Apple is secretly mounting a billion-dollar plan to mass produce its own micro-LED displays to move away from its reliance on Samsung, and to control more of its own supply chains, as the use of this technology becomes more ubiquitous.
This report, from Nikkei Asia, comes a day after Samsung Display doubled down on the emerging micro-OLED technology, buying US micro-OLED maker eMagin for around A$328 million.
Apple is, however, a customer of eMagin, so it isn’t abandoning the technology — nor its reliance on Samsung Display — in totality.
Micro-LED displays use less power, can be made thinner, and offer more outdoor brightness than micro-OLED panels. They can also be curved or folded. This last point is important, given Apple is one of the few hold outs in the foldable smartphone market.
Apple has spent over A$1.5 billion in the development of micro-LED displays over the past decade, and will soon take mass production inhouse, at its top-secret R&D facilities in the Longtan District in the northern Taiwanese city of Taoyuan, according to Nikkei Asia’s sources.
“Apple has spent at least $1 billion on the R&D and samples for micro-LED technologies in the past nearly 10 years,” said a source “who has been directly involved in the project for years”.
“It wants to secure more control over the next-gen display technologies for its future products,” the source added.
Apple is designing the driver integrated circuits for the micro-LED screens, and production equipment used it the mass transfer process, the sources said.
“It doesn’t mean that Apple will always do the mass transfer on its own. But it shows how determined Apple is to allocate resources to have more control over next-gen display technologies in its own hands.”
Apple will introduce its own micro-LED panels on its 2025 Apple Watch, the sources say.
“Apple’s ultimate plan is to introduce the technologies on its iPhone, which is its key revenue source and has much bigger volume, to justify the investments over the years,” said one of the sources who claimed to have seen samples of the company’s micro-LED screen.
