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Will the New M4 Chip Bring OLED to MacBooks?
- Thread starter aditya1503
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Yes. There was thread on Reddit discussing the new iPad that reminded me of an article a little more than a year ago that talked about the manufacturing cost of the Tandem OLED display for the iPad. I recall that article but at the time the article was published I did not recognized the significance. The recent announcement helps to clarify that Apple has had this display technology in the works for a while now. So, maybe they do have a plan to ramp up supply. Time will tell ...
I agree we will see a, probably minor, redesign with the changes. Just a little thinner and lighter due to efficiency improvements, whilst keeping the ports
Seems more likely to me that the redesign would happen with the new display, just like it did with the iPad. The lid would be a lot thinner and then they'd probably want to change the dimensions of the body as well.
Don't see why they'd think the current design is bad for the M4 Pro/Max when it's considered good for the M3 Pro/Max. The chips aren't that different.
Don't see why they'd think the current design is bad for the M4 Pro/Max when it's considered good for the M3 Pro/Max. The chips aren't that different.
Current design isn’t that old yet.
my guess is late 2025 with M5 a (small) redesign will happen + the addition of OLED
my guess is late 2025 with M5 a (small) redesign will happen + the addition of OLED
They can just drop the tandem OLED into the current design. I would welcome it if Apple used the tandem OLED as an opportunity to reduce the thickness of the 14“ and 16“ a bit. Even my 14“ is on the heavier side for carrying it around in a backpack every day. With the new display Apple can probably reduce battery size a bit and maybe that translates into Macbooks nearly as thin and lightweight as the previous 13“ and 15“ were.
Just as I thought there is little to improve upon the 14“ in terms of balance between mobility and performance Apple shows us how much is still left on the table with what‘s now yesterday‘s tech. In a few years we‘ll look back at the 2021 design and see those miniLED Macbooks as a necessary compromise that was the stone age of 2021 tech. Not actually, but sort of.
What I am really curious about is how long it will take other laptop manufacturers to make a tandem OLED available in their devices. And I don‘t mean top of the line expensive laptops but actually affordable ones like the 14“ base model that was selling as low as 1599 brand new. I bet that by the time other brands come around Apple‘s entry level MBP with tandem OLED will be down to 2000, or below. Still selling with 8GiB of memory of course but that‘s the Apple way for better and for worse.
Just as I thought there is little to improve upon the 14“ in terms of balance between mobility and performance Apple shows us how much is still left on the table with what‘s now yesterday‘s tech. In a few years we‘ll look back at the 2021 design and see those miniLED Macbooks as a necessary compromise that was the stone age of 2021 tech. Not actually, but sort of.
What I am really curious about is how long it will take other laptop manufacturers to make a tandem OLED available in their devices. And I don‘t mean top of the line expensive laptops but actually affordable ones like the 14“ base model that was selling as low as 1599 brand new. I bet that by the time other brands come around Apple‘s entry level MBP with tandem OLED will be down to 2000, or below. Still selling with 8GiB of memory of course but that‘s the Apple way for better and for worse.
It's inevitable that Mac's will get OLED displays.
Remember that the Retina display was launched on the iPad first.
Remember that the Retina display was launched on the iPad first.
I buy the whole tandem OLED necessarily requires M4 about as much as I bought Stage Manager requires M1 and only iPhone 15 is capable of controlling its charging circuitry in software. In others words not at all.
It needs some kind of special controller. Of course they could make an external one, but they chose to put it into the SoC, as they usually do.
2026 sounds good. My M1 MB Air will easily last that long, even with 8GB it feels as fast as the day i bought it.
Hopefully this will make the MB Pro a bit thinner and lighter, just like the iPad.
I believe Apple coined that term with the release of the iPhone 4 back in 2010 😅
Yep, apparently controlling one OLED layer is already complicated as the brightness of each pixel is variable. Controlling two layers simultaneously is no small feat and does require a new form of precision control. I would bet that part of the reason Apple pulled these screens off first is because they could also build the compatibility into their custom controller easier than if they were working with partners/off-the-shelf components.
They theoretically could, but they won't. The Mini-LED display is much thicker than the OLED display. What would they fill the rest of the display shell with? And if they choose to make the display shell thinner, that would be a new design, and I would expect the rest of the body to change somewhat as well, in order to maintain good proportions and all that. It won't look radically different but I would consider the inclusion of OLED and a change in shape of the unibody to be a "redesign."
It's apparently very difficult to put an OLED display in a MacBook, yet almost every other Windows notebook maker has a model with OLED.
My Lenovo P16s with OLED looks stunning. Before that, I briefly had an ASUS Q540 w/OLED and it was also spectacular.
If/when Apple decides to get around to it, it will look fantastic, I'm sure...
My Lenovo P16s with OLED looks stunning. Before that, I briefly had an ASUS Q540 w/OLED and it was also spectacular.
If/when Apple decides to get around to it, it will look fantastic, I'm sure...
Did they? Let's see -- an 11" iPad Pro M2 with 256GB is/was $899. An 11" iPad Pro M4 256GB with OLED is $999. So you get an M4 chip and OLED for $100. Is that really a "significant" price increase? (I won't even mention the sales on the M4 iPad Pro that can save up to $50 now).
Fair enough, although then getting rid of the butterfly keyboard introduced with the 2016 MBP would also qualify as a redesign even though these models were just a bit thicker and heavier and unless you really held both models in your hand you couldn‘t tell the difference.
I‘d call this a design update shaving off a fraction of an inch in thickness. And the display itself would be retaining all the previous specs anyways where you probably won‘t be able to tell the difference either unless you know what to look out for with miniLED vs. OLED. Of course just dragging any window across the screen will instantly reveal it based on the panel‘s pixel response times.
It‘s limited to 400 nits of brightness which is below what a cheap M1 Macbook Air can do. There‘s your reason why Apple didn‘t use OLED before. You won‘t find a windows laptop with such a bright OLED panel, they are all using miniLED for higher brightness just like Apple. And battery life will still be much worse.
The OLED displays on PCs are not the same. They have much lower peak brightness and more burn-in risk than these new "Tandem OLED" panels. They are also mostly less color accurate than current MBP displays, sans for the 2024 OLEDs in the Zephyrus/Razer Blade which are quite accurate.
As with many things, Apple's not going to use the technology until it meets their standards. It is not their style to put crappier components in just to hit a certain refresh rate or to have the newest buzzword.
Apple's never really done that for the Mac line though (they absolutely do for the iPhone however). Every 5 years or so they'll unveil a new form factor for a product and then spec bump it on an annual-ish basis afterwards. CPU architecture transitions are odd exceptions, both PPC->Intel and Intel->M1 they recycled existing enclosures with updated internals and then did a full redesign the next model, but that's probably more because of the effort required in getting a new architecture up and running.
Apple knows that 99.99% of people are not buying Macs on an annual basis; most users keep their machines for at least 4 years, so they don't need to constantly unveil new features, just incrementally faster chips.
You are assuming people want 256 or 256 was worth the hundred.
Also a hundred is significant.
As explained already but not very in-depth. The new tech actually does in fact require M4.
If not M4 then a separate display controller for a tandem OLED display would have to:
1. Sync timing across the 2 layers very precisely down to almost every nanosecond.
2. Distribute brightness the "right" way. Note that since we have 2 layers, the bottom layer will be slightly dimmer than the one on top. Physics doesn't allow us to have equal brightness for both. So in fact, the bottom layer will have to work slightly "harder" to produce the same brightness as the top one. And then we have to distribute these values evenly across at least 3 sub pixels of 2 displays. Depending on the subpixel arrangement, the calculation for this will be harder to accomplish since it's not clear tandem OLED means Apple is giving us 2 layers of RGB. If it's pentile like the iPhone then the distribution will have to be very precise because the green subpixel is shared with another pixel nearby.
3. Maybe alternate between the 2 layers at high speed if it detects that contents are static on the screen in order to avoid burn-in. It's not as simple as blasting max white on both layers all the time. In fact, because they can alternate between the 2 layers, I am fairly confident tandem OLED can in fact "eliminate" burn-in entirely as this alternating mechanism can effectively make sure no one OLED layer will ever display the same content for too long.
Being that the OS should know better which content is static and which is not, it actually does make a lot more sense for the display controller to have intimate knowledge of the OS here. It's really not trivial. I wouldn't be surprised if macOS actually has new frameworks dedicated entirely to this tech. We may learn more at WWDC.
So there are many things going on here that I think Apple failed to mention. In fact, I think they skimped on marketing for this display tech almost entirely. It's possible that their marketing department couldn't understand all of the nuances.
P.S.:
4. Also, since it's OLED, Apple may also be able to achieve pixel-level variable refresh rate. So instead of refreshing the entire display every frame, they can simply refresh just a region that's in motion. This goes along with point #3 above: that they may have to do some kind of alternating mechanism to avoid burn-in. It does make sense for the display controller to precisely know which region to refresh while leaving the rest static. This can also save on battery life significantly, which may be what allowed Apple to make the new iPads so very thin.
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Just the requirement to have tandem displays synchronized to the nanosecond requires some major work by the display engine. This isn't a dual display setup where slight differences between panels are not a big deal, but a stacked display where both panels must be in exact synchronization in order to provide a crisp, clear image. Otherwise there would be ghosting, blur, fuzziness, and every other annoying issue with the displays. The other part you are overlooking is that tandem OLED means the M4 display engine has to handle twice the number of pixels as the M2 did in the previous generation iPad Pro.
I hope that Apple sheds some more light on this at WWDC, perhaps in one of the breakout panels rather than in the keynote.
That part is easy, you just feed two identical output the same data and make sure they're clocked by the same source.
I respectfully disagree, I think the M4 chip is “it” for MacBook Pro’s, and iPad Pro, let the future begin!
Now we know the M4 chip is what does enable the new tandem OLED tech to work in thence iPad Pro, we will have to wait and see. I think we may see it, but I also think it will come with a price bump and considering how much Apples laptops are already, that's gonna be tough to swallow.