The Amazing New OLED iPad Pro Is the Best iPad for Movies

The new OLED iPad Pro might be the best way to watch movies short of a huge, expensive TV or going to the cinema.

What are the elements needed for a great movie-watching experience? Great picture? Check. Great sound? Yup. The glow of smartphones from the seats around you, the crunch and rustle of popcorn, and the stench of that "cheese" sauce they drench over buckets of knockoff Doritos? Hmm. Perhaps the new 13-inch iPad Pro, with its OLED display and quad speakers, is actually better than sitting in a packed movie theater?

"I never really thought of it before, but earlier today, I was on the couch holding up my iPad at the normal tablet distance, and I realized that it is equal to a 100+ inch television at the average television distance," said iPad TV fan Sluchbox in a MacRumors forum post participated in by Lifewire. "So it hit me that people might not be using tablets to view video out of necessity, but out of benefit."

Non-Silver Screen

To be honest, the iPad has been an amazing portable TV since Apple made the first 12.9-inch version, the iPad Pro, in 2015. But over the years, as the screen and the speakers have gotten better and better, so has the movie experience. And now, with the OLED screen, it's just about as perfect as it can be in such a small package.

Before we get to some more technical details, let's talk about size. If you're a die-hard nacho-guzzling theatergoer, or you have a giant TV on your living room wall, you might balk at such a tiny screen. But if you bring the screen closer, it becomes, relatively speaking, almost the same size as that big TV. The difference is that it never feels as big because your eyes are focused much closer, and our brains understand that it's a small object up close, not a large object far away.

But in practice, you soon forget about all that, and it's just as easy to see all the detail and action and to read the subtitles if you want them.

My partner and I watch everything on a 2018 12.9-inch iPad Pro, and it never feels any different from watching movies at a friend's home, where they have a massive QD-OLED TV bolted to the wall.

So size does matter—you really need the bigger 13-inch iPad if you're watching with a friend—but not as much as you'd think at first. And the advantages of that smaller screen soon become clear when we look at the screen technology.

OLED

The key to the 2024 iPad Pro being so good for TV and movies is its OLED screen. That's because it can display much blacker blacks, more contrast, and therefore much more vibrant images.

"The new OLED screens can produce a broader spectrum of colors, deeper blacks, and a higher contrast ratio. All of these help to make the viewing experience amazing for the movie watcher," filmmaker and photographer Neil Chase told Lifewire via email.

OLED screens work by lighting up individual colored pixels. If the entire screen is dark—the canonical example is a starry sky in outer space—then you'll see it as an inky-black field with pinpricks of starlight.

Try that with almost any other screen technology, and you get what's called blooming, a halo of light around those stars. With regular LCD screens, there's a glowing panel behind a grid of colored pixels. That light shines through the pixels, and depending on which pixels are activated, you get colored dots.

The problem comes with black. That backlight is always glowing, so to create black, you have to use the colored pixels to block that light. Even with local dimming, where parts of that backlight are disabled, you still get bloom. Also, the background is never really black, unlike with OLED.

Micro-LEDs are another technology that allows pinpoint control of each pixel, but right now that's still new and expensive to make. OLED is now a common, proven technology, which Apple has been using in iPhones for years.

Then we get to sound. If you've ever used a recent-ish iPad Pro to watch movies, you'll know that its speakers are amazing, and somehow Apple's audio tech manages to project sound off into the distance on the left and right. I used to use a Bluetooth speaker but soon found that the built-in speakers are good enough.

The downside is that the big iPad Pro is expensive—even more expensive than a MacBook Air, which comes with a keyboard and trackpad, which is $350 extra for the iPad.

So you might instead consider the new 13-inch iPad Air. No, its screen isn't nearly as good, but it's still good enough. The only downside might be the speakers, of which there are only two, not four. But in that case, you can always opt for headphones. And if they are AirPods Pro, then you also get to enjoy Spatial Audio, which is great for movies.

"I do think a lot of people use earphones to watch movies with iPads, as they are usually out of the house when they are doing so. So, the importance of this feature really depends on how the person is going to watch movies. In general, great sound leads to a more realistic-feeling movie watching experience," says Chase.

Am I seriously suggesting that you replace your TV with an iPad? Kinda. You could try. But this is more for folks who don't already own a good television. Try using your iPad instead. You'll be surprised at how good it is.