“During a Town Hall Hangout Wednesday, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth made comments about sapphire displays that the company was planning for its own Ubuntu Edge smartphone — a concept announced by Canonical in July of 2013,” Brooke Crothers reports for CNET. “‘Apple just snapped up three year’s worth of the supply of sapphire screens from the company that we had engaged to make the screens for the Edge,’ he said.”
“Which brings us to the rumored next-gen Apple device, possibly the iPhone 6. That too may use a sapphire display, not unlike the sapphire crystal Apple already uses for the cover glass on the iPhone 5S’ rear camera and Touch ID fingerprint scanner,” Crothers reports. “In November of 2013, Apple signed a deal with GT Advanced Technology, a sapphire manufacturer. That plant, a ‘new state-of-the-art sapphire material manufacturing facility’ in Mesa, Arizona is being readied for production of the rumored 5-inch class display for a future iPhone.”
Read more in the full article here.
“Sidestepping the fact that crowdfunding for the ‘superphone’ had failed dismally, Shuttleworth used an online discussion to moan about Apple’s new sapphire fetish,” Jasper Hamill writes for The Register. “‘Isn’t it interesting that how many of the things we said the future needed to include are showing up on other people’s roadmaps?” he asked. “Apple has also started describing their latest-generation mobile CPUs as desktop-class. That’s another thing we said we needed to have in the Edge, a desktop-class CPU. And we’re starting to see the roadmaps for the devices from Samsung and others that have the same amount of RAM we were proposing to put in the Edge.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: A three-year supply of screens for a proposed Ubuntu phone? Even if it were to get funded (which it isn’t), what’s that, about 11 screens total?
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