Did Apple kill the MicroLED industry? | Hacker News Reader

Did Apple kill the MicroLED industry?

yolegroup.com

41 pointscubefox32 comments

This seems like an odd take. Micro LED would be a huge boon to TVs, they’ve wanted to get there for a while. And just because Apple isn’t using it doesn’t mean other device manufacturers wouldn’t.

Sure you don’t get the large funding that Apple can give. But killed? The article even says they spent $3 billion on it. So they funded it quite a bit.

A marginal improvement in image quality isn't necessarily enough to offset a much higher panel price, in a way that creates a market for these panels.

Compare, for example, Intel's "Optane" phase change memory. It was qualitatively superior to NAND flash, but also significantly more expensive, which kept interest low and ultimately led to phase change memory being abandoned.

MicroLED isn't theoretically more expensive - in fact, the extended lifespan, more brightness, and lower energy consumption would all be selling points which, for various customers, would lead to being willing to pay more for a product which costs the same or less to make.

No, it is actually more expensive to make, as the article states. TVs are currently sold for more than 100.000 USD:

https://www.engadget.com/a-110000-microled-tv-in-this-econom...

And the technology isn't particularly new either, which means the high cost is not a minor technical problem.

Exactly.

Blacks of OLED, brightness of LED, no burn in, no degradation over time… it would be fantastic. It’s what’s being used in some insane (~140”) TVs but at a reasonable size.

Yeah it won’t compete with LCDs on price for a while, maybe ever. But the high end of the market would love it.

>no burn in, no degradation over time

How? Don't Micro-LED displays have individual backlights for each pixel?

Micro-LED displays don't have "backlights" like regular LCD displays. They're just arrays of LEDs. Each pixel element is made up of LEDs. Like OLEDs or Plasma displays, the dots themselves are the light source instead of a film trying to filter a backlight.

Inorganic leds that are not pushed too far outside their comfort zone do not meaningfully degrade over time. The problem with them is that you cannot make the three different colors needed in a single material, so unlike oled you need to physically produce three separate kinds of components, and then transfer 25 million individual components onto a substrate to manufacture a 4k display.

This will never be cheap.

> The problem with them is that you cannot make the three different colors needed in a single material,

If that's the problem, why not just make 3x white leds per pixel and have a layer of color filters, like LCDs have.

Or at least make the leds in vertical stripes, so you're not assembling 25 million components onto a substrate, but instead 4k*3 components (each assembled from 2k components, I suppose).

I think I might’ve heard of someone trying to do that, where all the LEDs are the same and they use quantum dots on top two emit the color that they want.

Maybe that’s how it’ll work. Honestly an LCD with one LED backlight per pixel would still be really nice.

Every time you print a document on a laser printer, >25 million particles of coloured plastic are arranged to within ~10um of where you want them to be on a sheet of paper, all for a total cost of a cent or two.

Moving millions of items to precise locations isn't expensive, as long as you do it the right way...

If you solve precise vapor deposition at a scale like your printer does with toner, you'll become very rich.

Those 25 million separate devices are electronic components with terminals that need to align with solder balls, and they need to stay in place until the entire assembly goes into the reflow oven.

We are not exactly talking about plastic particles here.

> Yeah it won’t compete with LCDs on price for a while, maybe ever. But the high end of the market would love it.

The problem is that it is hard for them to compete with OLED, not LCD, because the price difference is much higher than the difference in quality.

Once I saw the Fully transparent MicroLED on Display in this year's CES , it is only a matter of time before it comes to market. I can immediately see luxury Retail shop paying the premium to get it.

MicroLED is also getting cheaper. Compared to 2-3 years ago Samsung's The Wall offers 140 to 200+ inch Display that is not possible with OLED or LCD.

From a Smartphone, Tablet and Laptop prospective. OLED will be the tech going forward at least until 2030.

Before Apple cancelled it, their plan was to introduce MicroLED to their premium smartwatches and then to their premium phones. It's in the article. Meanwhile, TVs with MicroLED are extremely expensive. They can't currently be made on one substrate, or even multiple per substrate, so they instead stick multiple smaller tiles together.

OLED already works very well for TVs and other big screens; MicroLED would need to push into that market and prove its value against OLED. And OLED tech will not stand still while MicroLED catches up.

MicroLED needs market niches with lots of manufacturing volume to scale up and improve or they'll never get to a position where they can challenge OLED.

Maybe automotive display panels? I’m assuming that microled would have similar dynamic range to oled but less screen aging? Automotive stuff needs to be incredibly durable!

Automotive displays you'll be viewing from <1 m, so the dot pitch needs to be higher than a TV, but at the same time it's not usually as demanding graphically, so chunkier pixels OK?

MicroLEDs are a long ways away from being used for smartphones due to pitch.

OLED are fantastic, I have one. But they just can’t get as bright and I’m not sure you’re ever going to solve the degradation issue.

You’re right the technology won’t stand still, but will it be able to match what MicroLED can do with at same price?

Apple just used an amazing OLED on the new iPad Pros. But they had to stack two panels to do that and obviously it’s not TV sized. Maybe something like that could compete with MicroLED better but the price is really going to be up there.

Plus you don’t have to start with TV sized things. I remember OLED starting in small display applications like front panel displays for some electronics. I’d imagine production MicroOED would be similar.

One of the issues Apple has is that they use extremely high-quality displays with VERY tiny pixels. You can’t just make the Apple Watch display significantly worse, people will notice.

But there are tons of consumer electronics out there they don’t need such high resolution displays. Things where it could be a good option early on.

> Apple just used an amazing OLED on the new iPad Pros. But they had to stack two panels to do that and obviously it’s not TV sized. Maybe something like that could compete with MicroLED better but the price is really going to be up there.

MicroLED screens are much more expensive than any OLED screen. MicroLED TVs are currently sold for more than 100.000 USD.

For tvs there's not much of an advantage over OLED. Burn in is not much of an issue these days and for most people OLED tvs are bright enough.

Makes more sense for monitors than tvs IMO.

LCDs get way brighter than OLEDs, thats an issue. And OLEDs often do thing a to avoid burn in like dim static scenes that can be a problem when watching movies.

There is an advantage.

Slashdotted. Here's a mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20240511095911/https://www.yoleg...

It surprises me that microLED's are limited to only the big players.

At least from the outside, it appears the equipment to cut LED dies up, then place them on sheets of glass in an alternating R-G-B pattern, then sandwich another piece of glass on top, with both pieces of glass having row/column ITO conductors on, doesn't look really costly.

Sure - it's more than a hobbiest could do in a garage, but any reasonably funded university lab would have the equipment to do that.

Certainly less complex than OLED if you are starting from scratch.

Hence, I really don't see what is stopping there being a flurry of startups trying to get into the microLED screen business.

In fact, I forsee the hardest thing for a startup would be the row/column driver IC's, which I don't think the incumbent players will sell to you.

Nuclear fusion is similarly easy, you just have to apply enough pressure and heat to easily acquired hydrogen isotopes.

Excellent display technologies don’t always make the market. MicroLED is very similar to SED which Canon invested in 20 years ago. It never hit the market and had all the benefits of MicroLED and more.

The plot showing cost/performance has it increasing; so it's more expensive per unit of performance as time progresses. Surely that's backwards.

Should be performance/cost.

Is there any future tech coming down the line that would prevent oled burn in? That is the use case.

I wanted a flat 27" monitor that had good hdr capabilities but I wound up going with a bog standard ips panel because working from home means I'm using it for productivity 10-12h / day. There's no way that usage wouldn't burn in an oled in a couple years.

That is one of the reasons that Apple went with dual-layer OLED on the new iPads. Having twice the emitters lets you run them at lower power while still providing normal brightness. The more power you drive through an emitter the faster it fades.

I have no sympathy for any company that does this type of private equity money shenanigans.

It’s entire purpose is to make the investors rich in the short term without thinking about long term issues PE firms do this all of the time in the US

> It’s worth remembering that back in October 2023, ams OSRAM signed a $420 million sale-and-lease-back agreement with a pool of three Malaysian pension funds. OSRAM was retaining ownership of the equipment, selling the building, and leasing it back from the investors, with an option to buy it back in ten years.

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