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Why the IPhone 6 Doesn’t Have a Sapphire Screen

Over the last six months, we’ve seen plenty of rumors batted around back and forth between various sources claiming that Apple would debut the iPhone 6 with a sapphire screen. There was also another camp that claimed such a display was years in the future if it ever happened at all. The “nays” obviously won the day in this case, and with Apple’s sapphire partner — GT Advanced Technologies — now in bankruptcy, it’s not clear what will happen to the company’s supply of sapphire screens for its Touch ID fingerprint scanners, much less any hope of adopting the tech for other purposes.

Now, Raymond Soneira of DisplayMate has dumped more fuel on the fire by arguing that not only is sapphire years away, but even if it was available you wouldn’t want to use it.

Why not? Screen reflectance. According to Soneira, sapphire screens are intrinsically more difficult to read in bright light and tend to suffer from much higher total reflectance. According to DisplayMate, the 8% reflectance rate on sapphire screens is nearly twice that of glass, and more than 3x higher than the excellent 2.5% reflectance of the iPad Air 2’s display. Why does this matter to average users? To answer that, let’s look at an example of one area where the difference between screen reflectance is well understood — conventional desktop monitors.

The excellent PCMonitors.info site has a side-by-side comparison of two monitor types, a matte desktop and a glossy laptop display. While matte and glossy don’t have much direct relevance when applied to tablet or smartphone displays, glossy panels have far higher reflectance than their matte counterparts, and the difference is particularly visible in this shot.

If you’ve used a PC laptop or gone shopping for a display, you’ve seen manufacturers pushing these panels — bright, vibrant, eye-popping, and nearly useless in the summer. No monitor holds up particularly well compared to sunlight, but glossy panels fare remarkably poorly. Soneira’s argument is that sapphire, with its base 8% reflectance, will suffer a similar problem. Research from SeekingAlpha, conducted independently, supports this assertion with a claimed reflective rate of 7.58%.

So we’ve established that sapphire glass is more reflective than standard glass. Question is, do people care? Laptops with glossy screens sold millions of units, after all, despite driving those of us who preferred matte screens to the brink of insanity. Do people actually care about or notice the increased reflectiveness of sapphire?

The answer, so far, appears to be no. There’s one phone that’s actually shipped out with a sapphire screen — the Kyocera Brigadier, available for $50 on a Verizon contract. While I haven’t personally ever put hands on the device, it’s been reviewed at multiple sites across the Internet, including PC Magazine and Phone Arena. According to Phone Arena’s review, the maximum brightness on the Kyocera Brigadier is a whopping 610 nits. There can be variations in how various websites measure brightness, but DisplayMate rates the various iPads at between 394 and 449 nits.

Now read: iPhone 6 vs. iPhone 6 Plus vs. HTC One M8: Which one should you buy?

This suggests that Kyocera was aware that the Brigadier might reflect more ambient light than other types of displays and chose to increase the backlight brightness to partly overcome the problem. We say “partly” because simply driving more light out of the phone won’t solve the entire problem (and could actually make the text harder to read from some angles) — but could compensate for some ambient light conditions, just as turning up the brightness on a glossy monitor can help crowd out background reflection (again, to a certain degree).

If increased reflectiveness was a problem with the Kyocera Brigadier, not one reviewer noticed it — but the reviewers in question all focused on the question of sapphire’s durability and were suitably impressed when they failed to scratch the display. The truth is, reviewers are humans, too — handed a device that excels in one particular area, it’s easy to overlook painstaking comparisons in every other kind of lighting environment, especially if the phone’s increased brightness helps compensate for the problem.

Will we ever see sapphire in mainstream devices?

With Apple’s primary sapphire partner, GT Advanced Technologies, now moving into bankruptcy and looking to shut down its new facility, the future of this technology is much more uncertain than it seemed a few months ago. Sapphire will likely always have a market in devices that put unbreakable display quality ahead of all other considerations — such as the face of a watch, or the cover glass for a camera — but it’s not clear that the cost, complexity, and potentially decreased battery life from brighter displays will make it a winner in the consumer space.




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