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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?
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.
One of the largest uses for artificial sapphire is supermarket barcode scanners. No one's putting it there because they feel a need to bling-out the supermarket. It's there because any surface that has stuff dragged across it all day, every day either needs to be incredible scratch-resistant or replaced way too often.
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.
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...
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).
I'm thinking that's because athletes are more likely to hit their watches while doing activities.
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Because if you called it transparent alumina, people would accuse you of ripping off Star Trek.