Apple still has a team at a “secretive facility” developing microLED displays intended for AR glasses, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports.
The facility is in Santa Clara, 15 minutes away from Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino. The team there was originally also building the microLED displays for future Apple Watch models, Gurman reports, but that idea was canceled last year, with many of the engineers laid off.
MicroLED is a truly new display technology, not just a marketing name for a variant of LCD such as “Mini LED” or “QLED”. MicroLED is self-emissive like OLED, meaning pixels output light as well as color and don’t need a backlight, but is much more power efficient. This efficiency makes microLED ideal for use in AR glasses, since glasses necessitate a small battery and must be able to get bright enough for imagery to be visible on bright sunny days.
Most major technology companies are researching and developing microLED. For example, Meta has secured the entire output of a UK microLED startup, while Google acquired a US microLED startup. Today, very low resolution first generation microLED displays are used in early AR glasses like RayNeo X2 and Meta’s Orion prototype, and are a key driver of their relatively slim form factor, as well as a reason their battery life is measured in hours rather than minutes.
David Heaney
According to Gurman, Apple executives don’t “expect” an AR glasses product will be ready for “three years or more”, suggesting Apple AR glasses won’t launch until 2028 at the earliest.
Back in 2023 Gurman reported that Apple had postponed “indefinitely” plans for AR glasses, and the latest report makes clear that the new work is still at the very earliest stages. However, the company is planning to release simpler smart glasses, akin to the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, in 2027, he reported back in November.
