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.

Recommended Videos

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.

Computing Writer

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

Topics

Computing

MIT researchers found a new Spectre attack that can slip past Intel and AMD defenses

AMD Ryzen CPU inside a socket installed on a motherboard

Spectre has been haunting CPU security since 2018, and MIT researchers have now found another way to make it misbehave. The new TONTOU attack can bypass some of the defenses Intel and AMD have added over the years by exploiting a tiny gap in how those protections work. The research comes from Daniël Trujillo and Mengjia Yan at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Their findings show that even after a processor wipes or isolates information used by its branch predictor, there can be a brief window before that information is actually used. TONTOU, short for Time-of-Neutralization to Time-of-Use, attacks precisely that gap.

The tiny gap that TONTOU exploits

Computing

Microsoft accidentally gave Windows 11 users another OneDrive app, and you can’t easily remove it

Microsoft says the wider-than-intended rollout was an accident, but removing the app currently means removing OneDrive too.

Microsoft OneDrive Featured Graphic

Windows 11 users have been getting a new OneDrive app whether they asked for it or not. The problem? Microsoft says it wasn't supposed to happen. Microsoft has confirmed that its OneDrive Photos app was rolled out to Windows 11 PCs more broadly than intended, including enterprise machines where the app isn't even designed to work. The company says it is now working on a fix, but there's an awkward catch: users currently can't uninstall OneDrive Photos without removing the main OneDrive app too.

So, what exactly got installed?

Computing

Apple Reminders sucked for project management until I learned this feature

Your checklist deserves better. Here's how to turn Reminders into a proper Kanban board.

Apple reminders on Mac

For the longest time, I used Apple Reminders only for capturing quick tasks. Thanks to its Siri integration, Reminders let me add tasks quickly so nothing would fall through the cracks. However, when it came to managing big projects, I always moved to a more powerful task manager like OmniFocus or Things 3.

That changed the day I stumbled onto the Column view. Apple added this feature with the iOS 17 and macOS Sonoma updates, and somehow I completely missed it. But once I discovered and got the hang of it, Reminders finally started to feel like a real project management tool instead of a glorified sticky note.