It’s winter, which means Apple is probably updating the iPhone soon, which means the iPhone 6 rumour merry-go-round is spinning up. We’ve heard that Apple might use sapphire for a tougher iPhone screen, but experiments with alleged Apple materials say that might not exactly be the case.
First up, that sapphire rumour. There’s plenty of evidence supporting the theory that Apple would use a sapphire crystal material for the iPhone 6’s screen. In fact, Apple already uses sapphire for the home button/fingerprint sensor on the current iPhone 5s. But as Marques Brownlee shows in this video, the alleged iPhone 6 screen he used for scratch testing turns out to be not quite as hard as pure sapphire.
The speculation is that, if this is indeed an actual Apple item and if it does indeed represent what we’ll see on production models, it’s some kind of sandwich material that packs nearly the strength of pure sapphire, while cutting down on weight and cost.
And then there’s the just plain outlandish strength tests. Lou from Unbox Therapy teamed up with Joe Rogan to put another alleged iPhone 6 screen to a test no smartphone should ever expect to survive: a bow and arrow. SPOILER ALERT: the arrow wins.
What do these two tests tell us? First, if these are indeed genuine Apple screens, it seems like the iPhone will end up with glass that’s impressively strong, just not made of pure sapphire, and definitely not robust enough to stand up to an archery accident. Second? The iPhone rumour mill is cruising along with a full head of steam.