OLED Tablets - Introduction and Latest Industry News - Page 3

Visionox is the latest company to announce a new AMOLED production line, targeting the IT display market - laptops, monitors and tablets. The company said that it will best 55 billion Yuan (around $7.6 billion USD) to build a 8.6-Gen production line in Hefei, Anhui province.

Visionox's production line will have a monthly capacity of 32,000 substrates. The company did not share any details regarding the timeline of this project, or its financing.

There are some reports that Lenovo is developing a new tablet device that will use Samsung's 17" slidable AMOLED display. The display will be 13" in size when closed, and will be able to roll (slide) up to 17". Lenovo hopes to launch the tablet by 2025.

Back in 2022, Intel demonstrated a laptop device with a 17" rollable AMOLED display, produced by Samsung Display. Since then SDC demonstrated several similar concepts, including a panel that is both foldable and rollable.

Omdia estimates that OLED display shipments for laptops and tablets will grow from around 8 million units in 2023 to around 99 million units in 2031, a CAGR of 37%. We have already seen major laptop and tablet brands starting to adopt OLEDs in their latest devices, including Apple and Microsoft just recently.

Omdia says that in 2022 and 2023, the demand for laptops and tablets actually slowed, but new laptops with AI capabilities are now being introduced, and Omdia expects a recovery in demand for mobile PCs following the discontinuation of Windows 10 support in the second half of 2025.

Omdia says that shipments of OLED displays in tablets are set to grow in the future, rising from around 3.8 million in 2023 to 35 million in 2031. 2024 will see a 315% jump in shipments as Apple starts to adopt OLEDs in its tablets.

Interestingly, Omdia sees an increase in adoption of a 'hybrid OLED' structure (reaching a market share of 85.1% in 2031), which the company defines as a glass-based OLED with a thin-film encapsulation. This hybrid design is lower in cost compared to a flexible OLEDs, while still achieving high performance and a thin design. 

As OLED display makers are racing to launch IT AMOLED displays (for laptops, monitors and tablets), there has been recent reports that TCL CSoT has decided to build a 8-Gen AMOLED line, in a 63 billion Yuan (about $8.7 billion USD) investment.

TCL CSoT issued a statement that says that this report is inaccurate, and the company has not made a decision yet and does not have an investment plan. 

Yesterday Apple officially announced its 2024 iPad Pro devices, Apple's first tablets with AMOLED displays. There are two devices, a 11" model (1668x2420) and a 13" model (2064x2752). Both OLEDs offer 120Hz and 1600 nits peak brightness - and a tandem architecture. Apple brands these displays as Ultra Retina Tandem OLEDs.

The new iPad Pro 2024 devices will ship next week, starting at $999 for the 11" model. Some of the models offer a matte finish (nano-texture glass coating).

According to reports from China, Samsung Display established a new R&D team dedicated to develop OLED products for Apple. The so-called "A Team" is part of the Giheung Research Institute in Yongin, Korea.

This is an interesting move by SDC. Apple is an extremely important customer for Samsung Display, of course, and up until recently SDC has been the leading supplier of OLED displays for Apple - winning the majority of orders for iPhone AMOLEDs. But now that Apple is starting to adopt OLEDs in IT products (starting with tablets) things are changing.

According to UBI Research, the OLED tablet panel market is set to grow quickly, more than doubling between 2024 (12 million units expected) to 2028 (28.4 million). That's a CAGR of 24.1%.

UBI says that the market in 2023 was only 1.8 million panels - so growth in 2024 will be dramatic (almost 7X), mostly thanks to Apple's adoption of OLEDs in some of its iPad modules (expected to be announced next month). Samsung will produce 11" panels for Apple, while LGD will produce larger 12.9" panels. 

In January 2024 we reported that Samsung Display and LG Display have started to produce AMOLED displays for Apple's future iPads, to be announced later this year. Earlier expectations were for Apple to order a total of 10 million iPad AMOLED displays in 2024 from both LGD and SDC, with LGD getting around 60% of the orders. 

Apple was aiming to launch the new OLED iPads this month, but have now reportedly delayed the release to May, as Samsung is suffering from low yields for the 11" AMOLED panels, mostly due to the tandem stack architecture.