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Apple Investigating Thinner, Lower Power IGZO Displays Across iPad and iPhone Product Lines for 2013
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I'm a fan of Samsung displays and hate LG's. Sharp and Toshiba are right on the heals on Samsung... so I am excited for Sharp.
Actually, Sharp is right on the border of bankruptcy and Toshiba is in pretty bad shape, too.
Well, if you walk into Best Buy and just look at the TVs, you're eye is attracted to the two brands that are in trouble.
All the more reason to find a nice high demand client with buckets of cash and more as much production as needed to servicing them.
Wasn't there a rumor that Apple was giving Sharp a couple of billion dollars? That and the Sharp press release that products with Sharp IGZO panels will begin shipping in 2013. Add the rumor of a iPad 5 coming in 3 months and it looks like the pieces are coming together for Apple's 2013 iPad/iPhone lineup.
Or better yet is to reward Samsung for actually being able to mass produce quality components profitably and in a timely manner and all the while spending over $40 billion in R&D each year. That takes skill which Sharp and Toshiba don't have anymore. Samsung's R&D spending is much greater than even that of Apple's R&D and advertising spending combined.
See the PatentlyApple article from today where Sharp has stopped supplying IGZO panels to Apple because the price was too low to make a profit.
If they stopped supplying IGZO panels, could that mean Apple now has a significant supply on hand for the iPad 5 or at least enough to only require a small number of IGZO panels from Samsung (if Samsung is allowed to produce IGZO panels)???
I doubt it. Sharp has been having a hard enough time as it is just to find enough cash for day to day operations.
And yes, Samsung can produce IGZO panels. The IGZO part are the transistors and Sharp did not invent them.
Well, let's hope we get a IGZO iPad next year (hoping for a March release), because I think that's the only way for it to lose some significant weight. A bulky 5th generation iPad would suck. As for the next iPhone, more battery power would be a nice benefit from an IGZO panel.
So, lately Android devices get the best hardware much sooner than Apple devices. Apple has not been able to switch to OLED for many years now. And now they can't even get LCD IZGO. That's a major disadvantage of Apple strategy - having only one device model automatically means that this is a mid-range model. New tech supplies are always limited.
Err, it's more like the other way around.
IPS is superior to OLED and it's only recently that Android hardware is starting to switch from OLED to IPS. See the Nexus 4 compared to older Nexuses, HTC One X/DNA, the Nexus tablets and the Lumia 920 / HTC One 8 on the WP8 side.
The only major company still putting OLED in their flagships is Samsung (Galaxy SIII, Note 2, Galaxy Nexus) and those are the ones with displays that feel outdated now when you compare them to the competition. Reviews put down their (relatively) bad display and use of PenTile subpixel matrix and hopefully Samsung will switch to IPS like all others for the GS4.
Apple switching to OLED would be a huge step backwards considering that the iPhone 4 from 2.5 years ago still beat most OLED displays on so many levels.
Unfortunately it isn't a long shot.
Please Apple use the extra space to increase the battery life! (Even though we are all aware that sometimes a bigger battery doesn't see a proportional value in battery capacity.)
Samsung is not switching to LCD. They always had superior LCD panels but for their high end phones they use OLED. They do use LCD for cheap phones - always did. They also release some cheaper versions of high end phones for poor countries with LCD. Nexus 10 uses LCD because OLED panel with such high resolution would be prohibitively expensive. The biggest OLED screen Samsung produces in volume is a 7.7 screen in Galaxy Tab. Not all OLED panels use pentile matrix and the issue is becoming irrelevant anyway when pixel density reaches 300 ppi. Apple calls it "retina" because you can't see pixels and when you can't see pixels, you obviously can't see subpixels. And BTW Samsung will soon switch to IGZO for OLED.
My guess is Apple might be wanting Sharp's production lines to make the much-rumored Apple-branded television set in 46" to 65" sizes, using IGZO-technology LCD panels.
Making things thinner is also a trap. Maybe you can do it this year and brag about it, but what if next year you need to add something new, like NFC or haptic feedback and you could do it but... that requires to make the device 1 mm thicker! And you can not do it, because you just made it too thinner last year and brag about it! It's just a stupid marketing trap!
