BOE’s glass cracking issue threatens iPad OLED supply plans
Repeated glass breakage at BOE’s new OLED factory has persisted for about six months, potentially hampering its bid to secure orders for iPad displays from Apple, The Elect reports.
The Chinese display maker apparently only recently began the process of qualifying Apple’s panels. According to the report, manufacturing difficulties could either delay orders or prevent BOE from obtaining them.
A broken sheet of glass can render production equipment unavailable for half a day to a full day while workers remove the fragments and check the machines. This makes the problem disruptive even when most substrates pass through the line without breaking.
Sources cited by the publication warned that two or three breaks out of 1,000 substrates could still hamper mass production. The impact extends beyond the loss of damaged sheet metal, as other production cannot continue via the affected equipment during recovery. Sources said these incidents need to be almost completely eliminated for continued operation.
The affected facility is B16 in Chengdu, which houses BOE’s 8.6 generation OLED production line. BOE continues to operate two lines there, but has not yet identified the cause of the glass failure.
Previous reports linked BOE’s iPad Air projects to its separate B12 factory in Chongqing, while B16 was associated with its efforts to supply OLED MacBook Pro panels. The August report predicted the launch of new iPad Air models with OLED displays in the first half of 2027, with Samsung Display as the main panel supplier.
BOE’s previous work for Apple was also interrupted by manufacturing and approval issues. In 2022, Apple reportedly stopped production of BOE’s iPhone 13 displays after discovering unauthorized changes to their design. Reports from 2023 described light leaks around Dynamic Island cutouts that limited the supply of panels for the iPhone 15. In January, a report stated that Apple shifted millions of orders for OLED panels for the iPhone to Samsung Display after BOE again encountered production difficulties.
