Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “iPhone 6 Sapphire: Explained!”.
Hey what is up guys, mkbhd here and apparently a lot of people care about this iphone 6 sapphire crystal display. So in that video that i did about it, i went through a couple tests to measure the durability of the panel. I bent it a lot. I put it under my foot and pulled on it really hard.
I dragged my keys and my knife across it and then eventually stabbed it pretty hard, but i was never able to get it to scratch, but here’s the thing about scratch: tests with knives and keys, knives and keys. Aren’T that hard they’re i mean they’re, pretty sharp. Obviously, on the end, if i drag it across my own, skin it’ll hurt a lot, but when you compare it to sapphire, glass or really any glass for that matter, gorilla glass included metal is pretty soft. So let me introduce you to the mohs scale. It’S a scale from 1 to 10 rating mineral hardness, so, basically, how it works is at any rating a mineral can scratch anything below it, but cannot scratch anything above it so take quartz, for example, on that scale, it’s rated at a seven.
That means anything above a seven can be used to cut quartz, but anything below it won’t even make a mark so on the mohs scale. My steel knife blade that i use in that video is a 5.5 gorilla. Glass is already at a 6.8 and pure sapphire, which is a form of aluminum oxide, is the second hardest, naturally occurring material on earth. It’S at a 9.
so by those numbers, a steel knife blade, no matter how hard i try will never scratch. My phone’s display gorilla, glass or sapphire, so, let’s say goodbye to knifeblade scratch tests. This new test is pretty legit. Welcome to the era of sandpaper screen tests, because every smartphone on the market right now should survive the softer metals from your knife or keys. So i have two types of sandpaper here: the first one is garnet: it’s a bit softer it’s at about a seven on the mohs scale, which means it’s harder than gorilla glass but softer than pure sapphire, and the second is emery. It’S at about an eight.
A little higher than eight on the mohs scale, so it’ll really be able to show we’re working with here now, keep in mind, we already know exactly what we’re working with on the front of the iphone 5s. It’S gorilla glass, 3 on the front like in some other phones, but the home button that small little part is already sapphire apple chose that part, because it’s small not too expensive, and it can resist scratches better than gorilla glass to keep that touch. Id fingerprint stuff. Working even when the phone gets beat up so the new iphone 6 has this entire display made of a new material that we already know can bend really well, but sandpaper will show its true hardness.
So the first piece of garnet sandpaper take it to the gorilla glass of the iphone 5s. It immediately scratched a lot and that’s expected it’s a harder material. So this is exactly what should happen, picking the same material to the iphone 6 screen with the same force. It actually does scratch as well, but not quite as much. It does resist those scratches a little better and i also noticed it made a very different sound when scratching so we’re learning here that already this new display is definitely not pure sapphire, because it’s already getting scratched by a softer garnet. So, what’s interesting is check out the iphone 5s home button. It’S still flawless, not a single scratch. The garnet did not scratch the theoretically much closer to pure sapphire home button, which actually means the home button was damaging the garnet okay.
So, moving on to the emery, much harder sandpaper, taking it to the iphone 5s, no real surprise here, it basically destroys. It puts some really deep, scratches all over the panel pretty much instantaneously, so that gorilla glass is much softer, didn’t stand a chance, taking it to the iphone 6 display. Now we of course, still get scratching. It again made a different sound and it is much more limited, so this material is definitely harder. It holds up better to the much more tough emery sandpaper, but it’s definitely not indestructible or invincible and for good measure. I actually went back over the pure sapphire of the iphone 5s home button again, and it held up still really really well, so i’m impressed with the pure sapphire, of course it shouldn’t scratch because it’s harder than the sandpapers we used.
So what do we learned from all this testing? Two things number one: the iphone 6 display is harder than gorilla glass and will put up to scratching and bending a lot better than the iphone 5s display did and two the iphone 6 display is not pure sapphire. Like the touch id home button is, and that actually makes sense using a massive panel of pure sapphire for the front of a phone would be a little bit stupid. It would be first of all much more expensive and it also wouldn’t be able to bend like it did believe it or not. You actually kind of need your phone to be able to flex a little bit so pure sapphire is still best in smaller parts like the touch id cover over the home button and the glass over the back of the iphone 5s camera.
A little bit of research shows that apple’s actually already patented a fusion process where the sapphire structure may also be mechanically modified to help reduce the likelihood of chipping or fracturing, and the resulting sapphire laminate may achieve both superior hardness and strength. Due to the use of multiple planes, basically, it’s a composite involving sapphire to make it overall a lot stronger than the gorilla glass of the previous iphones or many other phones out there and it works as we saw and i’ll have the link to the exact pattern. Right below the like button, if you want to check that out, but basically as long as you’re, not carrying some high quality sandpaper in your pocket, you should be good without a screen protector on the next iphone, which is really comforting for a lot of people to Hear and i’m sure apple will talk a lot. I would expect a lot of talk from apple at their next keynote about how strong and indestructible this material is well, not really indestructible. You .