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Apple’s Newest OLED Supplier
- 1cvmask 5y agoApple has a vested interest in giving less business to Samsung which it competes with on mobile phones and had also sued separately in the past for alleged copying the iPhone.
- smoldesu 5y agoIt's a real shame too, Samsung displays are to die for. Say what you will about their chip manufacturing capabilities and phone business, their display fabrications are the real moneymaker.
- killingtime74 5y agoYou don’t need to die, just buy a Samsung phone
- asadlionpk 5y agoand die slowly via Android
- kaladin-jasnah 5y agoAs someone who has used Android exclusively for the past five years, I can confidently tell you that I am not dead, nor am I close to dying.
- philistine 5y agoThe Samsung display on my wrist is also a blast (it's an Apple Watch).
- aliyfarah 5y agoAlso probably related to Cook’s “secret deal” with the CCP to invest more in China.
- tooltalk 5y agoI'm inclined to believe this. This was well under way for years and coordinated among Apple, BOE, and the CCP.
- sumedh 5y agoShouldn't the US govt intervene if US companies are making such deals?
- viktorcode 5y agoThey should, when it is illegal.
- tooltalk 5y agoThis isn't illegal, but Apple clearly deceived the American public and policy makers -- and I'm assuming politicians didn't know about this -- on the state of supply chain and why Apple had to build everything in China. I guess the US Trade Rep Katherine Tai can rescinde tariff exemptions granted for almost all Apple products -- the company's iPhones and laptops now make up one of the largest import categories in trade with China.
- 1-6 5y agoWhy does the US keep feeding the hand that bites them?
- yyyk 5y agoAbout BOE Technology: "Two suppliers that make components for Apple in China employ forced labor, according to a report published Sunday. The Washington Post says BOE Technology Group, which supplies screens to Apple, and O-Film, which makes iPhone cameras, both use Uighur labor, either directly or through contractors. Apple lists both companies on its latest supplier list." https://www.cultofmac.com/688515/2-apple-suppliers-allegedly-used-uighur-muslims-forced-labor-in-china/ https://www.cultofmac.com/688515/2-apple-suppliers-allegedly... (The original Washington Post report: "Apple is lobbying against a bill aimed at stopping forced labor in China" https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/20/apple-uighur/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/20/apple-u... )
- jjtheblunt 5y agoThat title is very purposefully misleading, as Apple isn't by any means pro forced labor, just thinks that bill is written wrong: "Apple wants to water down key provisions of the bill, which would hold U.S. companies accountable for using Uighur forced labor, according to two congressional staffers"
- yholio 5y agoThat seems to completely vindicate the notion that "Apple is lobbying against a bill aimed at stopping forced labor in China". It doesn't imply the proposed law is well written, or even likely to achieve its stated goals. Just that Apple is lobbying against such a law.
- jjtheblunt 5y agoI wonder (and do not know) if the issue is that Apple vets contracted manufacturers, and if they later use forced labor after promising not to, in order to win the contract, then it's wrong to sue Apple for the Chinese company's behavior?
- yazaddaruvala 5y agoI by all accounts am an Apple fanboy. Yes Apple should be sued for not doing enough. Keeping me feeling happy for and proud of the devices I use is why I pay them the Apple premium! Yes I want the best hardware and software but most importantly I want zero guilt. To help get myself to zero guilt I’m currently buying (literally) the promise of Apple products in 2030 being net zero carbon and waste (99+% recycled from previous devices). If Apple can’t provide me the least possible guilt with a product purchase, I will use any other company that will even if that means a higher premium. And if I find out Apple lied (even by omission) to me when I bought the product, I feel I’m owed a refund for now needing to feel guilt. And trust me when I say I feel a lot of guilt finding out my purchases knowingly/unknowingly relied on forced labor.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago“ As expected, BOE absorbed Hynix's display technologies and capacity to rapidly catch up to the market incumbents. Backed by the Beijing city government's financial firepower, the company invested over a billion dollars to build its first cutting edge LCD factory. “ This is the power of state-backed capitalism. You can make heads-I-win tails-you-lose bets (because if they lose you can just devalue the currency of the citizens). Fascinating considering tech economies as proxy wars though…
- baybal2 5y agohttps://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secret-deal-with-china/ https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secr...
- nine_k 5y agoI wonder how much remains of the capitalism in this case. I should remind us that the original "Doctrine of Fascism" (by Mussolini, not the German Nazi stuff) was very much about blending corporate and state power: it openly declares that "fascism is corporatism".
- scoopertrooper 5y agoCorporatism, at the time, meant something closer to the Estates General or the Hong Kong electoral system for the Chief Executive.
- Synaesthesia 5y agoVirtually every economically powerful country has arisen thanks to aid from the state. The UK in the 18th century, the US in the 19th (and since!) , the Asian Tigers in the 20th century.
- zhdc1 5y agoYergin & Stanislaw's The Commanding Heights is still, imo, the best contemporary book on this.
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- 2bitencryption 5y agofrom the article: > BOE will initially split orders for the 6.1-inch iPhone 13 displays with Samsung Display these types of "splits" have always confused me a bit. I guess Apple provides certain constraints - brightness, color accuracy, etc - and both manufacturers must meet those requirements. But OLED displays are such complex things! Surely there must be some noticeable/functional difference between a "Samsung-display iPhone" and a "BOE-display iPhone" ? Slightly different viewing angle? Blues are a bit less saturated? Burn-in happens a few dozen hours sooner? 5% difference in power efficiency?
- freetinker 5y agoApple provides spec, and controls spec compliance.
- b112 5y agoDifferent models can use different displays.
- wishawa 5y agoIIRC back in iPhone 6 days the CPU production was split between TSMC and Samsung. The TSMC ones were measurably better (performance, thermals, battery life), but the difference wasn’t very big, so most people didn’t care.
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoEdit: Nope, my memory was completely wrong, I was thinking of modems.
- ace2358 5y agoYou may be thinking of the intel/Qualcomm modem situation?
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoAh, yes—that was it!
- georgeburdell 5y ago>Even after becoming the world's largest panel maker, the company continues to lean heavily on government subsidies. In 2019, BOE received $400 million in subsidies from various Chinese local and provincial governments. Per Chinese sources, from 2010 to 2019, they took in over $1.7 billion of subsidies - constituting over 50% of their net profit during this time. This is why legislation such as the CHIPS Act should not be seen as corporate welfare but rather as leveling the playing field.
- markdown 5y ago> This is why legislation such as the CHIPS Act should not be seen as corporate welfare but rather as leveling the playing field. What are your thoughts on affirmative action?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- olliej 5y agoTo equate compensating for centuries of racist, sexist, etc policies that artificially and deliberately suppressed the success of different races, genders, and other groups to corporate subsidies is unequivocally bullshit. A better comparison if you really insist on comparing treatment of companies to actual people would be to take two identical companies working in the same market. Force one of them to close. After the second has been established for a few hundred years, allow the one you shut down to reopen, but tell them that they can't charge more than 50% of the price of the established firm, and also say that suppliers don't have to provide goods to that firm, and if they do then those suppliers don't have to provide goods at the same level of quality. Those suppliers also charge more, for the lower quality goods. To be safe, you also don't allow the company to build anywhere near existing commercial or industrial zones, so they also have to pay more for shipping and transit, despite being less conveniently placed. After a while you say "ok, you can sell to everyone and we aren't going to limit what you can charge, etc". Then you turn around and say "see everything is equal now". Of course by this point entire industries are built around the version of the product sold by the established firm, the established firm has more resources, the subsidiaries of the established firm have more resources, as do their subsidiaries, because all those subsidiaries have been getting the same preferential treatment. Meanwhile the historically penalized firm has been given a bad rap because the quality of a lower quality of goods, because they got worse materials to start with, they couldn't afford the same quality of workers (in fact they were functionally prohibited from employing the best). Now people say "of course we pay less for goods from that company, they're lower quality". It may be a true statement, but the reason isn't because the company is fundamentally flawed, just that the established company has had unending advantages, and those advantages continue to apply even after the original penalties were removed. Of course this is a gross simplification of what actually happened to the victims of the various repressive laws and policies of various countries, because again, companies are not people.
- gurumeditations 5y agoBOE also makes advanced micro OLED displays which can be used in AR.
- aemreunal 5y agoI'm curios in what state the US' manufacturing (chips, displays or otherwise) capabilities would be had Apple invested that USD $250-odd billion (as alleged on that "secret deal" article) in the US rather than in China. I'm skeptical it would've ever reached the low cost (but high-quality) of labor they get in China but maybe they would offset that with something else?
- tooltalk 5y agoNeither chip or display manufacturing is driven by labor cost. China has, or had, no advantage here whatsoever -- other than the gov't subsidies and Apple, a large American investor and guaranteed buyer/customer. The display industry was previously dominated by Japan; then is by South Korea. Both countries are close US allies -- or America's "lapdogs" if you prefer. The mobile OLED as we know today is mostly Samsung's achievement -- they were the first to successfully develop, commercialize and mass-produce with large market share, both as producer (95+%) and consumer (95+%) until a few years ago.
- xadhominemx 5y agoChip manufacturing is definitely driven by labor costs. Labor is still a major component of opex and capitalized labor construction costs are a large portion of capex.
- watersb 5y agoA lot of comments here consider what manufacturing in the United States might look like at this scale. I have heard that we would need to build an entire Pear River Delta supercluster of manufacturing and supplier capacity, to "level the playing field". Not just one company. All the companies. Is the US willing to build anything at that scale?
- lotsofpulp 5y agoNo, the costs to comply with US environmental regulations as well as costs of inevitable litigation from the pollution would be astronomical.
- davidjytang 5y agoAs long as there is profit, some people would risk even death earning it.
- watersb 5y ago"Some of you may die, but that is a risk I am willing to take."
- davidjytang 5y agoI swear I heard that line from a Ferengi somewhere.
- eunos 5y agoBOE has no fab in the pearl River delta though https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOE_Technology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOE_Technology
- viktorcode 5y agoYou'll need workers to fill those factories. And on top of them you'll need seasonal workers too, because there's no reason to employ huge number of people outside of "new iPhone season".
- ngcc_hk 5y agoIs it related to the apple paying china part? Somehow the money has to go somewhere …
- ksec 5y agoThis isn't the first time this has been rumoured, it goes back as far as 2018 for BOE joining the Apple OLED Supply Chain. It makes zero sense at the time because BOE does not produce OLED of Samsung's Quality. Fast forward to today iPhone ( Non-Pro ) version are using OLED as well. So it makes sense to source more "affordable" components. My initial reaction in 2019 was expecting BOE's panel iPhone to be only sold in China, since iPhone ( non-Pro ) in China has the lowest prices ex VAT and Import tax. But now I believe Apple's goal will be to replace the whole iPhone ( non-Pro ) lineup with BOE and only use Samsung for Pro models. Sigh. This has been long time in the making. The next step is probably using NAND from YMTC and DRAM from CXMT. Although both seems to be quite far off.
- eunos 5y agoSeems YMTC NAND already achieved frontier similar to Hynix and Samsung. Volume might be the limitations for now.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rbanffy 5y agoAs the other day I was looking for a flexible OLED panel to replace a broken CRT (because CRTs are curved) in a Minitel terminal, I welcome any competition that could drive prices down. A Trinitron like curvature would be nicer than an obviously flat LCD panel.