Whatever happened to the sapphire screens for iPhone?
After all the 'will they/won't they' produce the iPhone with a sapphire screen, it has gone very quiet on this. Are there plans still to use sapphire at all?
iPhone 6, iOS 10.0.2, null
Apple never said anything about them, so you're asking about something that has never existed other than as rumors. And there is very good reason why you don't want synthetic sapphire display screens
1. Large, thin sheets of shapphire glass are very expensive to produce, much more so than high strength tempered glass. Their use would most certainly significantly increase the cost of devices.
2. while highly scratch resistant, they are also much more brittle, and have far less strength that the currently used high strength glass and would be very prone to shattering.
3. To be remotely practical on something as large as even an iPhone SE even, sapphire displays would need to be much thicker than existing glass screens for the reasons I mentioned above. So any phone using the material would be much thicker and heavier (sapphire glass is denser than tempered glass, so much heavier for the same area covered). You can note the thickness of sapphire watch lenses, which can be near 1cm for large wrist watches in order to be strong enough to survive knocks and dings, (and pressure for water resistance).
Synthetic sapphire really is a very poor choice of material for anything as large as a smart phone display. It works well for the rear camera lens because that is such a small surface to cover.
