Hey, according to UBI Research, Apple bought more than 250 million smartphone OLED screens last year. That's five years in a row they've been the biggest buyer in the world. Crazy, right?
Samsung was second with almost 200 million panels, Xiaomi came third with nearly 100 million, and then it was vivo, Huawei, OPPO, Honor, Motorola, and Google.
The report says Apple is probably gonna stay on top for a while longer, because Samsung still hasn't switched all its cheap phones to OLED yet.
Apple jumped on the OLED train pretty early. They first used it on the iPhone X in 2017, added one more model the next year, and by the iPhone 12 in 2020 the whole lineup had OLED. Since then, every new iPhone for the past six generations has used OLED. Now with the latest iPhone 16e, literally every iPhone you can buy has OLED.
They didn't stop at phones either. Apple started putting OLED screens on iPads too. The first one was the iPad Pro back in May 2024, and the new M5 version that came out last October also has OLED.
Even though memory chips are getting way more expensive and squeezing the phone market, the fancy OLED stuff isn't hurting as much. In China, the cheaper phones moving from old LCD screens to OLED might slow down a bit this year because of the cost, but everyone agrees it's still gonna happen eventually. The trend isn't turning back.
