Good news for Canadians who happen to have fifty grand lying around: RBC will give you an iPad Pro for it. Free, technically, in the sense that you don’t hand over $1,699 at an Apple Store. You just hand over $50,000 to a bank instead and let them hold onto it for a year.
This is RBC’s annual summer iPad promo, which makes you jump through some hoops for free Apple gear. To get in the door at all, you open an eligible RBC Signature No Limit Banking or VIP Banking account by November 2, 2026, then set up the usual banking homework within 90 days. That means payroll direct deposit, two pre-authorized payments, or two online bill payments.
After you’ve completed those steps you get the base prize, which is an 11-inch iPad.
But if you want the iPad Pro, just move at least $50,000 in net new funds into an eligible RBC investment account within 90 days of opening the chequing account. TFSAs, RRSPs, and non-registered accounts all count. At that level you can take the 11-inch iPad Pro Wi-Fi 256GB or swap it for a 13-inch MacBook Air, which is a nice touch if you’d rather have a laptop for $50k that you need to leave with them for a year.
You don’t need $50k, as you can just park between $25,000 and $49,999.99 and you walk away with an 11-inch iPad Air. Somewhere out there is a person who deposited $49,999.99 and will spend the next year thinking about that penny.
The catch is the holding period as you would have guessed. You need to keep the chequing account open through November 2, 2027, and leave the investment balance untouched for a full 365 days. Pull the money early and RBC bills you for the tablet, which puts you back where you started except now you have a bank account you didn’t want.
An iPad Pro 11-inch Wi-Fi 256GB at $1,699 works out to a 3.40% return on $50,000 held for a year, which is basically like keeping up with inflation.
A 13-inch MacBook Air at $1,499 works out to a 3.00% return on the same $50,000. The M5 MacBook Air starts at $1,499 CAD with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD, so the iPad Pro is the better pick by $200 if you’re optimizing purely for value.
Whether this is a deal depends entirely on what that $50,000 would have earned somewhere else for a year. If it was going to sit in a savings account anyway, congrats on your new iPad. If you were planning to invest it elsewhere, run the math before you get excited about a tablet.
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