Oliver Haslam on May 10, 2022, 10:10 pm

Apple Is Working On New Thinner OLED Panels That Could Be Used For Foldable iPhone

Apple is reportedly working on a new, thinner OLED panel that could be used in a future foldable iPhone. That’s according to a new report by The Elec which says the company is working on displays that don’t use polarizers.

By not using a polarizer Apple is expected to be able to make displays thinner, thus more suited to being folded. Samsung already uses OLED panels that don’t feature a polarizer in the Galaxy Fold 3.

Samsung Display was the first to supply an OLED panel without a polarizer. It supplied them to parent company Samsung Electronics for the Galaxy Z Fold 3.

Instead of using a polarizer film, Samsung Display printed a color filter on the thin film encapsulation __ abbreviated as CF on TFE __ and added a black pixel define layer.

Polarizers are normally used to allow for improved visibility of displays, but their removal would require companies to find new ways to carry out the same job — hence the color filter that Samsung uses.

Apple has long been said to want to launch a foldable iPhone but it isn’t keen to do so until it can launch a product without the compromises it believes other products have to make. It also isn’t clear whether this technology would be used for an iPhone at all — recent reports have pointed to Apple working on some sort of foldable MacBook device, for example.