What to Expect When Apple Transitions to Mini-LED Technology Apple is planning to introduce mini-LED displays across much of its product lineup, adding the technology to the Mac notebooks and iPads. Mini-LED displays will bring some useful technology improvements to Apple's products, as outlined in our guide below. What is Mini-LED? LCD panels used by Apple use LEDs, or light-emitting diodes inside for backlighting purposes to light up the display. Mini-LEDs, as the name suggests, are smaller diodes that are less than 0.2mm. A device like an iPad features an LCD panel with LEDs for backlighting, with the panel used to control where light is displayed on the screen. Depending on what's on the ‌iPad‌'s display, the LEDs are lit up fully or dimmed down for dark scenes. Compared to a traditional LCD, a panel light with mini-LEDs uses many more LEDs, which means there are more total dimming zones to work with. A traditional display might use hundreds of LEDs, but a mini-LED display could have more than a thousand. Apple, in fact, is said to be exploring mini-LED displays that use 10,000 LEDs, each one below 200 microns.