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Apple Watch Ultra With MicroLED Display Seemingly 'Canceled' For Now

klasma said:
The issue is yield. If just one pixel doesn’t work in a panel, you have to throw away the whole panel. That’s why Apple started with the device having the least pixels, planning to work their way up from there. The iPhone has almost 20 times as many pixels as the Watch, meaning that the rate of defective panels would increase accordingly. The iPads and MacBooks even more. This is also why the current microLED TVs are composed of an array of many smaller tiles (each of which, incidentally, roughly matches the Watch resolution). A 4K or 5K monitor would have been the last to move to microLED.
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Even before yield is the power and heat. Nobody has shown even a demo of a watch sized microLED with 300 PPI.

Watch has 300 PPI while the Samsung 110-inch wall TV is just over 100 PPI. It consumes 1kW while a comparable OLED TV uses 200W.

If it were just yield, Apple would have persevered because they've invested billions along with Osram, Sanan, and other suppliers.
 
If Apple bought Luxview, why it needs Osram?, cant Luxview manufacture?. Does Apple supplies "required specs" and the suppliers must find a way to comply or Apple provides real blueprints including electric, mechanic, resistance, etc. desings to their providers?.
 
Octavius8 said:
If Apple bought Luxview, why it needs Osram?, cant Luxview manufacture?. Does Apple supplies "required specs" and the suppliers must find a way to comply or Apple provides real blueprints including electric, mechanic, resistance, etc. desings to their providers?.
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Lux has patents. OSRAM owns fabs in Malay and Austria.
 
JPack said:
If it were just yield, Apple would have persevered because they've invested billions along with Osram, Sanan, and other suppliers.
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I didn’t say that yield is why they (apparently) cancelled the project. I'm saying yield is the reason why they started with the Watch.

All Apple displays have between 220 and 330 PPI, which is not that dramatic a difference, and the higher-PPI devices happen to coincide with the higher unit sales (iPhone, Watch, iPad), where economies of scale would benefit the per-unit production costs. They took the same trajectory with OLED (Watch > iPhone > iPad > MacBook).

There are a number of companies with microLED microdisplay prototypes featuring multi-thousand PPI, so it's not like 330 PPI is aiming especially high in that technology space: https://www.microled-info.com/microled-microdisplays
 
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I've said many times that it's too early to use microLED now and it should take decades to be mature just like LCD and OLED. Products with microLED in 2020s are highly unlikely and impractical.
 
nfl46 said:
Lol. So instead of Apple doing layoffs, they just decided let’s cancel every darn thing. Lol. That’s one way to save money I guess.
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If you hire talent you respect you generally don’t want to lose them.

Google doesn’t understand that and neither does Microsoft. Android was actually the product of former Microsoft and B OS developers. If Microsoft had retained their developers they may have had a better phone OS instead they’re stuck from the outside looking in
 
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Surprised to hear about its cancellation. Anyway was not expecting to see it anytime soon. Maybe Apple will pick another supplier.
 
the car, now this....seems a lot of "rumours" are getting canceled
Nothing official can be canceled because it wasnt real in the first place...one example of canceled product was the airpad wireless that was announced but never saw the light
 
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MicroLed should come to bigger displays first, since the shrinking down the pixels is the hardest thing to do to this tech.
 
Maybe the watch simply doesn’t need it? I have never looked at any of my watch displays all the way back to the series 0 and thought the display was anything but great.
 
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Damn Apple is canceling stuff left and right.. Makes not want to stick around, perhaps I should take a look what's on the other side of walled garden..
 
Lot of failures lately for Timmy.

Modems, cars, headsets, displays, china sales, Tired designs, antagonising the EU, fake privacy, letting bean counters run hardware designs and falling so far behind in AI.

They use to set the standard and others followed, now they're lazy, greedy and rush jobs.
 
Shame, it seems this is never happening. I'm not a fan of Amoled on watches, too many compromises (dimming, forced black backgrounds etc)
 
CWallace said:
MicroLED still has significant hurdles in terms of manufacturing yields at scale and the price per unit to overcome. It is a technology worth pursuing for the benefits it will bring over LED and OLED, but like fusion power, it's always seems to be "a couple of years away". :p
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It’s not by coincidence that the Apple Park campus is particle accelerator shaped. We can only imagine what research Apple’s doing underground. 😉
 
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