iPhone 6 Could Feature A Sapphire Display

Although we have just seen the release of the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c are recently, it’s become quite a certainty what the iPhone 6 will bring us. Its seems that one of the most important features of the next flagship will be the sapphire glass display.

News about Apple’s deal with a supplier from the United States that produces sapphire glass has been highly advertised. The display will be developed at a plant in Arizona that will also be handling the production for the nest iPhone and iPad devices to come.

Reported by USA Today,the news said that GT Advanced Technologies could make the super-hard glass for Apple products. The plant is currently employing about 700 people who will be working at the factory in east Mesa, Arizona, although it is currently vacant for now.

Monday afternoon in a regulatory filing, GT Advanced Technologies made the deal official. The statement said that the sapphire glass that they are going to make in the center will be utilized in the making of the camera lenses for Apple smartphones. Also it will be used in the fingerprint-reading devices that have been used in its latest products. Another way that this technology can be used is to help produce scratch proof glass that can be used as covers for smartphones. But that latter has not been used by Apple so far in its products.

Apple’s contribution to this is deal is estimated at $578m that will be put to good use by GT Advanced Technologies in purchasing and operating the necessary equipment needed for the production of the sapphire glass. The plan for GT Advanced Technologies is that it will pay back Apple this amount in five years time.

The CEO of GT Advanced Technologies, Tom Gutierrez has made a statement himself saying that it was in their company’s best interest in the long run to build a sapphire material business with regular profits. He also added that this would be in the best interest of the employees and shareholders as well by benefiting from the material operation directly and with the use of their enhanced R&D efforts. This could only give them a very good position in the market and leave them room to explore other sapphire opportunities.

Of course while providing Apple with the material it needs for its existing products is a short-term plan, there is also a long-term plan in the making. According to the deal, the GT Advanced Technologies company will be delivering low-cost, high volume manufacturing of sapphire material that it will be doing with the help of a large-capacity furnace.

This particular pieces of news has got rumors growing and spreading fast, implying that Apple might want to use sapphire glass on its products, starting with the next iPhone it will be releasing.

The synthetic sapphire glass has got this name because of the fact that it is transparent, as opposed to being just glass, from a technical point of view. One of the major advantages of this material is that it is very hard and scratch resistance, unlike any other traditional glass. Just to give you an example of what we mean on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness sapphire has gotten a value of 9. This places the material just behind diamonds. This could basically single-handedly revolutionise the industry, as there would be very few broken iPhones and iPads, and that could mean a lot of savings done on repair costs.

But for the moment, sapphire is still very expensive to be produced, at least not in large quantities in the sizes it would require it to cover for a display screen. But given that Apple has chosen to make such a big investment in GT Advanced Technologies’ large-scale forges, it could only be a matter of time before we see sapphire display screen on our iPhone or iPad.