Apple is currently working on Micro-LED display technology and plans to implement the same on future watch models starting in 2024, and gradually on its other devices including iPhones and Macs.
About Micro-LED display technology
- Micro-LED (also known as mLED or µLED) is a display technology that is based on tiny (hence, micro) LED devices that are used to directly create color pixels.
- The basis of microLED technology are sapphires. A sapphire can shine on its own forever. A microLED screen is filled with such small but strong light.
- The picture in a microLED screen is generated by several individual light-emitting diodes.
- Micro-LED displays have the potential to create highly efficient and great looking flexible displays, to challenge the current high-end OLED displays.
- Current LED displays are actually LCD displays that use LED as backlighting units – which are always on with a liquid-crystal layer that is used to create the actual image. This complicated LCD structure results in a device with serious image quality drawbacks and also difficulties in achieving flexibility and high-quality transparency.
- Compared to an LCD display, a micro-LED is much simpler, as the LEDs themselves emit the light and can be individually controlled. This results in displays that offer a much better image quality (contrast, response time) and are highly efficient, too, as there are no filters as in LCDs.
- As opposed to LCDs, micro-LEDs can be made flexible.
- OLEDs use tiny sub-pixels made from organic emissive materials. Micro-LEDs are somewhat similar – but with an inorganic LED structure.
- Compared to OLEDs, Micro-LEDs promise to be much more efficient and bright, more durable (higher lifetime) and with a higher color gamut.
- Micro-LEDs are based on well established LED devices, which means that it could potentially be a technology that is relatively easy to scale up.
