What Corning’s curved glass may mean for Apple

12 years ago

“Predicting what Apple has up its sleeves is a cottage industry on the Internet and sometimes the best clues comes from the company’s suppliers,” Daisuke Wakabayashi reports for The Wall Street Journal. “Corning just supplied one.”

“An iWatch and a curved iPhone with a bigger display are among the most-mentioned possible products for Apple’s pipeline this year,” Wakabayashi reports. “Both are expected to require a curved display, a feature currently missing from Apple’s existing line-up. That’s why it’s noteworthy that Corning, a key supplier of Apple and many other smartphone and tablet manufacturers, has announced that it plans to start mass-producing a curved version of its scratch- and crack-resistant Gorilla Glass in 2014.”

“Scott Forester, Corning’s product manager for 3D-Shaped Gorilla Glass, said its new production technique allows the curved glass to be manufactured more efficiently and cheaply,” Wakabayashi reports. “He declined to comment on whether Apple would be a customer for the new glass. But he said that many manufacturers have been asking for the technology for years as something that could enable new form-factors for mobile devices. Corning’s announcement comes a few months after Apple announced plans to build a new component manufacturing plant in Arizona producing sapphire. Sapphire is gaining popularity in portable devices because it is transparent and more scratch-resistant than glass. A patent filing from Apple earlier this year indicated that sapphire could be used to create scratch-resistant displays.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Leave the run-of-the-mill, inferior materials to the also-rans.

We want our superior Apple devices to be constructed of virtually indestructible synthetic sapphire and Liquidmetal (exclusively Apple’s in perpetuity)!