Whether you love Apple, hate them, or feel nothing at all,
they do a great job of capturing the imagination of would-be tech buyers with sexy-sounding branding
like Liquid Retina XDR, one of the major features
that they're pushing with their new MacBook Pro lineup. But what the heck does Liquid Retina XDR mean?
Is it just more marketing fluff, or is there more to it?
Let's start by quickly talking about what a retina display is.
You probably first heard the term quite a while ago, as Apple's been using it since the days of the iPhone 4.
And all it means is that the display has a pixel density that is high enough that you can't make out
individual pixels at a normal viewing distance. So really, just about any display is a retina display
if you're sitting far enough away from it. Though of course, pixel density is still important
if you're holding a phone close to your face or sitting arms length away from your laptop.
Apple then started using the term Liquid Retina in 2018 with the release of the iPhone XR.
But the iPhone XR was actually a lower-priced model
within the iPhone X lineup. So Liquid Retina was just a cool way of saying
that the phone had a relatively bog-standard Liquid Crystal
or LCD screen, similar to what you'd find
in completely average TVs or monitors.
So is the new Liquid Retina XDR
on the 2021 MacBook Pros and iPad Pros just more marketing hype?
It turns out the answer is not quite.
The XDR stands for Extreme Dynamic Range.
And after we get through the mandatory eye roll over the use of X for extreme,
it turns out that Apple has put some really interesting tech
into these new displays for deeper blacks and crisper colors.
Probably the most important improvement Apple brought to Liquid Retina XDR is the array of many LEDs
that backlight the display. All LCD screens need a backlight to function,
but nicer displays tend to have more and brighter LEDs for their backlights
that allow finer control over smaller areas of the screen.
This allows them to be made dimmer, to deepen shadows,
or to be made brighter to make bright details pop.
The Liquid Retina XDR display in the iPad Pro has more than 10,000 mini LEDs backlighting it,
organized into nearly 2,600 individual dimming zones.
And this is all fit into a relatively small tablet screen,
meaning that Apple had to custom engineer its own manufacturing methods,
because packing so many tiny LEDs into a small space
is a pretty delicate operation. But the result is a display that can,
for supported content, get to 1,000 nits across the screen
and 1,600 nits in smaller areas.
That's a high number for any display, but it's especially impressive for a mobile device
that has to run on battery. And it's something that might be a selling point
for folks who wanna watch HDR content on their laptop or tablet,
assuming they have deep enough pockets. But mini LED, as cool as it is,
still isn't quite as good in terms of contrast
as an OLED display, which has individual pixels that produce their own light.
And rumors are flying that Apple may transition to OLED for some of its future iPad models,
like they've already done on the iPhone. But considering that OLED is an expensive,
difficult to produce technology that typically can't get as bright as mini LED,
not to mention the fact that OLEDs can suffer from burn-in. If you leave UI elements on the screen for long enough,
we might be seeing liquid retina XDR and its mini LEDs on Apple products for quite a while.
Maybe they'll sell it to us with a less gimmicky name down the road,
but I wouldn't really bet on it.
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