Apple's first OLED tablet is now available for nearly 2 weeks, but the new iPad Pro, starting with new999, is a serious investment — which cartoon reading experience it offers

Often Pro-only features are gradually filtered to cheaper devices, as is the case with Apple Pencil support. The good news is that OLED panels will appear on cheaper iPad mini and Air tablets in the future - the bad news is that you are waiting for your hand.

According to ZDNet Korea, Samsung Display began developing a sample of 8-inch OLED panels for the future iPad mini last month. Unfortunately, this is only the first part of the slow process and plans to move to mass production at the Cheonan plant in late 2025.

That means that the OLED iPad mini will not actually be available for purchase until 2026, as South Korean media and research firm Omdia had previously predicted. The report adds that it will be launched along with the OLED iPad Air that year.

The good news is that it is not the next iPad mini out the door. According to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the iPad mini7 is expected to launch later this year — an overdue upgrade given that the current iPad mini is back all the way back to 2021.  However, this year's update is not rumored to be a major upgrade.

According to Bloomberg's Mark Garman, we expect an end to the curse of the A16 or A17 processors (the same as powering the iPhone14Pro and iPhone15Pro respectively) and the so・called "jelly scrolling" of the current models, but otherwise it will be a fairly limited refresh. It will be.

With the introduction of OLED panels in 2026, it will become more important if they are realized. Unlike the LCD screens of current iPad mini and Air tablets, the pixels on the OLED panel self-illuminate without the need for backlight, providing endless contrast with the deep, pitch-black black that literally has no light.

Apple's first OLED panel certainly impressed us. In a review of his iPad Pro2024, our computing writer Tony Polanco described it as having "the best OLED panel my eyes have ever seen." 

"I'm a professional writer, but I'm struggling to tell you how good the OLED display on the iPad Pro is," he writes, "and this is definitely what I think you need to look at it to believe it."

While the iPad mini and Air may not offer that great (after all, Apple still has to upsell the Pro), it's still a big