Slashdot Mirror
Behind Apple's Sapphire Screen Debacle
Frankie70 (803801) writes Apple invested more than $1 billion in an effort to make sapphire one of iPhone 6's selling point. But the iPhone 6 was released without the sapphire screen. GT Advanced Technologies, the small company chosen to supply Apple with enormous quantities of cheap sapphire, declared bankruptcy a month later. Recent documents from GT's bankruptcy proceedings, and conversations with people familiar with operations at Apple and GT, provide several clues as to what went wrong. GT said that to save costs, Apple decided not to install backup power supplies, and multiple outages ruined whole batches of sapphire. The terms Apple negotiated committed GT to supplying a huge amount of sapphire, but put Apple under no obligation to buy it. In its bankruptcy documents, GT would later accuse Apple of using "bait-and-switch" tactics, and said the terms of the deal were "onerous and massively one-sided."
In other news: A company so desperate to get into bed with Apple signs away their soul for rainbows and promises.
"Apple ruined us by trying to buy our product"
Maybe suppliers will now reconsider getting involved with Apple. Large companies with extreme market power will often bully their suppliers. It is common for large customers to make demands for price reductions below the contract price, with threats to dump the supplier if they refuse. Having a single customer that makes up most of your sales is a significant risk to any business and something that has to be carefully managed.
It's aluminum oxide. Basically impossible to accidently scratch. Can be made very Crack resistant if made correctly.
In its bankruptcy documents, GT would later accuse Apple of using "bait-and-switch" tactics, and said the terms of the deal were "onerous and massively one-sided." (Emphasis mine...)
And Apple gets blamed for this shortcoming? Why did GT sign on the god damned dotted line?
Uhm, you're supposed to notice this before you sign, not after you go bankrupt.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I newer understood the "not installing a backup power supply for each furnace" situation.
Who owned and was responsible for the factory? The story has always been that GT produced Sapphire, and that apple maybe wanted to buy it.
So why did GT let apple control anything at all, about their factories?
From the article " after five months Apple demanded a major change in terms, requiring GT to supply the sapphire itself. In fact, Apple wanted GT to build the world’s largest factory to produce the stuff"
So If Apple wanted GT to supply the sapphire, why did they have any say in the day to day running of the factories. Sounds like GT gave far to much factory control to Apple for no reason at all.
The salespeople saw money. The business people, who would normally assess risk, got blinded by the prospect of making huge amounts of money. The engineers who could see disaster coming were not consulted or ignored.
Not much sympathy for either party from me, as I'm sure both companies understood the nature of the contract. I wonder, though, how much it has cost Apple in sales and good will to be putting out a product without the top-of-the-line screen. Probably a lot more than they were trying to squeeze out of this deal with their ruthless negotiating tactics. This is the sort of thing Stephen Covey (7 Habits of Highly Effective People) was going on about when he advocated seeking out the win-win deal. If your partners don't prosper, it will always come back to hurt you.
Cretins think material science is 'magic', and with enough 'effort' a wonder material can be made with only 'positive' properties.
Sapphire ***IS*** extremely true scratch resistant (as in the surface atoms resist displacement) because sapphire is BRITTLE. Apple needed a 'magic' material to better 'Gorilla Glass' and the like, so they acted like every Slashdot Beta, and indulged the fantasy that 'science' 'solves' everything with enough money.
Come the day, sapphire iPhones suffered horrible drop failure at the expected rate- with the added 'bonus' of employing a horribly expensive 'solution'. Apple learnt the hard way that such materials are great if you can afford to make the 'window' either very thick or very small.
Here's the thing. Apple has run out of 'low hanging fruit' 'innovation' for their very expensive executive toys. Even spending insane amounts of money on R+D and materials no longer buys Apple a significant advantage against much cheaper rivals in the marketplace. Apple IS better if your metric is trivial and childish, but even for Apple fans, 'better' no longer means what it did a few years back.
Since Apple is insanely rich, I would advise every dishonest Human with a technology bent to visit Apple HQ and pitch some pie-in-the-sky magic tech solution, for never has the company been so desperate to believe such nonsense. Honestly, I'd expect even an average 12-year old science student to know that as hardness improves (ie scratch resistance) so does brittleness. No-one at Apple had even this basic awareness, so they're clearly vulnerable for any sort of future con.
They don't seem to care about losing customers. Perhaps they know that their customers are mostly fans who will always buy whatever overpriced gadget they throw at them, as long as the new product carries a new buzzword or two. That's what the sapphire screen was, a buzzword, and that is made clear by the fact that instead of switching to something about as effective like Gorilla glass, they shipped a scratch-able glass screen instead. It was not about using the best material for their screen, it was just about using the most marketable material. When the plan failed, their response was to change the marketing campaign.
In the meantime, at the office, all iphones without protectors are full of scratches, while the Samsungs have mostly pristine screens...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
But it sounds like Apple was bankrolling GT for the factory. which means they negotiated some kind of investment budget. Apple probably went through the list, found what sounds like excesses and asked GT if all this was really necessary or if it could be done cheaper. Apparently GT failed to justify the cost, so it was stricken from the final budget. When shit hit the fan it might have been too late to start redesigning and they were already behind schedule and budget with botched batches, GT might not have had the financial muscle to fix it and Apple might be concerned about throwing good money after bad. After all, this is how most terrible investment decisions are made, we're already $500 million down the hole so we need to spend a hundred more to finish it. Then we're already $600 million down the hole so we need to spend a hundred more to finish it and so on. Apple had a reasonable plan B by sticking with Gorilla Glass so they weren't pot commited as they'd say in poker.
Remember, just because GT can point to this and say that's why it failed doesn't mean it'd be a success otherwise as they might have stumbled on the next hurdle too. After all, if the product that did come out okay was that great I'm sure Apple would have been more willing to see it through too, unless they decided it was cheaper to let GT fail and pick up the pieces. I really doubt it's as easy as Apple buying GT's assets, installing a few UPSes in the factory and they're ready to go for the iPhone 6s. Like they say, production at this scale had never been attempted before which generally means you have to expect the unexpected. GT seems to have bet everything on things going according to plan, they gambled and lost. It's pretty cheap to try blaming Apple for their own botched execution, they're a business and don't just throw money around. If they failed to get sufficient investment that's nobody but GT's fault.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Put it in your pocket with keys.
Could not agree more, don't care what it's made from, if you do the above, it will come out scratched.
It's like keys that are unobserved in your pocket turn into diamonds.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
Wedding band or phone? Wedding band or phone? Wedding band or phone? ...fuck it, wedding band has to go!