A new report from South Korea claims that Apple has again postponed the release of the MacBook Air with an OLED display, but the reason is price and some supply chain issues.

The South Korean publication The Elec reported that switching from LCD to OLED would drive up prices. Still, Apple "does not consider an upgraded display attractive enough to lead to consumer purchases.""

The elect has not said how much Apple is pushing the OLED MacBook Air. The MacBook Pro, just launched with an M4 chip, is not supposed to receive an OLED display until 2026. Perhaps the upgraded air will continue in 2027.

One industry official told Elec (machine translated), "The development schedule for parts is receding, and for now, product releases are also postponed without delay."Earlier this year, Apple launched a new iPad Pro with an upgraded M4 chip and OLED screen. This is an excellent tablet, but the report reports that shipments have been steadily declining since launch, with between 600 million and 700 million units shipped. It was a deep cut when there were expectations close to the 10 million tablets shipped this year.

Currently, the base iPad Pro11-inch model starts at9999, while the larger 13-inch version starts atー1,299. Adding accessories such as the new Apple Pencil and the updated Magic Keyboard will bring that number closer to closer2,000. With prices rising across the board beyond technology, consumers don't seem to have an appetite for such high prices.

The MacBook Air with the M3 costs倍2 even if it has 1099 times more RAM. LCD is 10% of the price. Perhaps OLED will raise that percentage even more.

Apple is also facing competition from similar builds of Windows-based laptops that already feature OLED displays. You will also get an idea of how high the cost of OLED displays will be.

In many cases, OLED displays have been relegated to high-end gaming laptops like the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024), which is excellent (surprisingly

but not a reasonable, comparable device with an OLED screen without an eye-popping price tag). There is a laptop. The Asus Zenbook S14 is a good-looking laptop with OLED display, decent performance and excellent battery life. It doesn't win over Apple purists, but it starts with this949 and is on sale at OLED749 as of this writing, but anyone looking for an OLED laptop doesn't have to break a budget. The old Zenbook S13OLED was one of Tom's Guide's favorite laptop displays of the year 1.

The Dell XPS13 comes with both an OLED version and a non-OLED version. It also comes with Intel's Lunar Lake chip or Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite. Here the spectrum is wide. Snapdragon's non-OLED models start at 1 1,199, while the Lunar Lake OLED models start at 1 1,899. Some of them are Lunar Lake, as non-OLED Intel starts with starts1,399. The rest is OLED.

That said, Dell is offering the XPS15, which starts atス1,099 and features a smooth 3.5K OLED display.

Supply chains are also a factor. Apple only uses LG Display and Samsung Display as supply partners for OLED displays, and according to the report, only Samsung will supply OLED to future MacBook Pro. Competition and lack of partners potentially hamper Apple's ability to cut costs.

An unnamed official said, "We need to find that the OLED performance of APPLE's (IT product) Air lineup can approach the OLED performance of the Pro lineup while minimizing the price increase due to the application of OLED.""

As it stands, we're still waiting for the MacBook Air with the M4 chip, but Apple has doubled the RAM available in the standard builds of the M2 and M3Air. If the rumors are to be believed, the M4 version should arrive in early 2025.