The M1 iPad Pro is the latest iPad released by apple. It was released in April 2021. It is the best iPad; Apple has made so far. It is probably the best tablet you can find in the market. It is fast, has up to 12 GB of ram, a full-speed thunderbolt port, and has an industry-leading Mini-LED technology. The M1 iPad Pro is a true Pro machine.

However, there are some problems with the iPad Pro we’ll talk about them. People and tech reviewers thought Apple would fix those issues in iPadOS 15, but they are still there. Let’s talk about them.

Thunderbolt Port

The thunderbolt port on the iPad is the same as MacBook Pro and iMac, but it doesn’t work that way.
It doesn’t recognize some of the external SSDs that are available in the market. Those SSDs work fine with iMacs and MacBooks. After connecting to the SSD, the iPad Pro doesn’t show it at all.


To fix the problem, you’ll have to format the drive to exFAT. But the issue is you can’t format the drive on iPad. You’ll need a MacBook or an iMac, basically a computer to format it.


Formatting the drive completely wipe the data. So you have to first transfer the files to your computer and then format it and then transfer the files back into the SSD, which takes a lot of time if you have many files in the SSD.


iPad OS 15 doesn’t have the eject button for external SSDs.When you do that, the next time you connect the same SSD to the iPad, it again doesn’t recognize it. Apparently, the SSD was damaged in the process.
To fix it, you’ll have to hook it up to the Mac and run first aid, which also you can’t do on the iPad.

Slow Thunderbolt transfer speed.

A 16 GB file from SSD to M1 MacBook Pro takes about 8 seconds. The same size file took over 38 seconds while transferring the data from SSD to M1 iPad Pro. That means the iPad Pro was transferring the data at the speed of 421 MB/s compare to 2000 MB/s on MacBook Pro M1, which is almost five times slower. The thunderbolt port on iPad Pro is nowhere close to the thunderbolt port in Mac.


The M1 iPad Pro speed was slow because its write speed (1500MB/s) is slower than the M1 MacBook pro(2400 MB/s). The iPad Pro has an even slower speed when using the standard 10Gb/s USB c cable.

Limited Search Capability

The next problem with the iPad is a crippled search capability using spotlight.
In a Mac, when you search for something using a spotlight like a name, it can search through the text within your documents and file that contain that word. But on the iPad Pro, it only shows you the document that has that specific word in a title.


On top of that, the search tool within the file app is also extremely basic with the same issue, not searching the text file within certain files like a pdf.


There is a button to search a document that contains that word, but it ends up showing you nothing.
The same problem is with the SSD connected to the iPad Pro. When you search for something within SSD like jpg, it can’t show you those files. It should be easy for Apple to fix since iPadOS 15 now read and select the text from within photos and images.

Can’t Use the External Display for HDR video editing

In their event, while launching the iPad Pro, they announce that professionals could use the mini-LED display for HDR video editing.
So now you can use the mini-LED iPad Pro as a display for a MacBook Pro. But you can’t use the display to show the HDR content. Everything shows up as a standard dynamic range, even after connecting with the wired method of a sidecar.


The thunderbolt cable can support the HDR signal. The hardware is ready to go, but Apple is limiting the support.

Poor External display support

With the brand new iPadOS 15, you can easily connect the iPad with an external monitor. The major issue is external display support is still limited to mirroring the iPad display.


You’ll have to deal with the black bar on either side of the display because the iPad can’t dynamically adjust the display. It is even more annoying because when you use the split view feature on the iPad Pro, you can adjust the size of the window horizontally, which automatically scales each app to fit the different window sizes.

iPad Pro display scaling

The iPad Pro does not support display scaling. On a Mac, you can scale the UI and the icon to be smaller or larger to either make it easier to read or fit more content on the same display, which can be useful on a larger display. On the iPad Pro, you can’t do any of that.

Location of a selfy camera

The selfie camera is very annoying when using it with a magic keyboard, which many people use these days.
Apple added the center stage feature with the upgraded ultra-wide selfy camera. But even with that feature, you can still tell your eyes are looking way off to the side. Unlike MacBook, it looks like you are paying attention to the person you are talking to.
So hopefully, next time when Apple updates the iPad pro, they relocate the webcam like Samsung tab S7.

Blooming effect

The last problem of the iPad Pro mini-LED display is the blooming effect.


You can’t notice any blooming issue in regular or bright light, especially with regular content and movies. But when you turn off all the lights and turn on some HDR content, you’ll see the blooming effect from an angle. The biggest issue is when you watch the dark videos on youtube, and you tap on a display to pull up the controls.

One last thing is when you recharge your iPad with the magic keyboard; it charges slower because the keyboard only draws only 20 watts of power from the wall. When you start charging it from the main port, the charging speed is much faster because, through the main port, it draws 33 watts of power.

Apple should look into these problems, and hopefully, these will be fixed very soon. Like they did with the last issue where the iPad Pro, despite having 16 GB of ram, could use the 5GB.