It is safe to say that many would-be iPhone customers were thrilled by the rumors earlier this year that the iPhone 6 could feature a sapphire display, but the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus’ announcement came by without the mention of sapphire at all, and it was only later that it was revealed that GT Advanced Technologies had filed for bankruptcy, highlighting some of the issues as to why sapphire did not make its way into the new iPhones as expected.
Now thanks to a new report from The Wall Street Journal (paywall; via 9to5Mac), additional details as to what went wrong have been revealed. According to the report, it seems that Apple’s original plan was to purchase the furnaces and get GTAT to manufacture the sapphire on their behalf, but Apple later changed their mind and asked GTAT to handle it entirely on their own, with Apple helping to finance the production with the expectation that they will be repaid later on.
It was also revealed that GTAT had hired a bunch of new employees to help with production, but former employees stated that there was a lack of oversight and leadership which led to over 100 of these new employees not knowing what they had to do. They were also authorized to receive overtime and there were no penalties for missing work, so safe to say that these are a lot of wages paid out to people who may or may not be working.
However one of the biggest issues that could have potentially caused GTAT’s downfall was the fact that they had no experience mass-producing sapphire crystal before, thus resulting in poor yields as you can see in the image above. These boules of sapphire faced massive defects and cracks, thus rendering them completely useless, and considering that each boule takes about a month and $20,000 to produce, we can only imagine all that time and money wasted.
In fact at one point, a GTAT manager had accidentally take 500 iPhone-sized sapphire bricks worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and threw them away, thinking they were defective. It was eventually recovered, thankfully, but it is obvious that it did not make a difference. GTAT and Apple have since reached an agreement regarding the company’s finances in which the furnaces used to produce the sapphire would be sold, a portion of which will be going back to Apple to repay their debt.
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