MicroLED, mini LED, OLED - understanding Apple's future iPhone, iPad, and Mac displays

Furthermore, microLED diverges from TFT LCD and OLED greatly by not using a backlight. Instead, the microLEDs are used directly to make the picture. OLEDs do not use backlights is this sentence implies. Maybe you switched OLED for miniLED here?

OLED, microLED, and plasma (for the olds in the audience) are fundamentally the same idea: the subpixels are emissive. Ie, the subpixels themselves are the light sources. The big difference between OLED and microLED is the illuminating compound in an OLED subpixel is made of an organic compound (hence O = organic in OLED) while with microLED, it is made from an inorganic compound. The pixels change their color and brightness by varying the color intensity of the subpixels through changing the amount of electricity going through them.

LCDs need a light to shine through crystal subpixels for color to be seen. Ie, there needs to be a light in the back that illuminates the crystals. Hence, backlight. I

n combination with changing the brightness of the backlight, the

miniLED is a TFT LCD that uses a discretized backlight. Instead of one monolithic light chamber behind the crystals, there are hundreds to thousands of chambers in a grid. The iPP12.9 has 2596 backlight "chambers" with 4 LEDs in each chamber. As can be imagined, the more backlight chambers in miniLED, the closer and closer it gets to certain aspects of OLED technology. The iPP12.9 miniLED has a big advantage over the Pro Display XDR here. And as you can imagine, the more backlight chambers, the more difficult it will be to mass produce. It's going to take a while for the tech to spread.

I would surmise the primary reasons for Apple developing and shipping miniLED for the iPP12.9, and subsequently, probably the MBP14/16, the iMac Pro, iPP11 and stand alone monitor eventually is that it uses less power on average than OLEDS and has longer expected lifetimes with less issues than OLEDs. If it gets cheap enough, maybe the lower end devices.

The tradeoffs between OLED and miniLED really comes down to what a device is displaying and for how long. If it is a white or bright background web pages and apps, LCD wins. If it is movies and photographs, OLEDs. If the device is going to be used for 5 to 8 years displaying computer content? LCDs. So on and so forth.

People don't anticipate the issues with self emissive pixel display technologies to be mostly solved until microLED comes. No one is expecting these to come soon. The first device in Apple's lineup to use microLED is likely to be the Watch, so, the wait for microLED is going to be 2024, 2025, 2026 time frames for big high DPI displays. It will come to TVs, where the subpixels are much bigger, hence easier to manufacture, in 2022, 2023, 2024.