Apple-aligned firm opens sapphire glass factory. iPhone 6 rumours, DEPLOY Apple manufacturing partner GT Advanced has embarked on a hiring drive for its brand new sapphire-glass-producing iFactory. The fruity firm's friend will produce the "state of the art material" in Mesa, Arizona. GT sent around a postcard which announced that jobs were available at the production facility. It said: "Right now …
"But on a phone can they make it shatter resistant."
Probably not so much. You can do something like putting a plastic backing on the sapphire (like car windshields) to give it some tensile strength on the back side (the direction in which an impact is likely to flex the sapphire sheet), or at least hold the sapphire together when it cracks.
But sapphire's virtue is hardness, not toughness, and it's nothing a ceramic you can easily chemically modify. Unlike glass - glasses are chemical mutts and you can tweak their composition all day long, the way Corning does with Gorilla Glass.
Your best hope to improve the toughness of sapphire is to see if you can heat treat it until some residual compressive stresses are left in the inner and outer faces of the sapphire cover, which would suppress crack formation a bit. But I'm not familiar with sapphire tempering treatments. (Again, unlike many glasses.)
Have owned a Seiko watch with so-called sapphire glass and the problem was that while the material was hard enough to resist minor scuffs it still scratched in a brittle pattern on impact and was then too hard to polish out .
Rather have watch with plastic glass that can be restored using Brasso or T Cut.
Phone makers using plastic don't help themselves by putting a tinted coating on -- damage to this cannot be polished out so that fine print becomes jaggy and harder to read.
"Rather have watch with plastic glass that can be restored using Brasso or T Cut."
And you want a Casio because it has "more functions" than a Patek Philippe. Each to their own, I suppose...
[and you can buy high-end watches which are 50 year's old which still have glass/sapphire which is almost perfect. do you go rock-climbing with your watch or something?]
I've had my Tag Aquaracer for over a decade, I only take it off to sleep and I would describe myself as pretty active. Not even a hint of a scratch here. Kind of begs the question, and I don't want to diss your Seiko, but are there different qualities of Sapphire glass? Also, what is this going to do to the price of the next iPhone?
Same here - my Seiko watch has sapphire glass, and no scratches. And I'm not gentle - the band and case are heavily scratched.
It's not surprising Apple is doing this - it will get harder and harder to differentiate premium smartphones in the future. At least until the next big thing is figured out.
I had (have in a drawer) a similar Seiko watch. The glass was super hard but was marked/damaged by a (push)bike fall on asphalt/pavement at about 30mph.
I imagine Gorilla Glass may be tougher for impact (I seem to remember seeing videos of it being bent through ridiculous angles without breaking) and I imagine it will definitely be cheaper so it is preferable to me at least. I got a minor scratch at an edge early on somehow but none since and I treat my phone fairly badly and certainly don't use a cover, except when biking.
To those that want an inflexible, cold-feeling, rock-like object in their pocket that looks nice (ooh-er), a glass phone that is at least less breakable that the previous effort seems like a step forward though.
quote: "We gonna have to spend about 9 months listening to Samsung fans telling us that Sapphire is crap and it's just a gimmick etc. etc. until the S6 comes out sporting a Sapphire screen."
I feel the need to wind you up about how Apple fans kept going on about nobody needing cut/paste on a phone until Apple actually implemented it in iOS. Or how Steve Jobs stated explicitly that a 7" tablet is the wrong size, yet we now have the iPad Mini. ;)
Personally I'm wondering why no other premium device manufacturer has bothered putting Al2O3 on their devices before now, like people have said it has been used on premium timekeeping devices for decades. Has there been an issue with getting it to work with touchscreens or something?
Personally I'm wondering why no other premium device manufacturer has bothered putting Al2O3 on their devices before now, like people have said it has been used on premium timekeeping devices for decades. Has there been an issue with getting it to work with touchscreens or something?
Up till now it's been a question of cost. These screens have to be cut from huge sapphire single crystal ingots grown from a melt, much like a silicon wafer is cut from a silicon ingot. The price of the latter was driven down by the demands of the semiconductor industry and we've now reached the stage where industry is preparing to transition to 450 mm/18" diameters. Sapphire growth tech is on a similar, albeit less intensive, path towards maturity.
It is cost, but that is mostly controlled by manufacturing efficiency. There was nothing stopping someone from using it for a smartphone screen, but it needs to be produced in massive quantity to drive the price down. The problem is, the capacity won't be built until the demand is there. The smartphone OEMs might use it for one product, but they can't even guarantee how well that product will sell.
Enter Apple, who solves the problem by paying for the construction of a factory that will be used solely to serve their needs. Net result, Apple gets cheap (well cheapER) sapphire screens, but the situation is still the same for everyone else. Samsung of course has the money and the scale to do this as well if they wish, but the Motorolas and HTCs that don't know if their next big phone will be a hit or a flop are SOL.
"Or how Steve Jobs stated explicitly that a 7" tablet is the wrong size, yet we now have the iPad Mini. ;)"
Eh, the iPad mini has a 7.9" screen, not 7", which makes it ~27% bigger. I had a Kindle Fire, which felt a little small to me when reading books. I switched to the iPad mini, mostly because it has a bigger screen. (And a different aspect ratio that I prefer.)
Transparent aluminum is more difficult to manufacture and there-fore more expensive.
Although, Gorilla Glass 3 is 3x stronger than GG2 and is in the S4 and a few other products.
Sapphire is also 60% heavier than GG3 so they would likely make it thinner to compensate for the weight. It is also 3 to 4 times more expensive... how-ever much the screen comes to in their bill of materials. I can't see the iPhone6 costing less or even the same as the iPhone5s. Time to start making room on my credit card... haha.
>We gonna have to spend about 9 months listening to Samsung fans telling us that Sapphire is crap
Unlikely - the costs and drawbacks of making larger sheets of crystal glass is the primary reason why Samsung-Corning developed Gorilla Glass in the first place.
Not a particular fan of either company, but it's a good example of the difference between Apple (an OEM reseller) and Samsung which develop components, materials etc.
....the smart money is largely going into plastic screens in any case.
Nobody wants plastic screens, because plastic scratches.
I'd rather have a scratchproof screen that shatters if I drop it at a funny angle than a shatterproof screen that scratches if I accidentally put coins in the pocket my phone is in, or drop my phone and it slides down the sidewalk a bit. I used to hate how scratched up my phones would be when I had some fairly high end Nokias - despite how careful I was. And somehow dust always seemed to get underneath the screen in a way that never happens with glass screens. When I bought a KRZR I thought the glass screen was its best feature!
I'm sure someone will claim that there is or will be a scratchproof plastic, but anyone who claims that is ignorant of materials science. The harder you make something (i.e. more scratch resistant) the stiffer it is (i.e. more prone to shattering) There's no free lunch, you have to pick your poison. Well, you can play games by using both in a laminate, as windshields do, but that doesn't stop the shattering, it just stops it from spreading as easily.
>I'm sure someone will claim that there is or will be a scratchproof plastic, but anyone who claims that is ignorant of materials science
Eek...I can think of 7 or 8, how ignorant am I? ............but I said 'plastic' above because it's flexible (ie plastic) displays that are interesting and getting all the investment right now.......
.....I suspect Apple's interest is mostly down to the fact that Sapphire sounds better and Apple don't want to line Samsung's pockets by using Gorilla Glass.
I read elsewhere (Macrumors.com I think) that the sapphire glass will be used for the camera and perhaps for the iwatch but it is unlikely that it will be used for the front face of the 'phone.
Sapphire glass works well on watch faces which are small and the glass can be curved. On a 'phone front it needs to be thin and flat (for the touch screen to work) and comparatively large which means it is more likely to shatter.
Sapphire has a higher index of refraction than glass. Watch manufacturers typically put anti-reflective coatings on one or both sides of a sapphire watch crystal because otherwise it's really "shiny" and often difficult to read. Notice that since Apple switched to a sapphire camera cover, there have been complaints about internal reflections and chromatic aberrations (purple fringing/haze). I wonder how this would impact the image quality/visibility if it were to cover an entire cell phone screen.
Just got the non-replaceable battery of my iPhone 3GS replaced for £25 (including mailing it back to me). Replaced the battery of my daughter's 3GS over a year ago (even cheaper but involved me doing the fiddling about with tiny things) and it is still doing fine.
Maybe the next iPhone will be made entirely out of sapphire crystal - now that would be an innovation! In reality if you think about it, the average Joe will not see the difference between a gorilla glass and sapphire crystal screen, but EVERYONE would notice an iphone made entirely out of sapphire glass!
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