Backing up news published last week by South Korea’s ET News, Taiwan’s Economic Daily News has claimed that the production of OLED screens for upcoming Apple iPhones shall begin this May, with production capacity doubling by June. After Apple’s iPhone X’s disappointing display inventory, Samsung, who faced a downtime, has been asked to resume production of OLED screens for Apple. Samsung is the only company with the capacity to meet the demands of Apple, and although the latter has been talking to other suppliers, as of 2018, Samsung is likely to have a monopoly as Apple’s screen supplier. Apple had reportedly placed an order of one year’s worth of Samsung’s OLED panels, amounting to approximately $4 billion, in 2016 to secure inventory and good pricing as well as cope with consumer demand.
So far as Apple’s phone ventures are concerned, the smart devices giant is reported to be working on two OLED iPhone models, a 5.8-inch iPhone X replacement and a 6.5-inch “iPhone X Plus”, and a 6.1-inch LCD model, to be launched later this year. The LCD model is expected to ditch the home button and Touch ID in favor of Face ID and an edge-to-edge display and stick to a traditional single-layer layout. It is to be the cheapest of the three models and shares most of the qualities of the OLED models other than the superior image quality and power consumption. While all iPhone models for 2018 are expected to have logic boards built on substrate-like PCB (SLP) technologies first adopted by iPhone X and iPhone 8; The OLED models will likely sport stacked board designs like iPhone X.
