According to one of our earlier reports, Apple had reportedly secured enough sapphire material from GT Advanced Technologies to make anywhere between 100-200 million sapphire display. Many had assumed that the sapphire displays would be used in Apple’s iPhone 6, but those rumors were later contradicted with another rumor that suggested that the sapphire displays might be used in Apple’s iWatch instead. Or will it? In an interview with the folks at GigaOm, Canonical’s CEO, Mark Shuttleworth, revealed that Apple had snapped up about 3 years worth of sapphire displays.
Shuttleworth was quoted as saying, “Apple just snapped up the entire three-year supply of the same sapphire display we wanted for the Edge,” and by Edge he is referring to the Ubuntu Edge smartphone that has since been scrapped due to the crowd funding project failing to meet Canonical’s goal of $32 million. It should be noted that the Edge would have used a 4.5-inch display, one of the iPhone 6’s rumored display sizes, suggesting that perhaps the sapphire material Apple had purchased was enough to make 4.5-inch displays.
However it should be noted that the aspect ratio is different from Apple’s 16:9 used in iPhones, not to mention we’re not sure if by three-year’s worth we are talking about inventory enough for Canonical, or enough for Apple. If it were the latter, chances are it would definitely be a fraction of what Apple probably demands. In any case what do you guys think? Are Shuttleworth’s comments a hint that Apple is planning on using sapphire for the iPhone 6, or are we reading too much into this?
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