Phone 6 rumor du jour: sapphire to replace bulletproof glass body
Posted by Jake Robison on May 2, 2013 in News, Tech | 0 comments
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Apple is replacing the bulletproof “Gorilla Glass” with more durable sapphire on its iPhone 6 due to falling prices of the once-expensive gemstone, says the latest rumor du jour coming from the tabloid nether regions. And there may be more legitimacy to the storyline than the nature of its sources suggests. Apple has used the all glass iPhone design for three consecutive generations, the first time it’s remained with one material for such a prolonged period of time during the phone’s six year tenure. With the iPhone already defeating competitors in durability testing, moving from a durable material to a nearly indestructible one would give the iPhone 6 the kind of marketing muscle which the last two iterations have lacked.
Sapphire is most commonly thought of as a blue stone, but comes in several color variations including one that’s perfectly clear, making it usable for mobile device screens. Apple has been building its recent iPhones out of nearly all glass, with slabs of metal here and there, as it’s come to learn that the bulletproof glass holds up better than the plastics it had been using for iPhone generations one and two. That kind of glass doesn’t come cheap, and initially held up iPhone manufacturing due to the difficulty in cutting it. So moving to a gemstone like sapphire for the iPhone 6 isn’t much more of a challenge for the company, particularly with sapphire prices plummeting.
The material is most commonly thought of as a form of diamond. But sapphire is instead an aluminum oxide, technically making it a metal variant – albeit a clear one which looks like a diamond. Using the material on the iPhone 6 would mean Apple moving to a metal body which looks like glass but markets like a gemstone, the kind of ambitious move which tends to be right up the alley. So we’ll place this rumor in the “plausible” category. And it would also explain why Apple is said to be producing a lower cost iPhone 6 variant made of plastic, as a sapphire flagship iPhone 6 would have a high enough cost of materials that it would need to retain the current pricing scheme amid increasing industry pricing pressures.