5 reasons movies and TV shows are worse on your iPad ‣ Diverse Daily

One of my all-time favorite rants is David Lynch’s 2008 complaint about people watching movies on smartphones. “Now if you’re playing the movie on a telephone, you will never in a trillion years experience the film,” he said in the DVD extras for Inland Empire. He later changed his mind, but a lot of people still sympathize with his original view, including me. Even if you’ve got a iPhone 17 Pro Max, that’s such a small screen that you’re losing out on a lot of immersion, no matter whether you own noise-canceling headphones.

iPads do improve things, since there’s huge gap between 6.9 and 11 inches, never mind a 13-inch iPad Pro. In fact I’ve long enjoyed watching mid-flight entertainment on my 11-inch Pro, from The Witch through to Lynch’s own Twin Peaks: The Return. But I have to acknowledge that if you want the best possible cinematic experience, there are still deficiencies with iPads that should push you to use that 65-inch TV.

The aspect ratio is all wrong

The return of the dreaded black bars

An M4 iPad Pro on a rug next to an Xbox controller.

When Apple first introduced the iPad, one of its selling points was that you could use it in any orientation and it would adjust automatically. To make this work, though, Apple had to design the tablet with a relatively squarish aspect ratio. The exact ratio of each model varies, but hovers in the vicinity of 4:3 or 3:2.

You can see where this is headed. Most movies and many shows are presented in a 16:9 ratio or even wider, whether for artistic reasons or simply to fit standard theater and TV screens. When you watch video on your iPad, then, it’s almost always going to be compressed into a smaller area. It’s something I can put up with if I have to — yet it means that in practice, actual image sizes will fall below 10 inches on every iPad smaller than a 13-inch Air or Pro.

This matters not just for immersion, but your ability to pick out details. As sharp as iPad resolutions are, it’s a lot harder to notice, say, a sign or character in the background when its real-world dimensions are a fraction of an inch. A scrunched-up picture sacrifices some of the “texture” of a movie or show, in other words.

It’s tempting you with distractions

Not just notifications, either

One argument directors make for watching in the theater is focusing your attention. In a darkened room with a giant screen and a blaring sound system, it’s hard to focus on much else. If you do bring out your phone, the rest of the audience will rightly get annoyed with you.

The iPad’s versatility is the nemesis of staying focused. Unless you turn on Do Not Disturb or another Focus mode, you’re always at risk of being interrupted by notifications. With or without those alerts, you can be tempted to switch to another app, no matter how exciting a movie or show turns out to be. In fact unlike an iPhone, you can run other apps side-by-side, which sometimes satisfies the pretense of paying attention when all you’re really doing is putting on background noise.

The outside world tends to intrude as well. Because an iPad is so easy to carry with you or put aside, you can end up wandering off to do other things. Meanwhile, your partner or family might not take your viewing time seriously, especially with it being tough to share what you’re watching. The experience is inherently antisocial, in most cases.

You’re not getting authentic surround sound

iPad, meet the laws of physics

One of the features Apple advertises for most of its headphones, whether they’re AirPods or Beats models, is support for spatial audio in the form of Dolby Atmos. Spatial audio differs from traditional surround sound in that it’s populated by sound “objects” that move in 3D space. When it’s working as intended, you’ll hear sounds flying above you, not just in front or behind.

The thing is, without AirPlay or a wired connection, it’s impossible to get full spatial effects. Bluetooth lacks the necessary bandwidth, and if you’re wearing headphones, there are only two physical channels anyway. What you’re really hearing if you slap on a pair of AirPods is a series of audio illusions, used to trick your brain into thinking sounds are coming from a particular direction.

Don’t get me wrong — with a pair of high-quality headphones, you might not care whether things are simulated. But true Atmos with five or more channels is still going to be more impressive, not the least because you don’t need something clamped on your ears the entire time. I sometimes find it tough to watch a movie with over-the-ear headphones simply because my ears start boiling partway through. I’m not sure how anyone can wear the AirPods Max while they’re lifting weights.

You may be getting lower-quality streams and downloads

Your experience will vary

When you connect to a website or other online service, one of the things that’s immediately fingerprinted is what device you’re using to do it. This is often essential, since it helps with things like proper site formatting, and understanding what features should and shouldn’t be presented. There’s no sense linking someone to a Mac file download if they’re connecting from a Windows PC, for instance.

When it comes to iPads, though, video services can sometimes be overly conservative. They’ll not only scale down the resolution — which makes sense, since 4K is meaningless on a 13-inch tablet — but the bitrate, prioritizing stability over quality. This is going to vary from app to app, but you might want to bear this in mind if you hate the chance of visual artifacts or lower-quality audio.

You should get better results from downloads than direct streaming, but be sure to check quality settings in whatever app you’re using. Some apps may default to resolutions below 1080p, which is going to be very disappointing if you just bought an iPad with an OLED display and 1TB of storage.

Eyestrain is a real problem

Don’t sit so close kid

A woman using a 2024 iPad Air with an Apple Pencil.

At the distance that an iPad makes sense, several factors combine to increase eyestrain. The first is the difficulty of focusing — your eyes can’t relax as much staring at an object a foot or two away as it can a screen on the other side of the room. You’re also shining bright light directly into your eyes instead of letting it scatter. Furthermore, people tend to blink less when staring at a screen, which can lead to dry and irritated eyes.

On OLED iPads, a minority of people may run into a problem with PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) flickering. PWM is sometimes used to dim a display, but for those afflicted, PWM sensitivity can cause fatigue and headaches. It’s particularly bad at the lowest brightness levels, so trying to watch a movie in bed might be someone’s personal definition of hell.

Not all iPads rely on PWM, but if you have one that does, there isn’t yet an option to enable PWM smoothing, as there is on the iPhone 17 lineup. The only solution seems to be keeping Control Center brightness levels high, and perhaps using Settings -> Accessibility -> Display & Text Size -> Reduce White Point when you want a dimmer image.