It has been said that Apple has started to ship sapphire materials which are heading to a production facility in China.
“GT shipped some small quantities of sapphire made in its Arizona fab to one of Apple’s partners in China who is in charge of making sapphire covers,” Stephen Chin of UBS Securities said recently in a research note.
The GT he is referring to of course is GT Advanced Technologies. This is the company who was contracted by Apple last year to supply sapphire large scale, which was said to be for the iOS devices of Apple.
From March this year Apple started to deliver sapphire materials to a manufacturing partner in China, with the first batch coming in at around $1 million.
GT have been ramping up the production capabilities of the sapphire production and said they would have 1500 furnaces in full operation shortly.
“Apple’s partner in China will be receiving about $50 million in sapphire materials every month once the Arizona facility is fully operational” said an insider.
The report had confirmed mass entry of sapphire into the supply chain of Apples iOS devices, but what role the materials will play is unknown at the moment.
Tim Cook said that the sapphire deal was part of a project that was secret.
Apple fans believe that the Sapphire coating is going to take over from Corning Gorilla Glass for the glass cover on the display of the iPhones. Experts have said that this would make the device lighter, thinner and it would be scratch free.
It has also been said that iOS 8 will be revealed, however it is thought that not all the feature upgrades will make the final cut in time.
Perhaps some features would arrive with the iOS 8.1 update, which could happen later this year.
It seems that Apple is putting more focus on developing the Mac OS X 10.10 and this is the reason behind the delay for iOS 8.
So it is looking as though we could see the iPhone 6 arrive this year and it may have a sapphire coated display of 4.7 inches and be running iOS 8.
