I have no doubt that this story is (mostly) factually true. But it is misleading in a key way:
The South Korean (and Japanese to a lesser extent) display makers have spent several tens of billions of US dollars (equivalent) in the last couple of years making better and cheaper OLED panel technologies. All consumer OLED displays are getting rapidly cheaper for this reason, whether or not they are in control panels, wearables, phones, tablets, monitors, TVs, etc. The majority of the price reduction here isn't Apple's negotiating skill nor purchase capacity; it is greater market forces. A company I work for purchases custom panels by the 10k lot. We purchased in excess of a million panels of different sizes over the last running 12 months. The prices reductions have been a great trend from our perspective. But . . . people need to remember that such trends aren't always in one direction. Displays aren't perhaps as prone to the classic, crazy boom/bust capital cycles of memory and storage, but it is not that far off, either. There is even a name for it specific to the display industry--the Crystal Cycle. The decades-long trend of all these technologies is to become cheaper over time, and I have no doubt the trend line will remain the same when you zoom out. But there are major peaks and valleys along the way. We are also buyers of RAM and storage for the devices we make, and we are definitely struggling because of these same market factors. Lots of people lose good jobs (and thus homes, educational opportunities, and marriages) because of these crazy cycles. Since we don't have the size of an Apple/etc, only our customer service advantage, which some people will indeed pay more for, is keeping us on the right size of the profit/loss line in 2026. Otherwise, I'm sure we would have been one of those companies repeatedly announcing double-digit percentage layoffs every couple of quarters.
