How Apple's Billion Dollar Sapphire Bet Will Pay Off

alphadogg writes: "Apple is making a billion dollar bet on sapphire as a strategic material for mobile devices such as the iPhone, iPad and perhaps an iWatch. Exactly what the company plans to do with the scratch-resistant crystal – and when – is still the subject of debate. Apple is creating its own supply chain devoted to producing and finishing synthetic sapphire crystal in unprecedented quantities. The new Mesa, Arizona plant, in a partnership with sapphire furnace maker GT Advanced Technologies, will make Apple one of the world's largest sapphire producers when it reaches full capacity, probably in late 2014. By doing so, Apple is assured of a very large amount of sapphire and insulates itself from the ups and downs of sapphire material pricing in the global market."

Comments

Re:Should have gone with ruby....

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Obviously, Apple doesn't want any of that Chromium stuff in their app store.

Re:Well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sapphire is indeed harder than Gorilla Glass, whether you are talking about scratch hardness (the Mohs scale) or indentation hardness (the Vickers scale). There isn't an exact value for the scratch hardness of Gorilla Glass but it seems that people are easily able to scratch it with sandpaper, granite, or whatever, whereas you really cannot scratch sapphire with anything less than corundum/diamond.

Anyone else notice

[rsilvergun]

that you can go from jack squat to worlds largest producer in a few years? I'm not saying they aren't gonna do it, I'm just saying it's crazy how fast their doing it. 50 years ago this would be a massive undertaking with a whole town built up around it. Now? I think the factory's gonna have a couple hundred employees. It's just nuts how few people you need in manufacturing anymore...

Re:Well.

[viperidaenz]

a metric shitton of sapphire

Exactly. Not one of those ill-defined imperial long shit tons and short shit tons.

It's about time

[Animats]

It's surprising that Apple didn't do this a long time ago. Checkout scanners have had sapphire-coated glass for a decade or more. I pointed this out a few years ago, and the Apple fanboys immediately replied that Gorilla Glass was good enough and sapphire was unnecessary.

It's embarassing how fragile Apple's mobile products are. But this, at least, will stop screens from being scratched by coins and keys. You can drag canned goods across a sapphire coated supermarket checkout scanner glass for a decade without much effect. Home Depot self-checkout scanners have sapphire coated glass, and they get everything in the tool department dragged across them.

Re:Well.

[gnupun]

Sapphire is second hardest material (1st is diamond) known and much more scratch resistant than gorilla glass. This is the best feature of sapphire glass. Check out the youtube video in this article -- even a concrete block can't scratch the sapphire glass. However, sapphire glass has many disadvantages:

• *10x more expensive than gorilla glass
• *1.6 times heavier than gorilla glass
• *Higher refractive index so it's dimmer and therefore consumes more battery power to get same brightness as gorilla glass. A phone user is very interested in this property.
• *Not environmentally friendly (energy consumption very high to produce glass)

Re:Bullshit - don't believe marketing materials

[Plumpaquatsch]

Sapphire is *not* the second hardest material known. Yes, it's written in the linked article, but it is also definitely wrong.

Maybe they mean second hardest transparent material - which is kind of important for displays.