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Apple said to be developing its own micro-LED displays at secret facility

By Cookie Monster - on 25 Mar 2018, 3:00pm

Apple said to be developing its own micro-LED displays at secret facility

The Apple iPhone X uses OLED panels from Samsung.

Apple is bringing the design of another key component in-house - the display. 

Bloomberg claims that Apple is designing and producing its own screens for the first time in a secret manufacturing facility near its California headquarters. Small numbers of screens are being made for testing purposes. 

Sources said that Apple almost killed the project a year or two ago due to the complexity of the manufacturing process. However, Apple engineers have since been able to make progress and the technology is now at an advanced stage. Nonetheless, it will take several years before the screens are used on consumer devices. 

The screen technology being developed is micro-LED, which uses different light-emitting compounds from OLED displays. The benefits of micro-LED include slimmer designs, brighter panels and lower power consumption. 

If Apple succeeds in developing micro-LED technology, it will help the company stand out from its rivals in the smartphone market especially Samsung which has been touting its superior OLED screens. Apple could easily "own micro-LED" and shut the competition out of the supply chain. 

Micro-LED technology is likely to debut on the Apple Watch first before coming to the iPhone. The micro-LED Apple Watch prototypes are currently not fully functioning wearables and development is said to continue for the next two years. 

Apple has obtained the intellectual property for the manufacturing process of micro-LED from its acquisition of LuxVue in 2014. LuxVue is a company which specializes in the next generation micro-LEDtechnologies. The iPhone maker also setup a display research lab in Taiwan to see if they can pull off in-house display manufacturing. 

Source: Bloomberg

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