Marques Brownlee on his YouTube channel:
The 4.7″ Apple iPhone 6 will have a sapphire crystal display made by $GTAT [GT Advanced Technologies Inc]. Sapphire crystal is used in high-end watches & camera lenses already. Let’s put it through its paces!
Pretty impressive. While this won’t be the first smartphone with a sapphire display (Vertu has been using them for a quite a while), it will be first truly mass-market device.
If you want to know more, check this TechRadar piece where the Head of PR at Vertu talks about their experiences with sapphire displays:
Sapphire screens aren’t exactly easy to produce and Vertu experiences very low yields from its supply chain, which isn’t a big issue for a small firm, but it’s something which could spell trouble for the likes of Apple who will be looking to mass produce it.
If a sapphire display does come to the iPhone 6, Apple would have to exponentially ramp up the production and yield rate of these screens to satisfy demand.
Yield has always been the crucial element of a new iPhone hardware feature; Apple simply can’t add an element to the iPhone that they can’t manufacture in the hundreds of millions.
At the same time, this need for scale hasn’t stopped them from creating hardware designs that incorporate very advanced technologies and techniques — like TouchID, or the chamfer-cut edges on the iPhone 5 and 5S.
I bet if they can make it happen, this hardware advancement will certainly be a marquee feature in the keynote.
Jony Ive talking about how much better these sapphire displays are, images of new displays whirling through a spotless production facility, being cut and polished by friendly robots. That kind of thing.