What’s causing the Retina iPad mini to launch so late in the year, and why is demand expected to be so limited at launch? Display yield issues tend to be viewed as the culprit, but what exactly is happening? According to a new rumor, LCD burn-in is to blame.
According to Korea’s ETNews, Sharp is having problems with burned-in images on its new IGZO displays destined for the Retina iPad mini.
The issue appears to be one with Sharp’s thin-film transistor layer. This is the heart of IGZO, which allows more light from the LED backlights to actually pass through the display’s pixels. It is this technology that allowed Apple to half the battery and number of LED lamps in the iPad Air while maintaining the same battery life.
According to ETNews’ source, the burn-in is not actually visible to the naked eye, but the panels still can’t be used because of Apple’s incredibly strict quality-control process. It might seem frustrating that Apple’s not loosening these standards just a tad to get the iPad mini in more hands before Christmas, but let’s face it, this is what makes Apple Apple.
Source: ETNews
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
4 responses to “LCD Burn-In Issues Causing Retina iPad Mini Delay”
I find this quite funny: “the burn-in is not actually visible to the naked eye, but the panels still can’t be used because of Apple’s incredibly strict quality-control process.” Why? Because I’ve bought and returned 4 13″ retina MBPs with very visible image retention, or “burn-in,” including one of the most recent generation with the Haswell processors. There is an apple forum post 600+ pages long about this issue. Why doesn’t apple care about the problem it its $1500+ notebooks, while they care about it in a $400+ iPad?
“Demand limited at launch?” Surely you mean supply. They pay you for this?
So let me get this straight, my $2200 MacBook Pro with Retina Display that I bought in June of 2012 had this problem, and I had to fight like hell to get it fixed, but Apple all of a sudden cares about a $400 iPad mini? What about my iPad 2? I paid over $600 for it and it also had image retention which was BS.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad Apple is finally taking steps to keep it from happening in the new iPad mini, but I wish they would have cared the same about quality control when my $2200 MBPwR was manufactured.
Like a pile of total BS. Apple at no time promised any iPad would be released at any set time. They never said supplies were limited. Etc.
This is likely nothing more than the typical analyst and blog BS games to cover their butts. Just like the claim the ‘real tv’ won’t happen in 2014 after all, cause Apple wants to catch up with google over wearables.