What Corning's Curved Glass May Mean for Apple
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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. 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. 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.
Gorilla Glass was instrumental in the development of the original iPhone. In the months leading up to the launch of the original iPhone, Steve Jobs reached out to glassmaker Corning and asked the company to start producing a super-hard glass for the device.
Originally developed in 1960s for fighter-jet cockpits, Corning's "Gorilla Glass" allowed Apple to ditch its original plan to cover the iPhone in Plexiglass. Can it now do the same for an iWatch and a curved iPhone?
A new generation of mobile gadgets with curved displays would likely require a new type of glass strong enough but light enough to handle life's daily wear-and-tear, while meeting the mass production needs that a new Apple product could spur.
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. It allows Corning to produce glass than can bend 75 or 80 degrees and mold glass into "dramatic shapes," Forester said.
That would be a leap over offerings from Samsung and LG, which recently introduced smartphones with slightly curved displays.
Eventually, Forester said glass may replace the plastic or metal bezels that encase a device and replace mechanical buttons with touch-screen alternatives displayed on the side of a device.
"It opens up a whole new way of how you interact with the device," said Forester. "This is another building block, another tool in the tool kit that will unlock a new set of designs."
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.
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