Late last year, Apple announced it was building a 700-employee manufacturing facility in partnership with GT Advanced, a New Hampshire-based materials manufacturing company that specializes in sapphire production. According to a new report, GT Advanced has installed more than 2,500 sapphire furnaces in the factory for Apple's exclusive use.
The facility is expected to make sapphire boules -- essentially giant chunks of sapphire -- that weigh between 200 and 235 kilograms, with each of those creating sapphire for many, many devices. The entire facility may be able to produce as many as 200 million sapphire panels annually. For comparison, Apple sold 150 million iPhones in fiscal 2013 and is on track to sell millions more than that in fiscal 2014.
Synthetic sapphire, chemically identical to the geologic stone, is generally called "sapphire glass," though the material isn't strictly glass, because it's not amorphous. Instead, it's extremely transparent to wavelengths of light that the human eye can see, and -- more importantly for a smartphone display -- it's extraordinarily scratch-resistant.
This substance has been used for years as a high-end watch crystal, in grocery store barcode scanners, and (more recently) as a protective cover for the iPhone 5s's Touch ID-equipped home button and to cover the iPhone's rear camera lens
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