Analysis: Is this really such a big deal? Well, yes – kind of
So, there’s a potentially long wait for Tandem OLED to pep up MacBooks. It won’t happen next year, by all accounts, and past rumors have even raised the idea that Apple could put off the OLED upgrade for its laptops until 2027 (apply seasoning, as ever).
Is a screen really that big of a deal, though? It’s not like MacBooks don’t have great displays already, but the new Tandem OLED tech is really something – not just for the quality of the screen, but as LG points out in its fresh press release, there are benefits in terms of reliability and lifespan of the display, too. Not to mention power consumption – helping to get a beefier battery life – and enabling the panel to be thinner, too.
With a thinner screen, you can have a thinner laptop overall, and indeed the new Dell XPS 13 illustrates this as the OLED version is 0.5mm slimmer than the models without an OLED screen (it’s 14.8mm, so super-svelte). With Apple’s current philosophy around a new ‘thin’ era (kicked off with the ‘thinpossible’ OLED iPad Pro), we can imagine this will usher in the slimmest ever MacBooks – just not for a long time yet.
Finally, what seems bad for Apple here is that it simply looks well off the pace of cutting-edge technology in this respect. Here’s Dell (and other Windows 11 laptop makers soon) toting Tandem OLED screens in notebooks you can actually buy now, and the MacBook is lagging behind in this next-gen display race, and indeed is nowhere to be seen for now. It’s not a great look, though we don’t doubt that when the rumored OLED MacBook does appear, Apple will pull out every single stop to make it shine.
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