I guess you guys never win at the game of Clue? If you wish to be literal, there is no mgfr website that says they make any front glass for the iPhone. So I guess that means there is no glass there?
But there is plenty of non-website information out there, from the sources themselves. -ViewFly
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Here are some excerpts the recent NYtimes story about Foxconn in China and manufacturing over there: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html?hpw
In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into an office. For weeks, he had been carrying a prototype of the device in his pocket.
Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.
People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”
After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen, China. If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go.
The impact of such advantages became obvious as soon as Mr. Jobs demanded glass screens in 2007.
For years, cellphone makers had avoided using glass because it required precision in cutting and grinding that was extremely difficult to achieve. Apple had already selected an American company, Corning Inc., to manufacture large panes of strengthened glass. But figuring out how to cut those panes into millions of iPhone screens required finding an empty cutting plant, hundreds of pieces of glass to use in experiments and an army of midlevel engineers. It would cost a fortune simply to prepare.
Then a bid for the work arrived from a Chinese factory.
When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.
Manufacturing glass for the iPhone revived a Corning factory in Kentucky, and today, much of the glass in iPhones is still made there. After the iPhone became a success, Corning received a flood of orders from other companies hoping to imitate Apple’s designs. Its strengthened glass sales have grown to more than $700 million a year, and it has hired or continued employing about 1,000 Americans to support the emerging market.
But as that market has expanded, the bulk of Corning’s strengthened glass manufacturing has occurred at plants in Japan and Taiwan.
“Our customers are in Taiwan, Korea, Japan and China,” said James B. Flaws, Corning’s vice chairman and chief financial officer. “We could make the glass here, and then ship it by boat, but that takes 35 days. Or, we could ship it by air, but that’s 10 times as expensive. So we build our glass factories next door to assembly factories, and those are overseas.”
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Okay, so this is the story people have come up with:
Steve Jobs meets with Corning CEO Winks and convinces them to restart a plant to revive a 20 year old strengthened Corning glass (whose patents have expired, 20 years later) that Corning found no market for.
Corning says, but wait, we have plenty of glass now, why do you want a 20 year old product? We even have this new glass....Steve interrupts, and Jobs jumps up and down and says, NO, I want the old stuff and I will buy every piece of it you make. Corning shrugs its shoulders, sighs, and says, 'you're paying for it' , so Okay.
The iPhone is a success, with the first successful real glass screen- scratch resistant, even though it was actually made for it's bending/breaking strength.
Everyone inside the industry hears about what Apple and Corning did. Apple helps Corning start a new $700M business line...Corning is very appreciative.
After fooling around with plastic screens, other smartphone mgfr race to Corning for the same glass. Corning says to them...hold on...don't you know that we have this really wonderful new glass that Apple refused to use, called Gorilla Glass? Do you really want that old stuff.
Apple competitors bang their collective hands to their head: 'Holy cow, we finally outsmarted Apple' Man this is great, we got the better stuff. How could they have overlooked this. Corning says, yeah, screw Apple.
So to this day, Apple is using the crappy 20 year old stuff, and the competitors are using the brand new Gorilla Glass (err, rebranded, but the same 20 year old stuff).
So I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell to you...never mind what you hear...I DO actually have a signed deed right here....