2026 Apple Watch Ultra will be first to get micro-LED – TrendForce

We’ve been waiting a long time for the first Apple Watch with a micro-LED screen, and it seems the wait won’t be over any time soon. The latest report says that we won’t see the new display tech until the launch of the 2026 Apple Watch Ultra.

Optimistic reports about this date back as far as 2019, when it was suggested that Apple might begin the switch from OLED to micro-LED as early as 2020 – which, of course, did not happen …

What is micro-LED?

To understand micro-LED, we need to recap Apple’s display roadmap, which began with IPS LCD with conventional backlighting.

Next up was IPS LCD with miniLED backlighting. Apple switched to this for iPad Pro models, and is now using it in MacBooks. It allows for darker blacks and brighter whites, and makes a surprising difference.

OLED is gradually transitioning from smaller screens to larger ones. Apple first adopted OLED in the Apple Watch before bringing it to the iPhone, starting with the iPhone X. The company has not yet used this in either iPads or MacBooks, but is expected to offer OLED iPads early next year. OLED offers more vivid colors, and darker blacks, and is also more power-efficient.

Micro-LED, as the name suggests, comprises microscopic versions of conventional LEDs, with entire arrays of these making up each pixel element. Micro-LEDs are a hundred times smaller than traditional LEDs.

The upcoming tech offers two main benefits over OLED. First, the degree of control it offers means that it offers even better display quality. Second, because micro-LED uses inorganic elements, it doesn’t suffer the same longevity issues that can plague the organic materials used in OLED.

2026 Apple Watch Ultra to get micro-LED screen

The Elec, citing a TrendForce report, says work on bringing micro-LED tech to the Apple Watch has been delayed yet again, and that we now won’t see it until the launch of the 2026 Apple Watch Ultra.

Market research firm DSCC said it had predicted the mass production of its micro LED Apple Watch in May to 2025, and Trendforce said it had been pushed back from the second quarter of 2025 to the first quarter of 2026 […]

Apple plans to apply micro-LEDs to the top-end Ultra models in the Apple Watch series first, and then expand its applications. 

Why is it taking so long?

The tiny size of micro-LED components makes displays extremely tricky to manufacture, which can result in both low yield rates and consequent high costs.

This was the reason Apple bought LuxVue way back in 2014, and it has since invested more than a billion dollars in the display tech, with the aim of helping multiple suppliers develop micro-LED manufacturing capabilities. Samsung Display currently leads the industry in micro-LED tech, and Apple wants to avoid continuing its dependence on a single supplier for new types of display.

Photo: Nat Weerawong/Unsplash