Inside Apple’s Broken Sapphire Factory
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
1) GT was a solar furnace maker that first offered to sell Apple 2300 furnaces so that Apple could produce sapphire screens for the iPhone 6.
2) Then Apple decided to lend GT $500 million and have GT own the furnaces and produce the sapphire (although it had no experience in producing high quality, production volume sapphire) for Apple.
3) GT became a captive supplier to Apple and had exclusivity arrangements - so it couldn't diversify its business.
4) GT hit production problems with almost 50 percent of the boules of sapphire being cracked and unusable.
5) GT had operational issues, where people were paid to just sweep the floor over and over.
6) GT eventually filed for Chapter 11 - surprising Apple.
7) The iphone 6 didn't have sapphire screens.
I don't know if it is the same but in the semi-conductor business the reactor/furnace used to make the silicon boule had an oversized influence on the yield of the wafers produced. That lead to some folks timing their wafer starts to coincide with a specific lot of wafers.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/10/shattered_apples_jil... (interesting info on Sniper weapons pod use of sapphire in comments).
http://www.macrumors.com/2014/11/19/gt-advanced-sapphire-fai... (references the WSJ article)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/19/us-gtadvanced-bank...
Always works for me.
Not all paywalls are equally problematic, and most of this content is not truly inaccessible. There are standard workarounds that everybody already knows or can easily learn. It's not as if HN users are shy about pointing them out.
The status quo isn't great, but the brokenness of online content models is not something we can just fix by decree in our little corner of the web.