Last September Patently Apple posted a report titled "Rumor Claims that Apple will Shift to Mini-LED displays for High-end iPad Pro and MacBooks by 2021. A second rumor surfaced in late February and just last week a third rumor surfaced wherein a Taiwan mini-LED supplier gained orders from Apple.  

Today a fourth rumor has surfaced, this time from Taiwan’s financial news site Economic Daily. The report states that "Apple had secretly visited Taiwan recently to invest 10 billion yuan (=US$1.409 billion) in a new factory in the Longtan Park of Zhuke in cooperation with suppliers Jingdian and AUO.

It should be noted that some Apple news sites are quoting $10 billion New Taiwan Dollars or NT which is $US335 million. However, the Economic Daily Financial News site is clearly claiming $10 billion Yuan not NT dollars. Unless the original report is corrected, we'll stick with the $10 billion being in Yuan.

The report further noted that the plant will focus on manufacturing the next two generations of display technologies being Mini LED and Micro LED for iPhones, iPads and other hardware such as MacBooks.  

This is the first time that a Taiwanese factory has played a major role in the development and introduction of Apple's display technology, breaking the long-term oligopoly of related technologies in the past by Korean and Japanese players.

The Bamboo Science Bureau confirmed yesterday, May 10th, that it had passed the construction of Apple Longtan New Factory and completed the registration of relevant materials, but could not disclose details.

At present, the team in Taiwan includes nearly 200 Taiwanese engineers that have jointly invested in R & D with Taiwan LED Epitaxial leader Jingdian Group and panel manufacturer AUO.

According to industry analysts, the market for smart mobile devices such as mobile phones and tablets is facing a plateau period. Brand manufacturers can only start with hardware specifications if they want to encourage consumers to buy. Mini LED and Micro LED have more display technologies than existing LCD and OLED. More advantages such as power saving and thinning have become new technologies that Apple is actively developing.

Among them, Micro LED consumes only one-tenth the power consumption of LCD, and the color saturation is close to OLED. It is self-luminous like OLED, but compared to OLED, Micro LED can support higher brightness, high dynamic range and wide color gamut. To achieve fast update rate, wide viewing angle and lower power consumption, Apple is the most popular.

However, Micro LED technology is difficult. At the beginning, it will rely on the Mini LED between traditional LED and Micro LED. However, Micro LED is still the 'top priority' and is a technology that Apple attaches great importance to." This is something that we noted in our May 6th report.  Also keep in mind that high-end micro-LED displays could be used for future eyeware products (HMD, Smartglasses).