According to several sources, Apple has been buying up every 10″ screen it can, in both LCD and OLED varieties. The company is buying so many, in fact, that there really aren’t any left.

“We were designing a product for a customer and we needed 10 inch screens, but we’ve been trying for months and can’t get one from any of the Asian suppliers,” an anonymous designer told TG Daily at CES. It’s not the first time Apple has done this, either. If you remember when the iPod was first getting started, there were zero 3.5″ drives available for the rest of the world.

The source said, surprise, it’s for the Apple tablet! I’m not really sure what else it would be for so that’s likely a safe bet. As for timing, though, it could point to a late Q1/early Q2 release instead of later in the year.

If you’ve been sitting on your next TV purchase for that glut of OLED TVs to flood the market, you shouldn’t. LG’s VP of OLED sales and marketing, Won Kim, says prices won’t come down to LCD levels until 2016. Seven years is a long way off, and so much can change that Kim might be wrong, but in any case, OLEDs won’t be reasonable anytime soon.

Kim’s statements came shortly after LG announced a 15-inch OLED TV for its Korean market at the end of this year. No announcement for the US market, and that’s sort of been the standard so far. Only Sony sells an OLED stateside, and it’s just 11-inches. So it’s not just market prices we’re waiting on – the whole system has to mature enough to even be able to deliver the product.

Kim did say we would see 40-inch OLEDs by something like 2012, but you can bet they’ll be expensive. Of course by then who’s to say LCDs and Plasmas won’t be nearly as good as an OLED? The “absolute black” that makes the OLED so attractive (among some other features) is nearly attainable now with dimming LED TVs. In seven year this generation of technology could come a long way.