We hear more and more about new LCD display technologies and how Apple plans to adopt them on its devices this year. Follow along for an explanation of what mini-LED screen technology is, why Apple is switching to iPad and MacBook Pro soon, and what to expect from Apple’s 2021 plans.
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LED-backlit LCD monitors have replaced CCFL (cold cathode fluorescent) in the past decade as they offer a number of advantages in many ways, including reliability, life, wider color gamut, smaller physical size, energy efficiency, features dimming and more.
Although OLED (organic light-emitting diode) screens have become the current choice for many flagship smartphones and smartwatches, such as the iPhone 11 Pro and 12 line and the Apple Watch, mini-LED and micro-LED are set to bring more improvements to the screens.
What is mini-LED display technology?
Traditional LED-backlit displays will have several tens to several hundred LEDs. As the name suggests, mini-LED monitors use miniaturized backlight and can feature more than a thousand zones of local full-matrix dimming (FALD).
Advantages of the mini-LED:
- Higher contrast ratio
- Higher brightness
- Deep blacks
- Energy efficient
- Less likely to burn than OLED
- Uses inorganic gallium nitride (GaN), will not degrade over time like OLED
So, what are micro-LEDs? They are an order of magnitude smaller than the mini variant and are as small as 1/100 the size of a traditional LED backlight on an LCD display. They go further with the benefits that mini-LED has over standard LED-powered LCD monitors and can provide 30x greater brightness compared to OLED.
The tricky part about making high-quality micro-LED screens is that you dedicate one LED for each pixel on a screen. Semiconductor Engineering explains:
MicroLED is where you reduce them to the scale of tens of microns. You put one in each pixel. It is much smaller and more difficult to do. It is more difficult to physically place them where you want them to be. It is also more difficult to make the LEDs themselves so that they perform well.
Apple plans for iPad and MacBooks
It makes sense, then, that the two biggest hurdles for these new display technologies are cost and manufacturing at scale, and that Apple is looking to first make mini-LEDs with its larger portable devices and implement micro-LEDs with Apple Watch to begin with.
In 2019, Kuo predicted that we could see Apple’s iPad Pro and 16-inch MacBook Pro with the move to mini-LED in the fourth quarter of 2020. That hasn’t happened, but reports are piling up that the time is short. Latest reports from TrendForce and Digitimes predict that the next 12.9-inch iPad Pro will have mini LEDs in the first quarter of 2021.
And just yesterday, Macotakara published a report that the new large iPad Pro with mini LED will be launched in March this year with a slightly thicker body to accommodate the new screen technology.
Meanwhile, there are rumors that the new 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pro M1 models that we hope will include the move to mini-LED. They are due to be released later this year.
When it comes to micro-LED, we haven’t heard much about this change. The Apple Watch 6 / SE did not adopt the technology last year (after a report that it did), but it may be that the Apple Watch Series 7 will be the first to launch micro-LEDs in the fall.
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