LG has just announced that it will be ramping up assembly lines for its Tandem OLED panels for laptops (as already seen on the iPad Pro M4 tablets) and that the displays are now officially in mass production.
In a press release, LG told us it has “begun mass production of the industry’s first 13-inch Tandem OLED panel for laptops,” but in fact these panels are already on board the Dell XPS 13, a newly launched Copilot+ PC with the new Windows 11 24H2.
So it looks like the notebook production lines have already been running in one form or another to equip those Dell laptops with their 13.4-inch OLED with pin-sharp 3K resolution – and these screens will soon debut in even much more. Windows 11 laptops (which will likely include Copilot+ PCs).
Is that embarrassing for Apple? Well, the company clearly made a pretty big song and dance about bringing Tandem OLED to the refreshed iPad Pro with its Ultra Retina ).
But what adds to the awkwardness for Apple here is that while Windows 11 laptops are already on the market with these fancy Tandem OLED panels, an OLED MacBook model doesn’t even come close, if the rumor mill is right has. The latest speculation indeed points to a 2026 launch of the OLED MacBook.
Analysis: Is this really such a big problem? Well, sort of
So it may take a long time before Tandem OLED boosts MacBooks. That’s unlikely to happen next year, and past rumors have even raised the idea that Apple could delay the OLED upgrade for its laptops until 2027 (apply seasoning, as always).
But is a screen really that important? It’s not that MacBooks don’t have great displays yet, but the new Tandem OLED technology is really something – not just because of the quality of the screen, but as LG notes in its new press release, there are benefits in terms of reliability and screen life as well. Not to mention the power consumption – which contributes to longer battery life – and can also make the panel thinner.
With a thinner screen you can have a thinner laptop overall, and the new Dell , so super slim). With Apple’s current philosophy around a new ‘thin’ era (started with the ‘thin possible’ OLED iPad Pro), we imagine this will usher in the thinnest MacBooks ever – but not that long ago.
Finally, what seems bad for Apple is that it is simply far from the pace of cutting-edge technology in this regard. Here’s Dell (and soon other Windows 11 laptop makers) with Tandem OLED displays in notebooks you can buy now, and the MacBook is lagging behind in this next-gen display race, nowhere to be seen for now. It doesn’t look great, although we have no doubt that when the rumored OLED MacBook arrives, Apple will pull out all the stops to make it shine.