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Sapphire Glass Didn't Pass iPhone Drop Test According to Reports
SternisheFan notes reports about why Apple didn't use sapphire glass screens in the latest iPhones as many expected. Sapphire screens were part of the iPhone 6 design until the glass repeatedly cracked during standard drop tests conducted by Apple suppliers. So Apple abandoned its sapphire plans before the iPhone 6 product launch September 9. VentureBeat has learned that recent supplier channel checks by an IDC analyst yielded several reports of the sapphire failures and Apple's decision against using the glass material. As we heard on Tuesday in Cupertino, both the iPhone 6 and the larger iPhone 6 Plus will ship with screens made of "ion-strengthened" glass. This was apparently Apple's second choice. IDC analyst Danielle Levitas says it isn't clear when exactly the drop-test failures took place, or when Apple abandoned plans for sapphire-screened iPhones. She says the poor drop-test results, combined with the relative high cost of sapphire glass, could have made plans to ship sapphire glass phones too risky. One researcher who covers GT Advanced Technologies, the company that was to produce the glass for the iPhone 6, wrote in a research note earlier this week that plans for the sapphire screens were cancelled in August, just weeks before the September 9 launch. The new Apple Watches (except the "Sport" version) do use sapphire for their screens. Levitas believes that the glass for the smaller 1.5-inch and 1.7-inch watch screens was less likely to break in drop tests.
..might simply have been not appreciably better than glass alternatives.
if true (this sounds like speculation) kudos apple for not releasing something just because they could.
Isn't that what standard hardened glass is?
Why call it "sapphire glass" when it's not a "glass"?
Company tries two things, chooses the one that is better. News at 11.
Levitas believes that the glass for the smaller 1.5-inch and 1.7-inch watch screens was less likely to break in drop tests.
Watches are less likely to be dropped than phones, making scratch resistance a higher priority.
Why would they use that? Other than snob appeal.
I swear by sapphire glass for watches (which have been using it even for midtier models for ages) as it's incredibly scratch resistant, but I didn't think that necessarily translates to shatter resistant. I am curious though in terms of scratch resistance how sapphire crystal compares to gorilla glass (and similar products).
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
I've kept a number of different iPhones in pockets with keys for years, zero scratches. I've not seen an iPhone screen witch scratches (cracks if it's dropped, yes, but not scratches).
Also, they HAVE used Gorilla Glass. In fact I'd imagine the newer ones ALSO use Gorilla Glass, they just aren't saying that (which they did not in the past also).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Further drop tests revealed that the sapphire glass screen was not likely to break when embedded in a liquid metal casing.
Didn't Tag Heuer have some phone models with saphire displays?
Agree on this, sapphire crystal (crystal rather than glass) is something I've always seen on mid and above range watches. I have it on one of mine (an Eternal which I bought in the 90s which were briefly affordable) I suspect the sapphire works better at smaller size whereas the engineered glass products like Corning Gorilla glass work better at larger size where risk of shattering from bending or pressure outweighs the risk of sharps scraping the surface.
Have gnu, will travel.
This is iOn strengthened
Are you comparing standard phones to things like Vertu? Who else uses Sapphire screens on sub-$1k phones?
I've not over years of use, I guess it's that weak-ass Gorilla Glass 2 the original post was wishing for. Hopefully Apple ditched them if you can simply scratch it with keys.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've got a 3 year old iPhone 4S. Never broken the glass on it, but it does have some minor scratching on the display.
I'm not surprised Apple went with gorilla glass -- sapphire is very hard, but also brittle -- cornings product is a bit softer, but much more resilient.
I'll probably be upgrading to a 6 sometime in the next month or so.
Ian Ameline
I dropped my iphone 5 from 2 meters (i leave it to the Americans to make out how many badger's kidneys it is) to a hard, stone floor. Glass intact.
The vast majority of smashed screens I've seen are people of questionable intelligence like teenage girls who see a phone as a fashion accessory, stuff the phone in their back pocket and are somehow surprised when the screen is cracked.
But at least they weren't scratched!
The glass consists of a thin sheet of alkali-aluminosilicate. Gorilla Glass is strengthened using an ion-exchange process which forces large ions into the spaces between molecules on the glass surface. Specifically, glass is placed in a 400C molten potassium salt bath, which forces potassium ions to replace the sodium ions originally in the glass. The larger potassium ions take up more space between the other atoms in the glass. As the glass cools, the crunched-together atoms produce a high level of compressive stress in the glass that helps protect the surface from mechanical damage.
http://chemistry.about.com/od/...
How Sapphire Glass is made...
http://www.businessinsider.com...
shouldn't Apple be drop testing these?
i'm sure Apple does it's own testing, but if suppliers regularly have to do stuff like this it really makes me wonder what factors they test for
reminds me of this story about xbox one controller R&D
in the middle of the article, you see the actual R&D testing of the new controller designs, all in grey
now, for anyone who has ever played video games, **especially gamers**...the idea of designing a new controller is **awesome**
it's the kind thing that inspires a kid to go into game design...
now, look at the ***factors*** they are testing...look at what changes they are thinking of making
1mm
that's it
they're testing a difference of 1 millimeter....full testing battery....complex A/B testing with gamers, focus groups, the whole gamut!
for an experimental variable of 1 millimeter difference from the old to new design
a real experiment would test, oh, say a design similar to the N64's controller vs the current design...or a new button layout
my point is, we can see from TFA that "innovative tech R&D" is not very innovative...for many companies
Thank you Dave Raggett
Everybody who gets an iPhone immediately puts it into a rugged, generally rubberized, case. All smartphones tend to be fragile, and the naked iPhone is slippery. Cases not only protect against damage, but prevent most drops from happening in the first place. An iPhone in a rubbery OtterBox is not going to slip out of your shirt pocket into the toilet.
I went 3 years with an iPhone 3G and 3 years with an iPhone 4s. No scratches in the glass. The 3g even survived a 12 foot fall onto concrete. It landed on a corner and the glass was fine. The back had a tiny dent but the glass was fine.
I was hoping the iPhone 6 would be 5s size. I hate big phones. If you can't sit down with the phone in your pocket it is too big.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Actually it's not. Moissanite (silicon carbide) is harder. 9.5 on the Mohs scale, vs 9 for sapphire/corundum, 10 for diamond. Its structure is the same as diamond, except it alternates between silicon and carbon atoms, the silicon-carbon bond being nearly as strong as a carbon-carbon bond. I first ran across it (as an opaque conglomerate of smaller crystals) as guides for fishing rods - the hardness prevents braided lines from gouging a groove in the guide. There are a bunch of other materials harder than corundum, but I believe moissanite is the only transparent one.
Remember what your momma taught you - never trust a salesman.
Gorilla Glass by 2010 had been used in approximately 20 percent of mobile handsets worldwide, about 200 million units.[9] The second generation, called "Gorilla Glass 2", was introduced in 2012. On October 24, 2012, Corning announced that over one billion mobile devices used Gorilla Glass.[10] Gorilla Glass 2 is 20 percent thinner than the original Gorilla Glass.[11]
Gorilla Glass 3 was introduced at CES 2013. Gorilla Glass 3 is up to three times more damage resistant than Gorilla Glass 2, being better able to resist the deep scratches that weaken glass. It is also more flexible.[12] Gorilla Glass 3 is claimed to be 40% more scratch-resistant.[13] This is Corning's first glass to be designed through an atomic-scale modeling before anything was melted in laboratories, the optimal composition being predicted using rigidity theory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
Back in the 1920s-1940s as cars became more popular, more people started dying in car crashes. In response, the auto manufacturers did the obvious thing and started making the cars stronger and stronger. And people kept dying.
It wasn't until the 1950s when the first controlled crash tests were done, that they discovered that the stronger car bodies were the worst possible thing you could do. They did nothing to reduce the kinetic energy of the occupants before impact. The car would hit, the strong body would stop moving almost instantly, and the occupants would keep flying forward at full speed until they hit the front of the car. This is what led to the crumple zones we have today - where the car body deliberately flexes and deforms to absorb crash energy, lessening the impact forces on the occupants.
I think phones are going to go the same way. Rather than build the bodies and faces stronger and stronger to try to make them survive drops, they're going to be replaced with flexible screens once those come down in price and become commonplace. Bend and flex to absorb the impact energy, not try to stiffly resist it until something shatters. Scratches can be handled by a disposable plastic protector (I go through about one a year, so it's not at all inconvenient).
“All irregularities will be handled by the forces controlling each dimension. Transuranic, heavy elements may not be used where there is life. Medium atomic weights are available: Gold, Lead, Copper, Jet, Diamond, Radium, Sapphire, Silver and Steel.
Sapphire and Steel have been assigned”.
It's the exact opposite. "Shattering" is a catastrophic structural failure, where object could no longer bend sufficiently and didn't have enough strength to withstand the force applied to it.
As a result, typically being "hard" results in being "fragile", whereas being "soft" results in being "hard to shatter". Hardened plastic used on older phones for example would scratch up easily but was very difficult to shatter, whereas modern gorilla glass is very hard to scratch, but shatters easily.
Sapphire, being even harder is even more fragile and shatters even more easily. Considering how many shattered phones there are that I've seen, I would suggest that we hit a point where phones should prioritise "shatter resistance" over "scratch resistance".
The new Apple Watches (except the "Sport" version) do use sapphire for their screens.
Presumably that's because athletes are more willing than other market segments to pay to repair or replace broken items.
The problem with sapphire is that it's BRITTLE. Drop it and it will break. It's why steel is better than cast iron.
You aren't likely to drop a checkout scanner. Iphones though are regularly dropped.
The hardness is is great if you are worried ONLY about scratches.
The vast majority of smashed screens I've seen are people of questionable intelligence like teenage girls who see a phone as a fashion accessory, stuff the phone in their back pocket and are somehow surprised when the screen is cracked.
...and get Daddy to buy them a new one. It's all good, they needed an upgrade anyways. You can't be cool if you can't plug your headphones in from the bottom.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
My wife's wedding ring is moissanite. I know all about its hardness, heat resistance, brilliance, rarity in nature (mainly from meteorites) etc. That's my whole point, their Sapphire pitch was all marketing and when it didn't pan out they should have at least given something good to their customers...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Says the guy who still lives in a castle.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
Remains of a hard, sharp material like glass in a spacecraft would be life threatening. No gravity means they would hover around until someone drew them into their lungs, where they may cause all sorts of damage.
Apple has to start making all their stuff super cheap now, (keep them shareholders happy) weld the RAM jn their macbooks, back to plastic cases because they can't have NF without, and maybe start to pay attention to security.
A parade of failures.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I'm almost positive I'm taking the bait here, but how is an iPhone more useful than an Android? In my totally anecdotal experience, most of my male friends have Androids and use the hell out of them (music player, fitness apps, VOIP calling, etc.) and their wives (and mine) with iPhones texting and making phone calls and occasional web usage. Plus, my wife sees what I can do with my Galaxy S4 and Nexus 5 (fitness apps on the Galaxy, Chromecast, wireless Qi charging, NFC file transfer on both) that she can't wait to get an S5.
Kyocera
Meanwhile back on topic: never have had a screen issue with my Androids, no cases, no screen protectors, but always kept in it's own pocket by itself. Wife has had pretty scratched up iphone 3, cracked iphone 4S screen (pretty good drop, probably would've broke any of my Androids), and I sprung for an otterbox for her 5S.
A larger surface will be more prone to flex, leading to cracks. So a small surface like a watch face won't be subjected to much flexing stress, and the sapphire glass will hold up. A tablet, not so much. Pricing too. On a watch with a square inch of glass, spending ten times more for the sapphire glass isn't a big deal. On a tablet with about 30 square inches, well, do the math.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
You mean Apple doesn't have dropping as one of their test cases?
As someone who is into watches, one of the things I have learned is:
Watch glass is either mineral crystal or sapphire crystal.
Mineral crystal is prone to scratching (as compared to Sapphire), but handles a direct impact relatively well. Sapphire crystal is much harder and is extremely resistant to scratching, but is much more shatter-prone than mineral.
Excuse me, but the iphone 4 I'm using (gift from as friend) has a scratch near the top edge from when he fell down on it while biking (he weighs around 240). His jeans did not survive the fall, the phone did.
My old 3G never had any kind of screen protector on it and survived without a scratch on the front for years...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
It really depends how the glass hits the surface. A flat floor will probably be okay. An edge or uneven surface can concentrate the force in one area and shatter the screen.
LG makes a phone with a concave screen, or you can buy a minimal case that has ridges at the side to prevent the glass hitting the ground directly.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Moissanite is actually transparent.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
The story is Apple. Something to do with Apple. Something to do with how this decision by Apple is simply amazing and could not have been arrived at by any other company under any circumstance.
video game controllers...
specifically in overall 'width' or 'thickness' if you will...it's just not a salient gradient
example problem: users with large hands report cramping and mistakes, want a bigger controller. so, M$ tests a larger option. this task is much more than just making it 1mm wider...first, make the controller 20% larger, and space out the buttons, maybe raise their height...and do an ergonomic analysis of the angles of joints for button pushing and consider fatigue...**THATS REAL DESIGN TESTING**
what M$ did in that video is just a waste and an example of very poor product design and testing
Thank you Dave Raggett
your problem is you inherently do not understand the scientific method
there is no logical reason to even conduct a test like M$ did in my example...the factors are not salient
i tried to give you an example, but it just went right over your head
i used to be a design researcher...daily doing user testing in a non-corporate environment...i know what i'm talking about as much as anyone in the universe on this topic
i want to continue this conversation because your interest is actually intersting to me
i love this stuff, and it seems you have strong thoughts about HCI as well
so, to continue, maybe you could tell me why you think M$'s controller testing that I linked to was a good test?
what, in your mind, are they testing, what 'problem' are the working a hypothesis for?
Thank you Dave Raggett