Apple has reportedly delayed the launch of its first product with a microLED screen by at least another year. The company had plans to launch an Apple Watch Ulra with a microLED display as soon as 2025, but recent developments have forced Apple to delay its launch to 2026, according to new research by TrendForce seen by The Elec.
This would be the second time that Apple has apparently delayed the commercial deployment of microLED panels. A new Apple Watch Ultra equipped with the novel display technology was first rumored to launch as soon as next year before reportedly being pushed back to 2025. Today’s report indicates that Apple’s first product with a microLED display is now at least three years away.
The report quotes high manufacturing costs as the reason for the most recent delay, which Apple has to solve first before beginning mass microLED display production. The new timeline from TrendForce predicts that Apple and its suppliers hope to bring down manufacturing costs by the first quarter of 2026 at the earliest. TrendForce further adds that the company is still at an early evaluation stage for microLED panels production due to the “high technical difficulty” associated with the technology’s engineering and design.
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microLED beyond the Apple Watch
The report reiterates previous rumors that Apple first plans to incorporate microLED panels on its high-end Apple Watch Ultra, before expanding to the rest of its products including the iPhone. Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman earlier warned that it would take Apple no less than a decade to equip all of its devices – including the iPad and the Mac – with microLED-based displays.
Moreover, the report predicts that Apple already has plans to incorporate microLED for augmented reality applications, although it’s not clear whether it references a future Vision Pro model or the mythical Apple AR Glasses. Vision Pro features dual micro-OLED displays rumored to be sourced from Sony. Despite being similarly named, micro-OLED is vastly different from microLED, as the former is made from organic material just like conventional OLED panels, but is directly built on top of a silicon substrate instead of a glass one.
MicroLED is vastly superior to OLED-based technologies in a number of ways. It employs microscopic LEDs as individual pixels, offering advantages like superior contrast, higher brightness, better efficiency, and longer lifespan. However, microLED manufacturing is complex and costly, making it more difficult for Apple to mass produce the technology at scale for its devices. The organic nature of OLED makes it susceptible to degradation over time and is prone to burn-in, something which is not observed with microLED displays due to their use of inorganic materials.
