A Taiwanese supplier has reportedly just entered the iPad Pro supply chain to begin churning out mini-LED displays for the next iPad Pro model allegedly coming later in the year.
According to Taiwan’s Economic News Daily, supplier Innolux has picked up orders to build mini-LED panels for the next iPad Pro that the story claims is set to arrive later this year.
Innolux Mini LED has made a breakthrough. It is said that it has already had samples approved by Apple and is preparing to make displays for the latest iPad Pro tablet to be launched in the second half of the year.
MacRumors has more:
Taiwan’s Economic Daily News reports that the panel maker has already sent samples to Apple and has now won orders with the tech giant to supply them in bulk for the tablet, said to be launching in the second half of the year.
Aside from Innolux, Apple previously commissioned other suppliers for related components, including LG Display, General Interface Solution, Epistar, Taiwan Surface Mounting Technology, Zhen Ding Technology, and Flexium Interconnect.
The only problematic claim in the report could be the timeframe.
The story alleges that this purported new iPad Pro model will be launching in the second half of the year, but reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo previously predicted the next pro tablet from Apple with a mini-LED panel would arrive sometime during the first quarter of this year.
On the one hand, Apple is extremely unlikely to refresh the iPad Pro twice per year, in the spring and in the fall. On the other hand, this could be the year when Apple breaks from its annual refresh cycle: it could update the iPad Pro in the spring, followed by another update in the fall bringing 5G functionality, although this is pure speculation on my part.
The Cupertino tech giant did just that with the third-generation iPad that introduced Retina technology to the tablet brand. Due to its suboptimal GPU which caused the device to overheat, the iPad 3 was followed by the fourth-generation iPad just six months later.
So, there’s preceded to do something like that with the iPad Pro.
Compared with LCD and OLED technologies that utilize LEDs to create a backlight for a display panel, the newer mini-LED technology mounts the microscopic LEDs onto a flexible substrate. Mini-LED technology offers many of the benefits of its OLED counterpart, such as improved brightness, higher contrast ratios, crisper colors and deeper blacks.
The mini-LEDs should improve productivity and entertainment experience, per Kuo.
So, what do you make of this report? If you ask us, Apple isn’t going to update the iPad Pro twice in a single year so we’re putting our money on a fall refresh.
Let us know what you think in the comments down below!