"Presumably the engineers who designed the thing had some compelling reasons. (It’s conceivable that it was driven by a desire to make a worse display that coul

"Presumably the engineers who designed the thing had some compelling reasons. (It’s conceivable that it was driven by a desire to make a worse display that could be better hyped by marketing, but that seems extremely unlikely to me; I’m suspicious.) I’d like to hear what those are instead of just a hand-wavey “I don’t know what they are so I’m going to imply there are none”." Probably it has to do with manufacturing requirements. I think the author of the article erroneously assumes that the different colour sub-pixels should be more or less the same. For example, the article says: "And the layout can't logically be argued to be a limitation in manufacturing capability, because it is clear that the screen manufacturing process is able to create full-resolution green subpixels that are one-third the size of a physical pixel." This is actually true for LCDs because there the colour of a subpixel is defined merely by a filter that is put in front of the subpixel. However, this is not true for OLEDs. In OLEDS, each subpixel is a separate light emitting diode of the respective color. The light is not changed by the use of filters, but is generated only in a specific color to begin with. However, the light an LED generates depends on the chemical composition of the LED, so each different color LED is a physically different device. In fact, if you remember some recent history, for most of the history of LEDs, there have been no blue ones (only green and red). Blue LEDs were a big relatively recent discovery. (This is why you only see blue and white LEDs in relatively recent devices). So the manufacturing requirements for the different colors LEDs are different, and blue LEDs are the most difficult. So it is not at all surprising to learn that the manufacturing process allows for green LEDs to be twice as thin as the blue ones. So the pentile layout was an attempt to minimize the pixel size given the above mentioned limitation of blue LEDs.