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crazygringo

What is it that makes Apple so reliant on Samsung displays?

It uses TMSC to make chips which is a "neutral" company.

Is there no "neutral" equivalent of display manufacturing?

Is Samsung just so advanced in displays that nobody else can catch up?

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Korea simply ate Taiwan's lunch when it came to displays. Samsung got a big boost from Sony and LG from Philips and quickly grew to massive scales with the mobile boom. Samsung invested heavily in OLED and gathered a huge war-chest of patents / near complete market dominance, then managed to escape the worst of the political fallout from the LCD price-fixing scandal [0]. Their Japanese and Taiwanese competitors didn't invest as early or heavily, so they fell far behind. Apple spent millions propping up Sony's mobile display division in particular as a second sourcing option (as well as buying their production equipment), but Samsung was simply too far ahead and reinvesting too much to compete. LG is a strong competitor today and chinese competitors are really starting to narrow the gap though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TFT-LCD_(Flat_Panel)_Antitrust...

Yes, at least in smartphone displays. I believe the closest competitor is LG, and their displays are noticeably, visibly worse.

LG seems to have focused in the appliance business (TV screens, domestic consumer electronics, etc) and they white label 99% of the OLED panels coming off of their assembly line, with some making their way into Samsung TVs. While Samsung has a superior panel for small displays, LG’s focus consumer electronics has given it a small lead in the larger display race. They have better SDK/HDKs, more power efficient screens, and an array of tiers of displays to sell to their customers. If you bought a Sony, Vizio, or Sharp branded TV in the last 5 years, it for sure has an LG display in it. Other brands use LG as well but those three have an exclusive contract.

The dynamics of this business is fascinating.

No Samsung tv has LG Oled panel. Last year Samsung released their first Oled tv since 2013 with their own panel. Also top of the line Sony TVs started using Samsung QD-Oled last year.

At the beginning of 2021 there were talks of Samsung using LG Displays in their TVs, but it never any outcome from it.

Apple also used BOE OLEDs (12th and 13th I think?) and the iPhone 12 OLED displays have just some of the worst viewing angles I've ever seen out of any display, including cheap TN panels like those IBM and Lenovo liked to put into Thinkpads. Though apparently there is quite some sample variation to that... also tons of purple/green fringing but apparently that's considered normal for phone OLEDs.

That purple/green thing is also on LG tvs and samsung amoled phone/tablet screens.

Yes, it's not because of the OLED tech but due to the weird pixel arrangements many of them use.

I don't know about the 12th cos I skipped it, but the viewing angles on the 13 are great...

BOE LCDs on non-Mac notebooks are horrible: they almost universally use low-frequency PWM dimming, which gives me a really bad headache.

Just one data point:

I bought a Samsung Odyssey G9 Neo - a 1600+ euro monitor - in April last year. It's been more than 3 months that I try to get it fixed because of multiple issues:

- random "ticking" sounds

- screen corruption when using it via DP (random glitches)

- when using picture-by-picture, via the 2 HDMI connections, it randomly switches left and right inputs, when waking the computer from sleep

- 2 dead/stuck pixels (which Samsung support said doesn't qualify for a repair/replacement - it must be more than x pixel in a certain y area!?)

(yes, I've changed the DP/HDMI cables, tested on Windows/macOS/Linux, updated to the latest firmware).

Is Apple a shitty customer? Most probably. Are Samsung displays good? Abso-f**ing-lutely no!

I know it's just one data point, but I will never purchase another Samsung product (willingly/knowingly).

Yup, my experience closely mirrors yours. Samsung products always have a very impressive spec sheet, but just don’t last that long, reliability wise. Something that all of the sponsored youtube tech reviewers I see never seem to bring up…

Same. There was a thread on HN a while back about Samsung’s reliability issues. They seem to focus on feature set and specs over reliability and it has worked for them. I don’t but Samsung products anymore, but obviously a lot of people do.

Samsung’s panels may be fine, but their fully assembled monitors and TVs are unreliable and break at a high rate.

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