Apple be utilising sapphire glass

Could apple  be utilising sapphire glass for a solar-charging iPhone 6 screen?


There’s been a allotment of talk about sapphire glass since apple  CEO Tim prepare food sat down for an interview with ABC report last week. But apart from affirming that a new constructing vegetation the company bought in Mesa, Arizona last year will be used to make sapphire glass, no other minutia were revealed. Seeking Alpha analyst Matt Margolis has a attractive intriguing idea, though: He conceives Apple might be inscribing solar panels inside sapphire glass partitions for the next iPhone.

When you look at a lot of latest report about the business, this concept really makes a good deal of sense. For starters, Apple has filed solar patents that will permit the company to power devices through solar units. The company furthermore hired a thin films technician to “assist in the development and refinement of thin films technologies applicable to electrical devices systems.”
Apple  then signed a $578 million contract with GT sophisticated Technologies, which was just confirmed to be for sapphire glass in the aforementioned ABC News interview. The business furthermore broadcast plans to spend $10.5 billion in 2014, on new output expertise encompassing robots and lasers. The company furthermore posted job listings for constructing design engineers, with quotations to solar cells and lasers in the job description. And it was just described that Apple constructing partner Foxconn lately assembled at least 100 prototype units of the next iPhone with sapphire exhibitions.

Apple’s solar farm next to its data center in Maiden, North Carolina

In supplement to all of this, Margolis notes that sapphire constructor GT has been able to considerably decrease the cost of sapphire glass, from $13-18 to just $3-5 per computer display. That makes it a financially viable alternative to Corning’s Gorilla Glass, which charges $3 per screen.

Of course, no one of this is a sure wager that apple fruit is really designing to make a move towards sapphire partitions or solar ascribing, but the pieces of the puzzle do fit together pretty well. The business is no stranger to the advantages of solar energy, with two solar farms and one fuel cell ranch beside its facts and figures center in North Carolina. And solar ascribing would be a gigantic step ahead for mobile apparatus, which only consume more and more electric electric battery life as they become larger and more powerful. Then afresh, a solar section the dimensions of a teleteletelephone screen wouldn’t generate all that much power, and I’m not sure apple fruit would proceed down this route unless it supplied a discernable benefit.