Apple Makes Surprise U-Turn for Future Apple Watch Ultra

Rumors suggested that Apple had plans to use a different type of screen in the next Apple Watch series, but those plans seem to have evaporated, at least for now.

Apple has reportedly canceled its order for micro LED watch displays with a leading supplier. These screens could possibly have appeared on the Apple Watch Ultra 3 that will be released later this year.

Apple’s top analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says the order was canceled in part because the change in technology wouldn’t produce enough of an improvement to justify the cost of the part.

“My latest research shows that Apple has canceled the Micro LED Apple Watch projects because Apple believes that Micro LED cannot add significant value to this product and the cost of production is too high to make it financially viable,” he wrote Ming-Chi Kuo. in X.

This coincides with a statement from leading microLED Ams manufacturer OSRAM, marking the cancellation of a major project with a partner.

“Ams OSRAM AG’s board of directors has decided to re-evaluate the company’s microLED strategy after learning of the unexpected cancellation of a cornerstone project for its microLED program,” reports the statement. “Discussions with the relevant customer are ongoing.“

The microLED displays combine the best elements of the OLED and miniLED displays used in Apple’s Apple Watch and MacBook Pro series.

They use per-pixel lighting like OLED, but are likely to be significantly more efficient, brighter, and even richer in color.

However, as with almost any new technology, costs will be significant for a while.

However, there is some disagreement about exactly how much should be received from canceling this microLED order.

Ming-Chi Kuo says that “Osram was Apple’s exclusive LED chip supplier for Micro LED” and that “the cancellation of the company’s Micro LED partnership with Apple means that Apple has no plans to mass-produce Micro LED devices in the near future”.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who is also a notable Apple insider, took a polar opposite view in a recent tweet.

“AMS-Osram was a supplier on the Apple Watch Ultra microLED project. There are several others. I doubt it was canceled,” Gurman said He wrote.

On the consumer side, there is a question of how useful the benefits of a microLED would be anyway. The Watch Ultra 2 can already reach 3000 nit brightness, which is bright enough to deal with direct strong sunlight outdoors.

Today’s microLED TVs are usually very large and very expensive, and this technology has nowhere near reached the scale of a watch in a real product. Each pixel has three separate lit sub-pixels on a microLED TV because there is usually no color filter on these displays. It may require rethinking how the microLED works to get it down to the size of the Apple Watch.

In late 2023, a company called Q-Pixel demonstrated what it called the world’s smallest color pixel, just 1 um in diameter. It uses a “tunable” LED capable of displaying a range of colors from the same module. These were arranged in a microLED display array of 10000 pixels per inch. So Apple Watch-scale microLED displays are possible, but whether they’re even remotely feasible in a mainstream consumer product is another question.