Apple Scrambles To Catch Samsung, As LCD Loses Ground To OLED

Apple is rushing to catch Samsung on OLED displays. But it will be a long slog -- and consumers will begin to notice.

That's my prediction based on input I've been getting from Raymond Soneira, a display expert and CEO at DisplayMate Technologies. While it's clear that Apple has decided that it needs to move to OLED for the iPhone, that probably won't happen any sooner than the iPhone 7s generation of phones, circa fall 2017. Possibly later. That's a problem because OLED displays are quickly beginning to outclass LCDs in important ways.

"The Apple Watch has a flat screen but uses an LG flexible OLED because it results in a smaller and thinner watch -- the same would hold for an iPhone," Soneira told me in an email.

OLED beats LCD: While some reviewers dismiss the curved display on the Galaxy S7 (and S6) Edge as little more than a design flair -- that misses the point. It's the first step toward a future where devices aren't simply flat and two dimensional. "The current [Galaxy edge] models are flexible but are maintained permanently curved and rigid under Gorilla glass – that can and will change in the future, leading to truly flexible, bendable, and foldable OLED display screens," according to Soneira's review of the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge displays.

That's not all: OLED displays are typically thinner, lighter, with a smaller bezel (for near-rimless designs), have a faster response time, better viewing angles, and an always-on display mode. "Many of the OLED performance advantages result from the fact that every single sub-pixel in an OLED display is individually directly powered, which results in better color accuracy, image contrast accuracy, and screen uniformity," according to Soneira's review.

Samsung owns capacity: Samsung is the leading manufacturer of OLEDs for smartphones. So, Apple will either have to turn to rival Samsung (as some rumors have claimed) or work with a smaller manufacturer like LG or wait for others like JDI (Japan Display Inc.) and AU Optronics to slowly catch up.

How patient will consumers be? Most consumers may not notice now but as OLED innovation drives design changes for future Samsung Galaxy phones (think Galaxy S8 Edge), Apple's LCD-centric strategy may begin to hurt sales. "Apple has a large top notch display engineering department and great software development, but there is no way they can do this nicely all at once," Soneira said about the switch from LCDs to OLED displays. "I don't think consumers have the patience to live through a 1 or 2 year wait and see cycle to get a polished smoothly functioning curved screen OLED iPhone," he added.