Apple will start moving away from Samsung and making its own custom displays from 2024, according to a new report.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, ever a reliable source of Apple news, claims that Apple will start the process of moving away from Samsung and LG displays by providing the screen of next year’s high-end Apple Watch refresh.
This will entail a switch over from the current OLED standard to a MicroLED panel. MicroLED is similar to OLED insomuch as each pixel is individually lit, but it uses inorganic material to do the illuminating. The result: similarly deep blacks but a much higher peak brightness than OLED.
It’s claimed that the company is already testing out its microLED screen technology on the Apple Watch Ultra.
After this wrist-mounted introduction in 2024, we should start seeing Apple displays cropping up in the mighty iPhone line. That will prove to be a much bigger job in every sense of the word.
It’s a project that’s apparently been in the works for five years over at Apple HQ, costing the company several billion dollars to date. Apple apparently set out to start making its own screens as early as 2020, but technical problems put paid to those ambitions for several years.
Though this will undoubtedly be a significant blow to the bottom lines of Samsung and LG, it’s not all bad news for third party suppliers. The report claims that Apple won’t be ditching them altogether, but rather will have them manufacturing displays to their exact specification.
Apple does something similar with its own A-series processors, of course. While it designs the chips itself, it’s Taiwanese manufacturer TSMC that actually makes the bulk of the processors.
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