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[Written on 20160424] Jeremy Arnold's answer has a very good collection of news re. ongoing movements inside the mobility displays industry ecosystem. However, I find the reiteration of Ming-Chi Kuo’s estimate on what Apple's going to do in the next year with the iPhone 7 disagreeable. Ming-Chi doesn't seem to be familiar with the fact that gen 8 LCD fabs can also be used for OLED fab along with older gen LCD equipment.Rather I should say that I don't care for the sport of 'Apple prediction' very much. There are just way too many nuances and hidden variables that shape business/tech decisions and dictate strategy than can be accounted for in a simple Quora analysis. Ming-Chi's strategy of talking with line workers is fine for feeding the Apple news frenzy, but that makes little difference to an ecosystem where trends are written in Capital and visible to all that care.The question has curious wording - OLED is an electroluminescent, emissive technology. It mostly competes against transmissive LCD tech which almost always uses LEDs in the backplane as the illumination source. Most of the answers here dwell on that aspect of the question.But in the Apple context, OLED was also competing against micro-LED display tech, also emissive.Micro-LED, based on the LuxVue acquisition was Apple's first choice for their next-gen displays platform. The speculation following the acquisition was that Apple Watch would be based on microLEDs. But there was no subsequent news of the levels of capital investments required to scale microLEDs besides a couple of pilot projects.So the question's wording leaves the intention behind 'LED supply chain' open to interpretation. It could be aboutbacklight LED suppliers, as well asmicro-LED display makers.I will try to provide opinions on both perspectives.What does Apple’s move to OLED mean for general LED suppliers?There's a McKinsey market report from 2011 that pretty much outlines all the factors why OLED cannot threaten LEDs despite a shrinking backlight market size for LEDs. The tl;dr version is - OLEDs are too expensive, and too dim for every year that LEDs/OLEDs compete (horizons to 2020).The global LED market is diversified - Indoor/outdoor SSL, automotive, projection, large format displays, notebook/tablet displays, signage in addition to smart-phone displays (approximately 10% by volume).OLED doesn't have a play in any of those segments (in the 2016-2018 horizon). OLED are not bright in final throughput. Most OLED lighting news is research lab and govt RnD-spend driven. No capital investments in infrastructure required for serious play in this segment. (OTOH, Osram invested $4B in SSL a few months ago)Apple global smartphone market-share is around 10%.Most smartphone devices are cost-sensitive, growth in lower cost device segments, so LCD will always be preferred for cheap phones.Even if all Apple products were now OLED, we are talking about a 10% of 10% dip for LED source companies (1% by volume, overestimated).Faster price erosion in LEDs because photonic semiconductor materials (used in LEDs) are just more useful in many more places than just visible spectrum emission compared to organics (think photovoltaics).Impact will be Fairly Insignificant on the LED supply chain.Sure there will be some casualties, specifically those under suicide contracts with Apple and Samsung. But having Apple as an ex-client builds credibility and lets you ask for higher premiums from not-as-influential clients.What does Apple’s move to OLED signify?Global smartphone sales, especially the high-end flagship models, are flat-lining.Consumer electronics industry itself is flat-lining. You are seeing the trickle-down effects in your Unicorn portfolio.This was foreseeable and is common industry-knowledge since around 2012 when the smartphone ecosystem stopped producing the buzz it did.Why is this happening? Because Moore’s law is broken – Costs in designing sub ~22nm architectures has exponentially skyrocketed and is not coming down in foreseeable future despite huge capitalization; Time/complexity required to design with such architectures is also now on a ~3 year cycle. This has led to the stagnation we see now. Massive performance gain through simple die shrinking is no longer easy to come by and takes longer every year. What this means is that consumers don’t have as much reason to maintain rapid update cycles, to buy new devices.The movements we saw and continue to see in tablets, wearables, IoT, near-eye/Head-Mounted/AR/VR devices are a result of the industries trying to delay or suppress this flat-lining.Apple (and almost everyone else) has known this was going to happen. Apple knew they needed new differentiators – Samsung had been pushing Super AMOLED since 2010, Nokia had AMOLED displays back in 2008 on a feature phone. And given Steve Jobs’ views on OLED, it was just very difficult for them to consider OLED in 2012.So their first strategic move was the Sapphire/GTAT plant in 2013.Their second move was the LuxVue acquisition in 2014.Their sapphire attempt was primarily a HTPS backplane substrate alternative to glass for LCDs with smaller pixel pitches – Glass doesn’t work with the high-temp part of High Temperature PolySilicon (HTPS). Quartz is also a great substitute, but Sapphire is cheaper than quartz. Why HTPS? Because better electron mobilities. Consequently smaller TFT circuits/pixels and faster switching/lower power/better fill factors. Why buy a sapphire plant? Smartphone displays require larger panels and require meticulous quality and yield control.I am sure the small footprint optical windows for sensors, scratch resistance, piezoelectric behavior etc claims made by the media to justify Apple’s foray into sapphire crystals may have been actual marketing decisions influencing the investment, but they were not the primary motivation. Corning never had anything to fear.Didn’t pan out for whatever reason, probably because Apple doesn’t understand in-house displays manufacturing very well. This is also evidenced by their second apparent misstep.Their ~$180M LuxVue purchase was their backup, ultra-small formfactor display plan. Based on hearsay, LuxVue’s ‘magic’ was a pick and place approach to building micro-LED displays. They picked and placed pre-diced ~40um ‘microLEDs’ on a VLSI backplane. Obviously, this doesn’t scale no matter how much automation you invest in. But this may be a completely wrong read on LuxVue, not much insider info here. All I know is Apple was supposedly very impressed with the quality of the final cherry-picked display prototypes - but Apple couldn’t figure out how to scale the prototypes to Apple Volumes.However this approach may eventually work for 'ultra' small format displays, Apple Watch type displays specially since the volumes are so modest. But note this is just idle speculation.They also tried the tablet market, didn’t work out. They tried the wearables market, hasn’t worked out to Apple-scale. They tried introducing ‘force/3D touch’, ‘taptic engine’ for differentiation just to convince more of us to buy the 6/6s etc. But that’s not working out to drive growth.The bottom-line – Apple’s sales are flat-lining and they don’t have their next big thing ready yet. Tim Cook’s coming up on his 5th CEO year and there’s pressure on their whole team to recreate some of the Steve Jobs magick.And that is why Apple needs to use OLED displays as the big 'differentiator'. Whenever it happens, it will be positioned as a ‘completely new’ approach to displays. Apple marketing will work overtime to differentiate version X from version X-1 and ensure that we are excited to buy and use the ‘best displays ever’. We will be told that whatever minor decrement in pixel pitches, 39 um to 36.5 um, the deployment of IGZO-hybrid tech that mixes a little PLD with a lot of combustion generates, and the additional 10 columns of real estate, will be the revolution we absolutely need.And you will buy it too. I will be right behind you.If they can pull this off and revive their growth, it’s actually great for all of us in the FMCE industry.What does this mean to microLED companies?[Please, please note the disclosure below!]After a standard 'What microLED companies?' joke -Nothing.Nobody pays attention to us anyway. In our minds, we were already competing against FSC LCoS, CF LCoS, DLP, LCD, OLED, LBS, microOLED on HTPS, microOLED on LTPS, MEMS, IMOD, ELD, just about every one and acronym you can imagine. Also endoscopic-butterfly-laser-transparent-waveguide-that-are-called-magic-photonic-lightfield-chips-silicon-photonics display technology. Yeah, that too.Except for a minor blip in interest through the Apple acquisition, MicroLEDs are back to being the what the heck you talking about technology.But the thing is... microLED is the Holy Grail from the Arthurian legends.Everything else is simply a cheap substitute, a bark at the Moon.An emissive light source, almost a perfect point, with semiconductor VLSI fab integration, with VLSI production scaling and footprint scaling for years to come, at pixel pitches I can't disclose, at power and outcoupling efficiencies I can't disclose, at switching rates in the nanoseconds, no messy organics, no backplanes/transmission/multiple optical path inefficiencies, no TFT footprint bookkeeping, no juggling polarizations or polarization recycling, no liquid encapsulation, no polymer/colloid suspension chemistry, no organics aging, no dyes, no light bleeding, no fringe field effects, no mechanical molecule geometry switching, but with programmable diffraction effects, programmable phase/amplitude effects... Maybe none of this makes sense to you. Maybe this is sufficient info for a bunch of engineering estimates about contrast, aspect ratios, fill factors, lightfields,.. Maybe I am swimming in my own koolaid. But boy, what a future we are helping build while you are not paying attention!Now seriously, Apple voted for microLEDs before they decided to settle for OLEDs. Tells you something. Also DARPA and IARPA invested in microLEDs. And this was right after they and AFOSR spent 8 years looking into making the shining-lasers-into-your-eyes approach work.Long bets are always difficult, and you have to be selective about the problems you want to solve. Way I see it, microLEDs are the only problem worth solving in display tech.That and somebody please kick Moore's law back to life again!Disclosure: I design, build, analyze Micro-electromechanical systems and optoelectronic hardware for display/imaging technology used in ultra-miniature (pico) light engines based on the Quantum Photonic Imager (fancy name for specific types of microLEDs) and sensor technology for human-computer interfaces at Ostendo, a display technology company in SoCal. I have limited LC experience but no hands on OLED fab experience as of 2016.But I won't let that stop me from dissing that before-I-was-born technology.