Why you shouldn't expect Apple's new uber-bright 1000-nit 'Tandem' OLED screen tech to hit the PC any time soon

pcgamer.com:

Apple has rolled out its latest iPad Pro and apart from the new M4 chip, which is pretty interesting in its own right, the highlight is undoubtedly its new dual-layer OLED display, known in Apple parlance as Tandem OLED. Capable of 1,000 nits sustained full-screen brightness and 1,600 nits peak HDR, it blows away any OLED PC monitor for sheer brightness. Even the best current OLED large-format desktop panels top out at about 250 nits full screen.

So, the immediate question is whether Apple's dual-layer OLED tech could make the transition to desktop or even laptop PCs. But that seems unlikely. The main reasons are cost and complexity.

For starters, the Tandem OLED panel uses two OLED panels stacked atop one another. Current PC OLED monitors are expensive enough with just one. The cost of two panels in one monitor doesn't bear thinking about. And that's before you consider the complexity of manufacturing such a display. The two panels will need to be very closely aligned to ensure sharp image quality.

Then there's the problem of driving two panels in parallel. Very precise control over image update and timing is required. Indeed, Apple's new M4 chip has a brand new dedicated display controller block designed to do just that. That timing and synchronisation challenge is only going to be more tricky in a premium desktop PC context where you might expect a refresh rate of 240 Hz or more.

Imagine trying to update two panels in perfect synchronicity 240 or more times in one second. Get it even infinitesimally wrong and you're going to have all kinds of response and image blurring issues. So, it's likely that any dual-layer OLED monitor would need an expensive bespoke control chip to drive the panels.

What's more, it's also worth considering whether the achievement of 1,000 nits full-screen for a PC monitor even makes sense. A device like an iPad needs to work well in a much broader range of settings and scenarios than a desktop monitor or arguably even a laptop screen.

Cri