Somewhere in the story today on MicroLEDs are the future, the author mentions Apple’s apparent move into MicroLED display manufacturing. It might be simple to assume that Apple would rather not give its money to Samsung, LG, or BOE, in the same way, it stopped giving its money to Intel when it made its own CPUs.
It may be that Apple wants more control over its hardware so that it can better align with its software. Definitely. How much does Apple do already that it can slip under the display of its most popular devices, devices that cannot get much bigger.
It is definitely because Apple wants to do more with displays than display manufacturers may want or are comfortable doing, or care to invest in without a firm commitment. The one benefit of a move to MicroLEDs, an accelerated move towards their adoption in mainstream computing products from Apple, is the myriad opportunities to integrate the internet of things (IoT) into future product lines.
And let’s just be clear about IoT, in the context of what Apple does, there are going to be an awful lot of sensors integrated into its devices—to sense humans, sense living environments, and almost anything that can add value. The Apple Watch didn’t become an iPhone on your wrist, it’s became a monitor of vital signs and a health tracking phenomenon.
The future of displays is synchronous communication. Not just smartwatches, but the integration of displays into car cockpits is another example of an opportunity to integrate all kinds of sensors, and circuitry into the dashboard. The display is the focal point of the user experience, taking more space as more information has to be present, and thus, it needs to also start taking in that information, not carving out valuable viewing space for buttons, lenses, and sensors.
Speaker technology in displays, biosensors, LiDAR, haptics, self-cleaning mechanisms, under-display cameras, and the many non-display applications of MicroLED make it of strategically vital importance for Apple to find its own way in display manufacturing and put everything under the screen. The company has one guaranteed world-beating product, the iPhone, and it has practically reached the limits of what it can be in its present form factor. For the iPhone display, greater integration is what matters, and that integration has to be available across all Apple devices eventually.
Yup, Apple needs to make its own displays. However challenging that may be, the company has the volumes and the money to out-invest the whole display industry.
