Apple VP talks new iPad mini: OLED without ProMotion, Acoustic Display, more

Apple unveiled its “biggest update ever” for the iPad mini this week, introducing a thinner, lighter design and an OLED display. In a pair of interviews, Dave Pakula, Apple’s vice president of Hardware Engineering, discussed the new iPad mini’s design, display, and more. While the new iPad mini features an OLED display, it doesn’t support ProMotion. Instead, it’s limited to a 60Hz refresh rate. Here’s what Pakula had to say about that decision in an interview with Chris Lawley: Display experience is about more than just a single spec. One of the things that’s really cool about OLED is it actually has this really fast pixel response time. So it’s more than an order of magnitude faster than the pixel response time for an LCD display. What that does is it makes everything really smooth. Motion blur is significantly reduced compared to LCD. When you pair that with the other things, the contrast, the brightness, and the color, this is just a killer display. In addition to being lighter and thinner, the new iPad mini is also IP67-rated for water and dust resistance, a first for an iPad. One key enabler is a new Acoustic Display. Pakula explains how that technology works: One of the cool things we realized as we started experimenting was that the unique size and form factor of this display actually had a resonant frequency that’s in the audible range. I think more importantly, it’s in the range of like a traditional woofer that you’d have in a speaker. What we did was we built these custom drivers that actually energize the display and emit sound directly through the enclosure, but that only really works for the mid and low frequencies. For the higher frequencies, we actually designed these little custom tweeters. There’s one on each end of the product, and they’re actually ported out through these hidden ports between the glass and the aluminum. The result is we have this product that’s water and dust resistant. I think the sound that comes from it is so surprising for a form factor of this size. Pakula also sat down with Katarina Mogus for an interview, where he discussed how the iPad mini fits into a world where iPhone Duo also exists: What we love about the iPad mini is it’s really the full iPad experience in the palm of your hand. That gives you access to a million+ apps in the App Store. It’s got incredibly powerful creative accessories like the Apple Pencil Pro. And it’s got the advanced multitasking of iPadOS 27. It is really incredibly universal. And honestly, with all these updates, all of those experiences just got so much better. You can watch both interviews below. The new iPad mini is available to pre-order now, with the first orders arriving on November 6. FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.