Among Apple's tablets, the iPad mini occupies a category all its own. It is too small to double as a laptop for most people, and it usually isn't the first tool an artist reaches for when they want to draw. What it does better than anything else in the lineup is disappear into your day. It's built for pure portability, the kind of device you can read an ebook on, flip over to Netflix, and then slide into a coat pocket without a second thought. Pair it with an Apple Pencil and it becomes the closest thing the company makes to a phablet, and arguably its most purely enjoyable gadget. And yet, as tempting as it is, right now is exactly the wrong moment to buy one.
The reason surfaced on Thursday, when word emerged that Apple is preparing an OLED iPad mini for release later this year, quite possibly as soon as October. If it ships, it will be the first "mini" tablet Apple has ever built around OLED, and only the second iPad to use the technology at all, after the Pro line. For anyone who has been holding out for OLED in this size, that's genuinely exciting news. For everyone else, the pitch is simpler: you don't have to want the OLED model to benefit from its arrival. The smart move for any prospective iPad mini buyer is to hold off until it lands.
What OLED actually changes
OLED is a fundamentally different way of lighting a screen. The traditional LCD panel inside today's iPad mini relies on a single backlight that illuminates every pixel at once. That backlight can dim, but it never fully switches off while the tablet is in use. So when you're looking at a dark photo or a shadowy scene in a video, the areas that should be black come out looking gray instead. It can still look perfectly good, but the effect is noticeable, especially if you're watching something in a dark room.
OLED works the other way around. Each pixel produces its own light, which hands the display far finer control over how bright any single part of the screen gets. More importantly, individual pixels can shut off entirely. During a dark scene, the pixels that should be black simply go dark, so what you see is true black rather than a washed-out gray. The result is dramatically deeper contrast than an LCD can manage.
OLED isn't the only technology capable of this. The iPad mini would also have gained from the mini-LED panels found in MacBook Pros and earlier iPad Pros, which swap a single backlight for many separate "dimming zones." Like OLED, mini-LED can render dark images as genuine black, just with less precision, because it still can't switch off one pixel at a time. On that front, it's a welcome sign that Apple appears to be going with OLED here rather than mini-LED.
Why waiting pays off, even if you don't care about the screen
Is it worth holding out for the OLED iPad mini? The short answer is yes, and not only because the new screen is likely to win people over. There's a real group of buyers who have wanted an OLED mini for ages, and for them the wait is a no-brainer. But plenty of others genuinely don't think about which display technology sits inside their tablet, or whether their mini can turn off pixels one by one.
If that describes you, waiting still makes sense, for a different reason: the older models should get cheaper. Apple will most likely retire the current iPad mini once it starts selling the new OLED version. Retailers like Amazon and Best Buy, however, will keep selling whatever previous stock they have on hand. And because those units will suddenly count as "outdated," there's a good chance they'll be priced lower than they are today.
None of that is guaranteed. The OLED iPad mini will almost certainly cost more than the current models, both because of the upgraded display and because of the broader memory crunch that's pushing prices up across the board. Retailers could seize on the new mini's higher sticker price as a reason to leave the old mini's price untouched. Even so, there's reason for optimism: most shoppers will gravitate toward the newest iPad mini available, which gives Amazon and Best Buy an incentive to cut prices on the older units so they can actually clear that inventory.
Exactly how retailers react won't be clear until Apple formally unveils the OLED iPad mini. But October isn't far off, so it's worth sitting tight. In the worst case, you'll simply get to choose between the iPad mini you would have bought today and a slightly pricier one with a far better display.
