The funny thing about the 12.9-inch iPad is that it is very easy to miss the benefits of Mini LED in normal day-to-day use. (“Liquid Retina,” as far as Apple has ever told us, refers to the Apple-specific method of making round corners on an LCD.) It supports ProMotion, Apple’s term for a variable refresh rate to increase smoothness and match the frame rate of videos.
On the 12.9-inch version, Mini LED lets blacks be truly black, offers a high contrast ratio, and can also get very bright.Īpple is calling this screen the “Liquid Retina XDR display.” And it has all the benefits of Apple’s previous iPad Pro displays: it’s very high resolution, color-accurate, and it has fairly good viewing angles. But because it uses a more traditional LCD backlight system with fewer dimming zones, you can see that the blacks are actually just a little gray. I would never call the display on the 11-inch iPad Pro bad, because it’s a stellar display.
The 11-inch lacks Mini LED, but it still has a great screen with ProMotion. The iPad Pro models have the same shape, and though the 12.9 model is slightly thicker, it still worked with an old Magic Keyboard Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Both new iPad Pros. It’s almost like the backlight itself is a lower-resolution screen behind the screen, tracking the image and making sure the black parts of the picture aren’t lit up.
The trick is that they’re lit by 10,000 tiny LED lights split up by software into 2,500 local dimming zones. Its display pixels are not self-lit, but instead lit from behind. Mini LED, the technology powering the 12.9-inch iPad Pro display, is designed to bring the LCD panel as close as possible to OLED’s contrast and black levels. Each technology’s strength is the other’s weakness. The benefit of OLED is that the black pixels are not lit at all, meaning you get superb contrast, but they are relatively expensive and don’t get as bright. The benefit of LCD panels with LED backlighting is that they’re relatively inexpensive, long-lasting, bright, and unlikely to burn in. OLED pixels are self-lit LCD panels light up the display pixels by putting one, several, or many LED backlights behind them. Both have pixels that combine red, green, and blue subpixels to create colors, but in order for you to actually see those colors the display pixels need to be lit up. There are two basic types you usually see, LCD and OLED. Here is a very brief, wildly incomplete, and necessarily oversimplified education on flat panel screen technology. How much do you care about having a great screen?īuy for $799.00 from Apple Buy for $799.99 from Best Buy Buy for $799.00 from Amazon And so again, the question is what that screen means to the experience of using an iPad, especially since the price has jumped $100 compared to the last model.
But even that fancy processor - the same as you’ll find in the new iMac, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini - doesn’t fundamentally change the story of what the iPad Pro is and what it can do.īut the 12.9-inch version of the iPad Pro is an iPad with a very beautiful display. It starts at $1,099 for a 128GB version, but increased storage and accessories like a keyboard or the Apple Pencil can shoot the price up fairly quickly.īoth the 12.9 and the smaller 11-inch iPad Pro (which starts at $799) feature Apple’s M1 processor and some other updated specs, all of which are excellent. It has a new kind of display so good I think it is the best thing for watching movies that isn’t a high-end television. That, really, is the only question that matters with the new 12.9-inch iPad Pro. How much do you care about having a great screen?