Although beautifully made, the
iPhone is just as breakable as any other smartphone, with plenty of people
walking around with cracked screens after a drop. Apple appears to be working
on a solution to this problem, toughening up its products.
A new deal could signal a
super-tough sapphire screen for the iPhone 6. According to reports, Apple has
struck a deal with GT Advanced technologies to produce sapphire glass in a
plant in Arizona.
The deal was announced by GT
Advanced Technologies in a regulatory filing. "The sapphire glass that GT
will make in the facility will be used to cover the camera lenses in Apple's
phones and the fingerprint-reading devices in its latest products. GT's
technology also can be used to make scratchproof glass covers for smartphones,
although it is not used for that purpose by Apple today".
Apple is due to pay $578m,
which GT Advanced Technologies will use to buy and operate sapphire production
equipment in a new Arizona facility. GT Advanced Technologies will pay back the
Apple over a five-year period.
While the deal should, in the
short-term, provide Apple with the materials it needs for existing components,
there's a long-term plan, too. As part of the deal, GT Advanced Technologies will
"deliver low cost, high volume manufacturing of sapphire material"
using a large-capacity furnace.
Synthetic sapphire glass gets
its name because it's transparent, although it's not technically glass.
However, sapphire's advantage over glass is its incredible durability and
hardiness. Sapphire has a value of 9 on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness,
putting it just behind diamond. This means that it's extremely difficult to
break, resulting in fewer broken iPhones, saving money in repair costs.
It would seem almost certain
now that Apple will go with Sapphire Glass. Thanks to GT Advanced's earnings
report, covered by Forbes.
Looking through the filing, GT Advanced appears to be doing little business in
the first and second quarters of the year, but expects to jump massively to
$500-to-$700m in the last six months of the year alone.
What this tells us is that GT
Advanced is now fully committed to Apple and that it expects to ramp up
production of sapphire glass in the second half of the year. Revenues of this
size can only be generated by one product: the iPhone. As noted above, this
information would also seem to give away the release date, ruling out the
iPhone 6 coming in May.
As well as looking at the
screen, Apple is also said to be looking at toughening up the case by
investigating liquid metal for the iPhone 6. Liquid metal would encase the iPhone
6 is a super-tough metal, built up layer-by-layer, making it a lot hardier and
more difficult to break. According to new information, Apple has put in five
patents for liquid metal.
One describes how bulk metallic
glasses (BMG, or liquid metal to give it the more familiar name) would be
layered on top of each other to create components. The main focus on this
invention is via 3D printing, allowing Apple to build components and cases from
computer-generated designs.
What's more Patently Apple, which
found the information, believes that Apple has already used liquid metals in
the iPhone 5S, suggesting that the technology is already available. It's clear,
then, that Apple is interested in liquid metal for the iPhone and iPad range,
so it's now a matter of when.
Liquid metal could make the iPhone 6 a lot tougher
than previous models
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