Apple Reportedly Testing 1.5-Inch OLED Displays for Smart Watch
Japanese blog Mac Otakara points to a pair of reports in today's edition of Taiwanese newspaper Economic Times addressing rumors surrounding Apple's smart watch effort. According to the first report [Google translation], Apple has begun sampling 1.5-inch OLED displays from RITEK subsidiary RiTdisplay.
The report also claims that RITEK's joint venture RitFast will be supplying the touch sensor technology for the watch.
Today's report echoes a December claim about Apple's plans for RiTdisplay's 1.5-inch displays and word that Intel is involved in Apple's effort, but includes a detail indicating that Apple had originally hoped to use a 1.8-inch display in the smart watch. That display, however, proved to be too large and the company shifted to the smaller 1.5-inch display size.
The second report [Google translation] offers an overview of the smart watch industry, with "market rumors" indicating that Foxconn has already received orders for Apple's smart watch. But with order volumes said to be around 1,000 units, the production run would clearly be a small-scale trial.
Rumors of an Apple smart watch ramped up in the months following that December report about Apple and Intel working together, with The New York Times later reporting that Apple was "experimenting" with curved glass smart watch designs and Bloomberg following up to claim that Apple has 100 product designers working on the project.
"iWatch" rumors peaked in February and March of this year amid claims that the device could launch "as soon as this year", but things have been relatively quiet for the past several months.
(Photo: HEX Vision Metal Watchband for iPod nano (6th Gen.))
Popular Stories
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
Best Buy is discounting a collection of M3 MacBook Pro computers today, this time focusing on the 14-inch version of the laptop. Every deal in this sale requires you to have a My Best Buy Plus or Total membership, although non-members can still get solid second-best prices on these MacBook Pro models. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Best Buy. When you click a link and make a...
Top Rated Comments
Step 1: Assume "iWatch" will be hideous and useless.
Step 2: Dismiss "iWatch" because it will be hideous and useless.
:D
This line of conversation sounds familiar... iPhone, iPad anyone?
Lets reload this thread in a year or two, when you all own one of these (yet to be released) puppies. And you'll pay a pretty penny for one two.
My money says gangbusters!
March and Feb are only 2-3 months ago... How have things been quiet for "several months"?
Careful now...
I said the same thing years ago about electronic organisers.
Many iPhones & iPads later, I have a different opinion... ;)