Apple is Developing Its Own MicroLED Displays at a Secret Manufacturing Facility in California [Report]

According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman yesterday, Apple Watch should be the very first product from the Cupertino giant to incorporate Micro-LED technology. The author has learned from plugged-in sources that Tim Cook & Co. made “a significant investment” in the design and development of Micro-LED displays, which use a bunch of tiny chips to create images.

It reportedly took Apple several months to get the California plant operational and only recently have engineers become confident in their ability to eventually replace screens from Samsung and other manufacturers.

“We put a lot of money into the facility,” this person said. “It’s big enough to get through the engineering builds and lets us keep everything in-house during the development stages.”

In addition to boosting battery life by as much as 300 percent versus LCDs, micro-LEDs allow for higher-resolution screens with improved color gamut and two to three times the brightness of OLED technology under the same power consumption.

Some of the major benefits of Micro-LED technology include:

• Micro-LEDs could improve battery power by as much as 300 percent.
• Micro-LEDs eliminate the need for backlighting unlike traditional LCDs.
• Micro-LEDs allow for higher-resolution screens with improved color gamut than other display technologies.
• Micro-LEDs provide two to three times the brightness of their OLED counterparts under the same power consumption.
• Micro-LEDs require much less investment than traditional TFT LCD display panels to reach economies of scale.

It’s likely that consumers will see the MicroLED display appear in a future generation Apple Watch before eventually making its way to the iPhone. This could take three to five years.