John Gruber:

I believe the iPad Mini (or what­ever it’s going to be called) uses the same dis­play as the iPhone 3GS. So instead of cut­ting these sheets into 3.5-inch 480 × 320 dis­plays for the iPhone 3GS, they’ll cut them into 7.85-inch 1024 × 768 dis­plays for the smaller iPad.

The 3.5-inch 480×320 dis­play sports a res­o­lu­tion of 164.83 ppi. The 7.85-inch 1024×768 dis­play is 163.06 ppi. Assuming the 3.5-inch dis­play is actu­ally more like 3.53 inches the res­o­lu­tion becomes closer to 163 ppi.

For the sake of argu­ment let’s assume a res­o­lu­tion of 163 ppi for both dis­plays. In that case both dis­plays can be man­u­fac­tured using the same design rules on the glass sub­strate and so it will be effi­cient and eco­nom­i­cal. However if you want to build mil­lions of 7.85-inch LCDs it would most likely be on a larger fab than the one used for man­u­fac­tur­ing the much smaller 3.5-inch LCDs.

Update 2012.07.10: John Gruber:

So maybe it’s the peo­ple who carry a big note­book who’ll be most tempted to get a smaller iPad, since they’re already car­ry­ing more weight.

I carry around a big note­book: a mid-2009 uni­body 17-inch MacBook Pro with the non-matte high res­o­lu­tion dis­play. I got the big note­book because I wanted and needed enough pix­els to put up two pages side-by-side. Weight was not even a consideration.

And weight will not be much of a con­sid­er­a­tion when/if the smaller iPad comes out. I waited two years for the retina iPad. Rumor has it the iPad mini will have a pixel for­mat of 1024×768. That right there is the prob­lem for me, pre­cisely because I’m a guy who val­ues high-end dis­plays. The 17-inch MacBook Pro up until the retina MacBook Pro was the only MacBook capa­ble of dis­play­ing 1920×1200. The 9.7-inch retina dis­play in the iPad (3) makes con­tent absolutely beautiful.

The rumored iPad mini would have a dis­play that’s less res­o­lu­tion (ppi) than the smaller iPhone and the larger iPad. The only dis­play advan­tage would be a few more pix­els (1024×768 vs. 960×640) and I don’t con­sider that much of an advan­tage since the res­o­lu­tion would be half: 163 ppi vs. 326 ppi.

Update 2012.10.31: Gruber reviews the iPad mini:

The non-retina res­o­lu­tion is the one and only sig­nif­i­cant com­plaint I have with the iPad Mini, and it’s an issue that is only appar­ent to those of us who already own a nearly-new iPad.

Or an iPhone 4/4S. He likes the size and weight so much he’s will­ing to switch from the iPad (3) to the iPad mini, despite the lack of a retina dis­play. I don’t think I’d want to pun­ish my eyes like that.

Update 2012.11.04: iFixit tore down the iPad mini. The LCD mark­ings lacked model num­ber and man­u­fac­turer, but the LCD dis­play dri­ver is a Samsung W1235 S6TNMR1X01 sug­gest­ing the LCD is also man­u­fac­tured by Samsung.

Update 2012.11.05: Raymond Soneira:

The iPad mini is cer­tainly a very capa­ble small Tablet, but it does not fol­low in Apple’s tra­di­tion of pro­vid­ing the best dis­play, or at least a great dis­play – it has just a very capa­ble dis­play. What’s more, the dis­plays on exist­ing mini Tablets from Amazon and Google out­per­form the iPad mini in most of our Lab tests as doc­u­mented below in the Shoot-Out Comparison Table. Some of this results from con­straints within the iPad prod­uct line, and some to real­is­tic con­straints on dis­play tech­nol­ogy and costs, but much of it is due to a num­ber of poor choices and compromises.

A bit sur­pris­ing and quite dis­ap­point­ing. The lower res­o­lu­tion of 163 ppi is right around those of the orig­i­nal iPhone, iPhone 3G, and iPhone 3GS. Simply ter­ri­ble, but that’s not sur­pris­ing; these are: higher reflectance than the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire HD (lower reflectance is bet­ter) and a smaller color gamut than the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire HD. Compared to the other two the iPad mini man­aged to rank in the mid­dle. Read on for Soneira’s thor­ough analy­sis of the iPad mini’s dis­play.

Update 2012.11.06: Jacqui Cheng, Ars Technica:

What does this mean for read­ing? If you’re used to look­ing at a retina screen, which it turns out many Apple prod­uct users are, the dif­fer­ences will be notice­able. I really didn’t want this to be true when going into this review—I like my retina dis­plays and all, but I also think they’re a hair over­rated when it comes to every­day use—but I can­not tell a lie. When I was read­ing on the iPad mini, prac­ti­cally all I could see were jagged edges and pix­els. It was dis­tract­ing, par­tic­u­larly when I was really con­cen­trat­ing on the text, like when read­ing e-books or PDFs.

This is the main rea­son rea­son why I waited until the iPad (3) to get mine. I bought the first iPad, but returned it because it didn’t fit my work­flow. Blogging apps were ter­ri­ble back then. The iPad 2 had the same dis­play as the orig­i­nal, but by then my eyes were used to look­ing at the iPhone 4. I, of course, passed on the iPad 2.

The lack of text smooth­ness, and occa­sional jagged edges, are just annoy­ing enough to con­stantly pop out at you even after long peri­ods of use. It may actu­ally be the sin­gle lim­it­ing fac­tor for many poten­tial buyers.

Millions of us are used to retina dis­plays and now Apple wants us to go back with the iPad mini. No thanks, I’ll wait for the retina iPad mini. If the recent pace of new intro­duc­tions is any indi­ca­tion I won’t have to wait long.

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