Report claims the iPhone 17 will finally get an always-on display

We’re now starting to get pretty regular updates on the iPhone 16 coming later this year, but every now and then the rumorsphere spits out something relating to a later generation. Such as this week’s news that Apple plans to upgrade screen tech across the entire iPhone 17 range next year.

At the moment, Apple’s iPhones use a mixture of OLED display types: LTPO (or low-temperature polycrystalline oxide) on the Pro models, and LTPS (low-temperature polycrystalline silicon) on the rest. LTPO is a more advanced and overall better choice because of its ability to dynamically adjust refresh rate depending on what’s being shown on the screen and consequently lower power consumption. In other words, LTPO is closely related to Apple’s ProMotion tech, which can adjust refresh rate of Pro-class iPhones all the way up to 120Hz without killing the battery.

Perhaps more importantly for users, LPTO also lets Apple dial the refresh rate all the way down to 1Hz to enable its always-on feature that lets you see the time and widgets without killing the battery. Apple introduced always-on with the iPhone 15 but thus far has kept it as a feature of the Pro phones. LPTO tech will open the door for Apple to bring it to the cheaper iPhones as well, much like the Dynamic Island with teh iPhone 15.

Limiting a major feature to the more expensive models in a range makes sense commercially, as it pushes customers into spending more money. (We’ve written before on the upsell strategy that Apple has been leaning into for the past few years.) But eventually, it needs to diffuse into the wider range… and for ProMotion that moment appears to be scheduled for the fall of 2025. According to The Elec, all four iPhone 17 models will get LTPO screens, which probably means they will all get always-on and likely ProMotion as well.

The Elec quotes an industry official as saying (via Google Translate from the original Korean): “Because the product change between last year’s iPhone 15 and this year’s iPhone 16 series is small, the iPhone 17 series needs to differentiate itself by applying LTPO to the lower lineup.”

The complication in all this relates to BOE, a Chinese supplier which has been making OLED screens for Apple’s iPhones since 2021. BOE does have the capability to make LTPO screens–The Elec notes that it already does so for some Chinese smartphone companies such as Huawei–but isn’t up to the task of doing so for Apple, presumably because of quality control issues. The Elec predicts that Apple “is expected to conduct some kind of ‘training’ to improve BOE’s LTPO technology.” If this doesn’t fix the problem, that same industry source reveals, Apple will press ahead with the plan without BOE’s help.

Author: David Price, Editor