Apple started using OLED screens back in 2017 with the iPhone X, and before that with the first Apple Watch. And the Touch Bar, of course (RIP). But it’s been slow to move away from LCD elsewhere, like its iMacs, MacBooks, standalone displays and iPads. I want OLED on all those things, but if the iPad Pro gets it first, as rumoured, then that’s fine with me.
There’s no product where the use of an LCD panel bothers me more than my 11-inch iPad Pro. It’s got a nice-looking screen, as long as I’m looking directly at it. Get a little off-axis, though, and the screen gets a lot dimmer. That’s also true of my laptop, but I’m always sitting directly in front of the screen and almost always looking at a browser window with text in it.
Contrast isn’t an LCD’s strong point either, and the grey-black of the letterboxing and the shadows when I’m watching films and shows bothers me more than it probably should. It doesn’t matter when I’m just reading, but when I’m playing a game – especially something like Resident Evil Village, which I’m sure will run on the next iPad Pro – or watching a film, the extra deep blacks of the OLED would look nicer. And in a dark horror game, the extra contrast would make things easier to see.
OLED would mean other things too, like an always-on iPad screen. That could open up a version of the iPhone’s standby mode, turning the iPad into a true blue smart display (something that’s been rumoured before) and actually opening up a niche for the iPad that it could really use.
Assuming an OLED upgrade means more than just a nice screen for the next Pro model, I’d sell my M1 iPad Pro in a heartbeat to buy it.
It sounds like I may soon get my wish. This morning in the subscriber Q&A section of Power On, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reiterated something he’s said in the past: that Apple has a new OLED iPad Pro coming next year. And in that last update he called it the “first major overhaul in half a decade” in the form of an 11-inch and a 13-inch model, and I hope that’s true because it needs it.
Ming-Chi Kuo echoed this later in the day in a Medium post, saying that Apple will mass produce two OLED iPads using the same LTPO technology that gives both Apple Watches and newer iPhones their 1Hz to 120Hz variable refresh rate. Kuo added that they will outperform the Mini LED iPad Pro in terms of “display performance and power consumption”.
