop-type apps, etc.
The 8GB on my M4 iPad Pro have been hugely limiting even with dedicated apps like Procreate, Nomad and Shapr3D where some of my files can't even open or export in higher resolutions without crashing. So hardware has been a limiting factor.
Yes you can get a 16GB for the outlandishly priced 1TB iPad Pro but 16GB, or better yet 24GB should be standard for the iPad Pro and 48GB for the top tier models.
In the most recent 'Blender Today' (#262), Pablo highlighted some new work having been done by an Apple developer (Michael I believe).
They do. The whole Metal drivers endeavor that fully revived blender on the Mac was kickstarted, developed and maintained by Apple engineers.
“Michael Jones” being one of the ones I remember, he was making the Cycles renderer work on metal with ever increasing feature parity and render times enhancements.
Back at the Blender forums, I could almost hear the cheers after some of his commits would be pushed and merged into the Blender builds.
Compared to what exactly? An MPB or rather a Threadripper with a 4090 card or two? Absolute performance is not the point. The pencil and versatility is and it is mostly suited for the modelling part not the rendering part of the production. Many uses a modelling computer with lower compute and a (noisy and therefore tucked away) render computer with high compute capacity or use cloud computing.
There are large project and small project. Low end Macs has worked fine for years for smaller projects and you come along way with 16 Gb, but more is better of course. A M4 iPad Pro will furthermore beat my MBP M1 Pro in all tasks related to Blender and video rendering. I did not know the M4 in iPad Pro had slower memory bus compared to Mac M4? A quick Google search suggests 120 Gb/s same as M4 Mac. My M1 Pro has 200 Gb/s but I would believe the compute in M4 will compensate for the slower bus. It seems the latest iPad Pro USB C speed is 40 gbps (I am lazy and used at Google AI summary) equal to or better than most Macs. Only M4 Pro/Max runs at 120 gbps. Most people do not use the latest MBP and they survive just fine.
I judge the M4 iPad Pro has sufficient hardware for smaller projects in the field (which would be consider rather large a few years ago).
