Samsung, Lenovo, Asus, Microsoft, and Huawei have delivered, and been open about OLED tablets for a while and this seems a good time to remind everyone about that because Apple – yes, it again – stirred up its stans with the promise of an OLED iPad Pro for 2024. According to Counterpoint, that is going to make a quick dent in everyone’s market share.
You could say that Apple is timing its launch to arrive as OLED costs come down or you could say that Apple doesn’t have to care about first mover advantage any more and can just release a product at any point in the space-time continuum and jump into market leadership. Or, you could say that Apple’s user experience is all that matters and the products are going to be whatever they need to be when Apple is ready to pull the trigger – meaning that users will wait for Apple to do an OLED tablet, whatever the cost, rather than use a product from some other brand.
That’s not necessarily true in all regions. Geography plays a big part in brand adoption, particularly in places where cost matters or the higher-end brands don’t service as well for whatever reason they may have. You can also see this as a bookmark for when OLED technology will gain wider traction because if Apple is doing it then it must be pretty cool.
Maybe it doesn’t matter how much display real estate Apple takes in-house as long as it is transitioning the industry to OLED, miniLED, whatever floats your boat. When Apple endorses the technology, costs be damned, then consumers say, that’s nice, and costs be damned, too. I don’t discount the impact on Apple’s suppliers, the external foundries that will supply the good, but they’re very well fed and well kept hostages to Apple’s plans. Industry health only comes from opportunities for growth for everyone else.
The cynic in me, a very powerful presence of great stature prior to a morning caffeine injection, would say that Apple doesn’t lead on hardware anymore, it is opportunistic. We can use it as a gauge to monitor where manufacturing capability for certain technologies are in their readiness for mass market use, but we can’t use Apple as a measure of what is cool. That’s the legacy of moving from Steve Jobs, a product guy, to Tim Cook, a process guy, each playing to his strength.
