
Apple and Samsung continue to battle each other in courtrooms across the globe and the animosity continues to spill over into their supplier-customer frienemy relationship. Apple is reportedly dropping Samsung as the supplier of Retina Displays for the iPad 3.
Apple will replace Samsung’s displays with Sharp manufactured equivalents. Peter Misek at Jefferies & Co. believes Sharp began production of high-resolution displays for Apple’s iPad 3 and will help build displays for the iPhone 5 as well.
Apple dropped between $500 million and $1 billion on manufacturing equipment for Sharps’s Gen 6 Kameyama manufacturing facility. Misek believes Apple and Sharp have figured out a way to avoid the thickness the dual-bar LED back-lighting solution adds to the iPad 3 Retina display.
Also, we believe that Apple and Sharp together have a modified IGZO (indium, gallium, zinc) technology to achieve 330 dpi, which is sufficient for an HD display while not using IPS nor having to include dual-bar LED back-lighting. In our view, this should lead to several design advantages, namely the device can be thinner, battery life should be longer, and the overall experience for users should be meaningfully improved. — Misek
Source: Forbes
Message