Samsung so distrusts Apple—which is on a quest to find alternatives to Samsung’s displays—that it bars Apple engineers from Samsung factories, according to multiple former Apple employees. In one incident in 2017, Apple engineers flew to South Korea from the U.S. to meet with employees at Samsung’s display division but were told they weren’t welcome inside its facilities, including its office buildings, because Samsung had to protect its intellectual property around a screen technology known as organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs. Instead, Apple’s engineers were forced to speak with their Samsung counterparts remotely from their hotel rooms in South Korea, according to a former Apple employee briefed on the matter.
The Information
This is behind a paywall, and the writing is better than you would find in the usual tech story, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you something that you didn’t know already. There are only a handful of companies that could ever supply volumes of cutting edge displays. There are even less than that number of suppliers who could do it for Apple. Samsung is the second largest smartphone company after Apple. Move along, nothing to see here.
