What Display Daily Thinks: Whatever Apple does on displays is for Apple and its handpicked suppliers. No one else gets anything out of it. Apple isn’t selling displays, it is selling devices. Displays are a big part of the bill of materials (BOM) so, logically, the company is trying to reduce the overhead to create operational efficiencies. So, it can delay introductions, and it can fall back on technologies because, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter to anyone but Apple and its suppliers who are, in turn, bound to Apple.
That means that the emergence of MicroLEDs will neither be hindered nor accelerated by anything Apple does. Granted, as the world’s first three trillion dollar company, Apple is going to get a lot of press for everything it does, but the rest of the display industry may get too wrapped up in what that means for it to be healthy. The constant leaks about product launches, that are two or three years out, is a distraction. What really matters is what the opportunities are today.
MicroLED developers need to assume anything is possible. There are enough known problems with MicroLED manufacturing, and enough smart people outside of Apple trying to solve those problems, that we can rest assured that the future is independent of anything Apple does.
There is an inevitability to MicroLEDs and sure, if Apple has problems then there must be really big problems for the technology, but just because a company is too big to fail doesn’t make it the authority on innovation. MicroLEDs are not ready for prime time, but when they are, it won’t be because of what Apple does or doesn’t do.
