IT之家 October 30 news: The tech media outlet 9to5Mac yesterday (October 29) published a blog post reporting that in an interview with the YouTube channel Christopher Lawley, Apple’s Vice President of Hardware Engineering Dave Pakula discussed the design, display, and other aspects of Apple’s iPad mini 8.
Although the new iPad mini is equipped with an OLED display, it does not support ProMotion technology, and its refresh rate is only 60Hz. ProMotion support would allow the iPad mini’s refresh rate to automatically adjust from 10Hz to 120Hz based on the displayed content, but Apple apparently still reserves this feature for iPad Pro models.
Regarding the topic users care about most—“why the iPad mini 8’s screen refresh rate is still 60Hz”—IT之家 translates Pakula’s response as follows:
The display experience does not depend on a single specification alone. One of OLED’s major advantages is its extremely fast pixel response time, more than an order of magnitude faster than the pixel response time of LCD displays.
The benefit of this is that the picture is very smooth. Compared with LCD, motion blur is significantly reduced. Combined with contrast, brightness, color, and other aspects, this is definitely an excellent display.
Apple says the new iPad mini can reach a peak brightness of 600 nits when displaying standard content, an increase over the previous generation’s 500 nits; when displaying HDR content, peak brightness can reach 1,200 nits. OLED technology can deliver higher contrast and more vivid colors because it has no backlight, and each pixel turns off completely to display pure black.
Apple’s technical specifications show that the new iPad mini has a contrast ratio of 2,000,000:1. The display still maintains a pixel density of 326 ppi and supports the P3 wide color gamut.
In addition to being lighter and thinner, the new iPad mini also features IP67 water and dust resistance, a first for the iPad. One of its key advantages is the all-new acoustic display. Pakula explained how this technology works:
One cool thing we discovered during our experiments was that this display’s unique size and shape actually has a resonant frequency within the audible range.
I think more importantly, its frequency response range is similar to the woofer in a traditional speaker. We customized these driver units; they power the display and emit sound directly through the enclosure, but this only applies to mid- and low frequencies.
To enhance the high frequencies, we specifically designed these small custom tweeters. There is one at each end of the product, and sound is emitted through hidden ports between the glass and aluminum. As a result, this product has water and dust resistance. I think that for a product of this size, its sound quality is truly amazing.
In an interview with Katarina Mogus, Pakula also emphasized the product positioning of the iPad mini:
What we love about the iPad mini is that it truly condenses the full iPad experience into the palm of your hand. That means you can access more than a million apps in the App Store. It also has powerful creative accessories, such as Apple Pencil Pro. In addition, it is equipped with the advanced multitasking features of iPadOS 27.
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