How will the rumoured iWatch face hold up if I'm wearing it during sports and it takes a knock?
The following sums it up exactly right...
Yes, as they have a ton of metal around them, the Glass is often below the surface of the surround, it's a far far smaller piece of glass, and the glass it probably a lot thicker than the thinness of a phone screen.
A big rectangle of sapphire in a "thinnest" possible case gives up the "ton of metal around them", "smaller" and being "a lot thicker" in a phone. I have a watch with a Sapphire screen and it measures less than 1.5" across. That's a big hop from 1.5" to 4.7" and 5.5".
Apple has patents on tempering sapphire, chemically and with lasers, which would make it much more impact resistant and less brittle. They are testing with regular sapphire. That would be a fair test if they compared it with regular glass instead of GG.
Oh brother.
But we'll all hope this is true. I've never heard of any kind of Sapphire treatment that makes it substantially less brittle. The very thing about it that makes it harder to scratch than GG is what makes it more brittle in an impact. If Apple switched to Diamond, it would be even more scratch resistant and even more brittle on impact.
I'm willing to bet that if Apple is investing over $500M in GT Advanced for sapphire, they have a plan to make it durable enough to survive a 3-foot drop. It doesn't matter how scratch resistant your screen is if it's shattered lol.
Or, Apple sees how much profit is being made by third parties selling generic replacement screens and realizes that selling parts only available from Apple can be a lucrative way to grow profit per unit sold. Personally, I suspect Sapphire is much more about this than anything else but will be happy to be proven wrong if Apple's "tempering", "chemically" and "lasers" have yielded some kind of previously unknown breakthrough that brings more impact resistance (than GG).
What I do know: we're going to be shocked at the increase in screen replacement costs for cracked screens… unless- maybe- the third party market can offer replacements made of GG.
iPhone 4S: 3 years without cover, 0 scratches on the screen.
Exactly. And I don't think that's even remotely unusual. Sure there will be a few who have suffered a scratch but I suspect the vast majority have not. If true, this is a relatively expensive solution in search of a tangible problem.
It doesn't even have the usual punch of impressing our friends as all they'll see is one transparent rectangle in place of another. To demonstrate scratch resistance, you endanger your expensive new iPhone in each demo, so this will really have to be a lip service benefit, meaning something to verbally tout at best. They won't be able to
see any difference.