To what end?

I genuinely don’t get the purpose of these high end processors in a tablet. Like more power is nice but what would I do on it that needs it?

Serious gamers mostly steer clear of Apple. Video editors presumably use desktops/laptops. Browsing doesn’t need power. Video watching doesn’t need it. Programming on iPads is cumbersome.

Who is the target audience that gains from this?

You'd be surprised by the horsepower some games require, my wife plays Love and Deep Space and she recently just bought a new iPad because the game requires some good specs and a LOT of storage space. She's not a "serious gamer" as your parlance.

Music production is the killer feature that benefits a lot from CPU performance.

I only recently bought an iPad for the first time this year after realizing this was feasible. I’ve always preferred digital music workflows, but hated dealing with a laptop and DAW. iOS supports AUv3 plugins and cross app audio, so it’s pretty much a full DAW experience (I use loopy pro). The form factor forces AUv3 devs to design smarter interfaces.

Plus, I dislike using the iPad for literally anything else, so I’m less likely to get distracted :)

Better chip = better performance per watt = longer batteries for similar levels of performance, running cooler. Also it never hurts the smoothness of the interface.

It just ultimately makes it a nicer device to use.

People complain when Apple doesn't do spec bumps. But when Apple does do spec bumps, people complain again.

Artists benefit hugely from the extra horsepower. My brother works in the animation industry and uses an ipad as his primary work device when travelling.

Ive been using mine since 2018, the ipad pro. If you do any drawing then it’s a no brainer, and that’s why I got it in the first place.

Then it was so good that I used it to travel and to watch videos in bed in place of my computer. If I need to work I’ll take my laptop though.

IMO if you don’t use your laptop to work it doesn’t make sense to use a laptop instead of an iPad.

It's a spec bump, soon they'll introduce M5 powered iPads. More GPU cores, more neural engine cores, more unified memory -- eventually iPadOS features will spring up to take advantage of this stuff. I assume the target audience for this is folks who want to make future-proof purchases or those who likely have more money than sense.

iPad is the most absurd device ever. It is fully capable of running a full blown general purpose OS, but artificially restricted to be a YouTube machine. Something you give kids in a restaurant to be quiet. Putting an M4 in it is like Apple rubbing our faces in it. Look at this device that could do everything, but can't do anything.

Those are not high end processors? You can get them in apple's most basic laptops. They are just good, but not high end.

They're half a second away from offering an iPad running MacOS (or a tablet MacBook, take your pick). They're baby-stepping their way to this, obviously.

I've yet to figure anything you can do with these but watch videos and play some games; I always end up grabbing the laptop.

At the very least it is one less TSMC 3nm chip in the hands of competition.

So even if they break even, which I highly doubt, they would rather use it in a kids tablet than let the competition use it to power a flagship phone.

Web browsing modern websites like Github (or some worse ones)

It lets the iPadOS/app devs write slower software without you noticing too much

People who buy things, mostly.

Bill Gates, is that you?