According to a new report from The Elec, in order to create the i iPhone 14 Pro display with a pill-shaped cutout on the top,Apple asked the company’s leading display supplierSamsung to use more advanced production methods to protect the surrounding environment. The display is protected from possible damage and loss of image quality.
i The iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max are the first to feature a cutout directly into the display, unlike other iPhones that have a notch protruding down from the top bezel. The report claims that Apple asked Samsung to use additional inkjet equipment to create the cutouts while preserving the surrounding OLED panels when producing the displays for its high-end iPhones.
To create the pill-shaped cutout inside the display, Samsung has to drill the pill-shaped hole directly into the OLED panel, but doing so means the surrounding pixels and panel can be damaged, and if so, exposed to moisture and oxygen. To prevent possible exposure to moisture and oxygen, the report says Samsung built a dam that separates the pill-shaped cutout from the surrounding pixels. From the machine translated copy of the report:
This is because of the i first hole display applied on the iPhone 14 Pro series. To punch holes on top of the OLED screen for the front camera lens, etc., the holes must be drilled in post-processing (module process). If the thin-film encapsulation is damaged and the OLED is exposed to moisture and oxygen, the lifetime of the product will be greatly shortened.
For this reason, Samsung Display is known to use inkjet equipment to build a dam after making the thin film encapsulation and touch electrodes in the iPhone 14 Pro series OLED, separating the hole from the rest of the area and making the height uneven area flattened. Samsung Display is able to perform this process using a laser rather than an inkjet device, but Apple is said to prefer the inkjet method.
Samsung has a lot of experience producing displays, including those with cutouts. The company's own line of smartphones feature a single hole-punch cutout that houses the front-facing cameras. For the iPhone 14 Pro, however, the report suggests that Apple has taken extra care in producing the displays on the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max to ensure the cutouts don't interfere with surrounding pixels and degrade image quality.
Elec said that another Apple display supplier, LG Display, also used the same method in its batch of displays for the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max. The iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus have the same display notch as previous iPhones, but next year's lower-end models of the iPhone lineup are rumored to have the same pill-shaped cutout as the iPhone 14 Pro.
