Apple's OLED iPad tipped for early 2024

Apple’s long-rumoured OLED iPad Pro is coming. A new report says that the next iPad Pro will get an OLED display in early 2024 – but it also says that the much-wanted OLED MacBook Pro is still several years away.

The report comes from market research firm Omdia, via the Korean tech-trade site The Elec. The same firm previously predicted that Apple would switch to OLED displays in almost all of its tablets, laptops and monitors by the end of 2027, and it now says that OLED Mac laptops will come in at the very end of that timescale.

The plan, according to Omdia, is to put OLEDs into the iPad Pro in early 2024 with laptops following a few years later. It predicts QD-OLED or WOLED panels for 32-inch and 42-inch iMacs for 2027 too, although I suspect that something’s been lost in translation there and the panels are for Apple monitors rather than iMacs.

So what can we expect from the iPad Pros?

OLED iPad Pros are go

Omdia isn’t the only future-gazer predicting OLED iPad Pros. Display analyst Ross Young reported the same back in late 2022, and multiple reports in early 2022 said that LG Display and Samsung were gearing up to make OLED panels for iPads. There’s no doubt that Apple is doing it; the only question is when it’s going to happen, and the predictions for that have moved around a lot.

According to Omdia, the panels are coming to the 11-inch and 13-inch iPad Pros in 2024, and they will go on sale in the first quarter of that year. Bloomberg says that the devices are codenamed J717 and J720 and will be built around the as yet unannounced M3 chip, so they should be seriously powerful devices: every iteration of Apple’s silicon has brought significant performance boosts. 

That’s good news for iPad Pro fans, but the news for MacBook buyers isn’t so great: we’ve gone from rumours of a 2024 13-inch OLED MacBook Pro to multiple reports suggesting we’ll be well into 2027 before any OLED Macs appear. 

The reason for the change is apparently because Apple wants eighth-generation OLED technology in its Macs, and the panel providers aren’t ready to manufacture those panels in large enough numbers to make it financially viable.