OLED & the future of Apple displays

Apple uses OLED displays on iPhone and iPad, but not on Mac. That may be about to change...

- DAVID CROOKES

There was a time when Apple was dismissive of OLED displays. In 2010, Apple debuted its Retina display on iPhone 4 and iPod Touch, which relied on LED—backlit IPS LCD technology, and Steve Jobs told Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference: “You can’t make an OLED display with this resolution.”

Three years later, Apple doubled down, saying the Retina display was twice as bright and didn't suffer from "awful" color saturation. "If you ever buy anything online, and really want to know what the color is, as many people do, you should really think twice before you depend on the color from an OLED display," Tim Cook proclaimed to a Goldman Sachs investor conference.

But then, a year later, Apple used an OLED display for the first time on the Apple Watch. In 2017, the company moved away from LCD on iPhone, lending iPhone X a stunning OLED screen, which it called the Super Retina HD display. More recently, in 2024, Apple used an OLED display in the M4 iPad Pro and called it the Ultra Retina XDR, and now it’s looking likely to use it on Mac. So, why did Apple go from criticizing OLED to embracing it?

The answer lies in timing, technology, and control. In the early 2010s, the market for OLED (organic light-emitting diode) displays was perceived as belonging to Samsung. The company was producing OLED panels for phones and tablets on a large scale. As well as using them in its own devices, Samsung sold them to other consumer electronics firms, enabling it to control 90% of the market.

When Cook spoke, Apple was the only major company holding back from OLED. But, according to reports at the time, had Apple wanted to follow suit, it would have come up against supply issues, given that Samsung was working flat out to satisfy much of the world. It was better for Apple to react negatively to OLED and promote its own technology while working on a solution. After all, it’s not as if Apple was struggling with the displays it already had.