The Apple Watch already has one of the best displays on any smartwatch, but the company is reportedly working on something that could make it meaningfully better.
According to industry sources cited by The Elec, LG Display is currently developing and validating a new display backplane technology. It is called high-mobility oxide, or HMO, and the company is making it on its sixth-generation OLED production lines.
How does HMO matter for Apple Watch battery life?
Every OLED display needs a backplane, which is the layer of transistors that controls each pixel.
The current gold standard for Apple Watch panels is LTPO, which improves battery life by allowing the screen to dynamically drop its refresh rate to 1Hz when not being used actively.
HMO, on the other hand, takes a different approach. It maximizes the inherent low-power advantages of oxide transistor technology without the complex manufacturing steps involved in making LTPO.
The new technology doesn’t require laser crystallization or ion implantation, which, in theory, should result in a display that draws even less power while costing less to produce. In simple words, the Apple Watch models using the technology could last substantially longer than the ones that rely on LTPO technology.
Apple is evaluating HMO as a potential successor to its LTPO technology for Apple Watch displays. If everything pans out well, we might see the same technology on future iPhone displays.
When could HMO reach an actual Apple Watch?
The challenge comes down to how quickly the transistors inside the display can switch on and off.
Today’s mass-produced oxide panels aren’t fast enough for the kind of high-resolution, high-refresh-rate displays Apple demands, and LG Display needs to close that gap significantly before HMO is ready for production at scale. Getting there consistently across a full-sized panel, without sacrificing reliability, is the challenging part.
The report suggests that LG Display could supply the technology for smartwatch applications as early as next year, putting an optimistic timeline for an Apple Watch with an HMO display at 2027 or later. However, I won’t be surprised if it is delayed to 2028.
Keep in mind that everything here comes from industry sources cited by The Elec, and nothing has been confirmed by either Apple or LG Display.