The iPhone could get a microLED display — what that means for you

You may want to skip the iPhone 15 later this year because if you can hold off on buying a new iPhone for another year or two, you could get a far superior display.

Writing in his Power On (opens in new tab) newsletter, Mark Gurman says that future iPhones will be equipped with microLED screens. He claims, these panels will be brighter, with better viewing angles and color accuracy than existing screens.

These microLED displays have previously been rumored for a future Apple Watch Ultra successor coming “the end of 2024”, which Gurman says will be the first product to show off the new tech. The tipster noted we can then expect to see the screens appear on iPhones “a few years after that.”

It’s perhaps unsurprising that after the iPhone, Gurman claims Apple could move to add microLED to iPads and later Macs. The whole process could take up to a decade though, similar to how iPhones have OLED panels right now; but the iPad is still using LCD (or mini-LED in the iPad Pro (12.9-inch)’s case, which is a derivative of LCD technology).

The other notable thing about the microLED displays is that they have been reportedly developed (since 2017) to be Apple’s first set of internally-designed displays. And these would be another step in the company’s march towards total component self-sufficiency. We’ve already seen this with Apple Silicon chipsets in Macs and iPads over the past couple of years, with powerful chipsets like the Apple M2 chip powering top-tier devices like the iPad Pro and MacBook Air M2.

As for what we can actually expect this year, the iPhone 15, according to the most recent rumors, is expecting to stick with 6.1-inch and 6.7-inch OLED displays, as we’ve seen on the iPhone 14 series and older models. 

Other upgrades, such as a periscope telephoto camera on the iPhone 15 Pro, and a new iPhone 15 Ultra model with a new titanium design with haptic, solid-state buttons, are rumored though, which should make the new iPhones a worthwhile purchase for most users in need of a phone upgrade.