We’ve been hearing rumors about MacBooks with OLED displays for sometime now. The latest one, spotted by MacRumors, seems to confirm the ongoing rumor that we won’t see an OLED MacBook until 2026 at the earliest.
The latest rumors and speculation come from the market research firm Omdia.
According to Ricky Park, Senior Principal Analyst in Omdia’s Display research practice, “Apple is highly likely to incorporate OLED into its MacBook Pro models as early as 2026. This move could spark a significant surge in OLED demand within the notebook market, potentially reaching over 60 million units by 2031."
None of this should be surprising as Apple just released the latest iPad Pro 2024 with an OLED display. That's an upgrade from the miniLED screens that previous iPads were using.
The year 2026 seems to be shaping up to be the year of OLED for Apple. Earlier this week, it was tipped that the iPad Air and iPad Mini will be getting OLED panels that year as well.
Allegedly, Samsung has started development of an 8-inch OLED display for the iPad mini. Though that report claimed the facility in Cheonan won’t start mass production until the second half of 2025.
The recently released 13-inch iPad Air features an LED display while the nearly three-year-old iPad Mini has the older Liquid Retina display.
Apple has yet to say anything official about any of these reports. We’ve seen rumors claiming everything from next year to 2027 for OLED laptops. Display analyst Ross Young has said in interviews that there is a supply bottleneck. Young has also claimed that OLED MacBooks would arrive this year.
Though he was correct in saying that OLED iPads would arrive this year as they did with the new iPad Pros.
In April of 2023, we reported on rumors that the MacBook Air would receive an OLED display before the MacBook Pro. Allegedly, this version of a MacBook Air would launch sequentially with the iPad Pro. However, our computing expert Tony Polanco doesn’t believe that Apple would release the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro so far apart from each other, if the three-year manufacturing timeline is to be believed.
For now, the OLED MacBook Pro is merely a dream.
