Apple faces challenges with bringing OLED to the MacBook Air

By Willow Roberts Published November 7, 2024

The MacBook Air on a white table. — Luke Larsen / Digital Trends

A report from Korean outlet The Elec suggests the OLED MacBook Air that Apple was allegedly planning to release in 2027 could face significant delays. While progress for the OLED MacBook Pro seems to be going smoothly, the price increase caused by the new display technology is a much bigger problem for the budget MacBook Air models.

One of the biggest selling points of the MacBook Air is its lower price, making it great for first-time Mac buyers, students, and anyone else who doesn’t expressly need the power of a Pro. While price increases are a natural part of the tech industry, the slightly disappointing sales of the 2024 OLED iPad Pro suggest that a new display simply isn’t enough of an incentive for consumers to justify a higher price tag.

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At launch, Apple was planning a shipment of 10 million iPad Pro units for the year but it has since dwindled to between 6 million and 7 million. This really won’t cause too much of a problem for the OLED MacBook Pros which are still rumored to be coming in 2026. Companies and hardcore individuals set the specs to max and spend as much as $7,000 on these high-end models, so a high-quality display will suit both the product and its audience just fine.

The Air, however, has much harder job. It is and has to be both high-end and affordable — and if the MacBook Pros get OLED displays, MacBook Air customers will expect to have them too before long. The main cause of Apple’s pricing struggle right now, according to The Elec, is the limited number of OLED manufacturers. The company currently works with just Samsung and LG to make its OLED displays, and it’s impossible to generate competition and drive down prices in this kind of environment.

If you’re wondering why Apple doesn’t just use a slightly lower-end OLED for the MacBook Airs — it seems that is already the plan and the pricing problems are persisting despite this. The planned OLED MacBook Pro would use the same Tandem OLED technology as the iPad Pro, using two panels to allow for better brightness while minimizing the chances of burn-in.

The OLED MacBook Air, on the other hand, would reportedly use just one OLED panel. The report continues to say that it’s extremely unlikely that manufacturing methods and costs will naturally drop by 2027, so Apple will have to come to some kind of compromise with its manufacturers if it wants to keep the MacBook Air prices within an acceptable range.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Willow Roberts has been a Computing Writer at Digital Trends for a year and has been writing for about a decade. She has a…

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