“Glass as thin and as flexible as a sheet of paper that can be printed on rolls just like a newspaper will be available to phone makers as soon as this month, said Dipak Chowdhury, head of Corning’s ultra-flexible thin-glass project Willow,” Jeremy A. Kaplan reports for Fox News. “‘It’s seriously built like paper,’ Chowdhury told FoxNews.com, ‘and behaves just like that.'”
“Ordinary displays in notebooks or smartphones are made of glass sandwiches, usually three sheets of the stuff measuring a bare 0.7 or 0.5 millimeters in thickness. At 0.1 millimeters thin, Corning’s brand new Willow glass is as thin as the finest human hair — and will makes those smartphone sandwiches as much as 7 times thinner,” Kaplan reports. “Glass isn’t inherently a rigid substance, Chowdhury explained. When it gets superthin, it becomes flexible just like any substance.”
Kaplan reports, “Willow Glass won’t immediately lead to roll-up iPhones, Poor was quick to note. The entire display industry is built for inflexible sheets of glass, made in massive, astronomically expensive plants. ‘It costs billions of dollars to build an LCD plant these days,’ Poor said.”
MacDailyNews Take: Gee, who has billions of dollars, an insatiable lust for cutting-edge technology, and a masochistic dependency on Samsung that needed to be smashed the smithereens years ago?
Kaplan reports, “Display giant Dai Nippon Printing Co (DNP) will demonstrate touch sensors and color filters — two essential components for modern smartphones — printed onto Willow Glass, Chowdhury said.”
Read more in the full article here.
Guess Balmer meant to announce Virtual SmartGlass then
Doesn’t matter. They’ll build the plants in China.
and what’s wrong with that?
China: Criminal Nation.
Every buck we send to China enables them to become the dominant totalitarian military power in Asia. Have fun with that. 😛
+100 CORRECT
Apple buys Gorilla glass that is made in Kentucky USA not from overseas. So it is very, very possible that Apple will buy Willow Glass from a plant in the USA as well. Shipping cost from China would probably be more expense then the product itself. Just a thought.
Since many Apple products are assembled in China, the cost of shipping from China to the US is not an issue. Apple has been able get very large margins on iPhones and iPads while shipping Gorilla glass from the US to China for assembly.
Not very possible at all:
1) the radius of how much this glass bends does not allow it to be used for those futuristic devices like half-inch thick sticks from where screens could be unrolled;
2) and even if there was a glass as flexible as needed (which is not the case yet), then still the battery and chips are not flexible unless they are super-low charge and superslow speeds.
As Jobs said, truly flexible mobile devices are not on the horizon.
What you know about Corning would fit into the period at the end of this sentence. Do you go on the Internet? It is likely that the fiber optics that you are surfing through was done on a cable made in North Carolina by GLW. Do you watch a large screen
TV? It is likely that that screen was made by a process Invented by Corning. (fusion draw). The glass in your iPhone was likely made in Harrodsburg, Kentucky. By the way all of this stuff was invented in a tiny upstate NY city by a group of brilliant people.
Corning, New York! Corning have actually been excellent at keeping their tech AND their manufacturing inside the USA. There’s nothing wrong with that! 😀
Wow! Really Cool!
Music.. “With isenglass curtains you can roll right down, in case there’s a change in the weather” …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mica#Isinglass
“Willow Glass won’t immediately lead to roll-up iPhones,” Poor was quick to note.
So Corning isn’t also working on a roll-up circuit board and chassis for the iPhone?
Apple Gorilla Glass is made in Kentucky USA. So Apple could buy Willow Glass that is made in the USA as well. So no overseas production. Shipping from China could possibly be more expense then just buying locally produced glass. Just a thought.
Nelson, with the glass made in America, shipped to the assembly point in China and then shipped back to America as part of an iPhone or iPad, shipping costs must be high.
Since the glass would be shipped both ways in a cargo jet to do that just in time manufacturing thing, shipping costs would be astronomical.
I think you’ll find that Gorilla glass must be made close to the Chinese assembly plant by a contractor working for Corning.
Ok, now we can have that 55 inch Apple HDTV 4K units that hang on the wall from a push-pin.
Loving it.
Fascinating. Great idea.
How about 70 inch curved screens
hanging by threads from the ceiling?
Anybody notice that the video was produced in 2011?
This is old news.
OFC its old news. Samsung has produced a few curved prototype phones and displayed them already.
@Wise…That the cowards that run MDN want to hide behind anonymity, shove countless intrusive ads at you, and offer their snarky opinions is not new. We all know that. Many people like it. What’s more disturbing is that it’s all driven by political agenda that emerges frequently in the form of links to Rush Limbaugh and other conservative voices. It’s sickening…not for what they believe. Who cares? But for the fact that they hold up truth and beauty, intelligence and human compassion in support of Apple (justifiable) in a pastiche of right wing nonsense and confusion about what really matters. There’s a mind behind MDN that is in serious need of mental health counseling. Just read a few of his “takes” that are rushed out, often misspelled, or missing words, and you’ll see he’s anything but a professional journalist. He’s an opportunist (nothing wrong with that per se)..but ultimately he’s a cowardly, rather sniveling, personality. Pathetic.
WTF! If you don’t like it why the hell are you visiting the site let alone posting here?
Speaking of people in need of councelling, eisenstaedt (which I believe is the correct spelling…).
I believe he stated once that “fundementalism is not a traditional but a modern problem.”
There’s more than a few on here should take notice of that and think on it.
“There’s a mind behind MDN that is in serious need of mental health counseling.”
Typical left wing argument method. Anyone that doesn’t share a leftist point of view MUST be mentally deranged, and thus ignored and marginalized.
PS- I think the man behind MacDailyNews is Ben Horowitz, who is partnered with Marc Andreesen. Don’t ask me why.
When I look at what the girl is holding, it looks like partially opaque plastic. Not clear like I would expect glass to be. Wonder if it was the real deal or a fake to be used as an example to the unwashed masses?
I work there, it is glass. Amazing stuff, you have no idea the far out things that are being tried.
If you took a look at the old windows in an old, old house, you would find that the thickness at the bottom of a large pane of glass is measurably thicker than the thickness at the top of the pane.
Even though glass is many orders of magnitude slower than molasses, vertical glass actually flows downwards over the decades.
This is not true. Glass does not flow. There have been several scientific studies that have disproved this.
Very old glass on old buildings was made using different processes than modern glass. This made for panes of glass that had varying thickness. Typically windows made from such glass were composed of many smaller panes of glass. Glaziers would put pieces of glass into windows with the thicker edges oriented downwards, since that would make the class more stable.
Thank you. Non molten glass is solid it doesn’t flow over time.
Buster
You saw a “girl” in the video? You were either looking at a different video than I saw or you have a pea sized brain!
The problem is not the flexibility of glass. The problem is the flexibility in the LCD behind the glass, or more correctly, the lack of flexibility in LCDs (they must be perfectly flat). And the need for a backlighting system behind the LCD. Every current Apple product with a built-in display uses an LCD.
Therefore, before there are “roll-up” iPhones and iPads, the more important transition is Apple using a completely different image projection system that matches the quality of current LCD “retina” displays.
Maybe Apple should use its cash hoard and buy Corning? Its market cap is less than $20 billion. That’s what — two months earnings for Apple? Pocket change. Keep the cutting edge stuff strictly proprietary. Let Samsung pay for their own research…
While it can make the iPhone thinner, it really can’t make it more flexible except to help avoid breakage during drops, etc. The remainder of the iPhone’s components are not flexible, and since most of the iPhone is a battery (even moreso with the iPad), it would make it difficult to have a bendable iPhone.
> At 0.1 millimeters thin, Corning’s brand new Willow glass is as thin as the finest human hair <
Not true: The average thickness of a human hair is about 0.10 mm; "finest" human hair is ca 0.02 mm diameter. Fine grade wool fibre is < 0.017 mm.
BTW: the point of being 5- to 7-fold thinner isn’t so much in the thickness of the product as in its mass: a roughly calculated one third or 40 grams lighter, at 100 grams the new iPhone would weigh about as much as a typical dumb phone.
Can’t believe no one has mentioned the new flexible AMOLED technology Samsung had been hyping in South Korea and hinting about a big buyer later this year.
MacDailyNews Take: Gee, who has billions of dollars, an insatiable lust for cutting-edge technology, and a masochistic dependency on Samsung that needed to be smashed the smithereens years ago?
Can’t wait th hear the answer to this question! Give us a hint.