What Display Daily thinks: There was a time when Apple was known for making extraordinarily good displays. Whether justified or not, when you got a look at an Apple screen, you know it was somehow different from the competition. It seems like it doesn’t matter much anymore.
Or, does it? There’s definitely a pricing issue and an upgrade issue. Both are exhausting, even to die-hard Apple fanatics. There’s only so much charity you can give to a multi-trillion dollar company before you start to question your own values. The second thing is that if the iPad Pro’s display is as good as it is, why didn’t that resonate purely from a technical point of view? It goes down to a little bit of the myopia of the display industry. The industry thinks that it is doing amazing things and getting thinner, brighter, more colorful displays, but most of that seems to be aimed at themselves. Consumers really don’t know much between one display technology or the next, at least if you get out of the echo chamber of social media.
Apple hasn’t really found a compelling reason to make its iPad Pro displays more interesting as a solution or benefit. That’s hard to do because the qualitative arguments are subjective. If what I see in my device at hand is good enough then it is good enough. Upgrading for display quality is an indulgence.
Having said all of that, it doesn’t help provide any solution or conclusions that could be helpful. There isn’t one when the key differentiation is, what you see is what you get. Well, what I see right now is fine. I can see what I see. Why do I have to roll up a barrel of money to see what I already see on something new.
So, there you have the main problem with OLED displays: how do you convince people to pay a lot more for a viewing experience that isn’t two or three times as good. And what is the overall performance uptick when you move to OLED? Is it 10% or 100%?
LG put out a press release this week on its OLED TVs getting Eyesafe Circadian Certification or something like that. I don’t even want to go there because I get the marketing pitch but really? OLED TVs help you sleep better? That’s worth a two or three fold increase in price? The problem isn’t the tech. The problem is that the sellers are so enamored by the process of making the displays that they can’t really come up with a compelling reason why consumers be on the hook to subsidize their long-term investment in their fabs.
Shrinking iPad OLED Sales
At the DSCC 360 Conference, Ross Young covered the precipitous drop in sales of iPad Pros following a strong Q2 2024. Despite boasting some of the best displays ever made for the tablet market, characterized by tandem OLED stacks and LTPS backplanes at a remarkable 0.2mm thickness, the projected shipments for 2024 have drastically fallen. Initially estimated at 10 million units for the 11.1” and 13” iPad Pros, the revised forecast now stands at only 6.7 million, reflecting a troubling trend. Early figures from Q3 2024 indicate a staggering 40% decline in OLED panel shipments, with further declines expected to exceed 30% in Q4 2024. The larger, higher-priced 13” models are particularly affected, experiencing reductions over 50% in Q3 and projected drops of 90% or more in Q4.
Young makes all the right assumptions about what could be happening, the impact on Apple’s product line and also investment in OLED IT panel manufacturing. You can read Young’s take on Apple’s OLED iPad Pro volumes continuing to come down for yourself.
