In case you missed the news, that fancy Touch ID buttons with fingerprint reader is made out of sapphire glass which costs much more than the regular glass the older iPhones have. According to DigiTimes, Apple won’t stop here as it plans to adopt a similar button for its line of tablets, 9.7-inch iPad and 7.9-inch iPad mini, which are expected to be launched in October.
The Cupertino-based company originally adopted sapphire to make covers of iPhone 5 cameras, but now it’s looking to expand the use of this fancy material. Yup, we could see sapphire glass-based touchscreens on the iPhone 6, and perhaps the 2014 iPads.
DigiTimes says that its sources caught Apple’s patent at the USPTO concerning high-temperature lamination of sapphire layers, hinting us about Apple’s plans. The tech giant is going beyond “plain” specs wars and is looking to add an extra dose of quality to its products, to differentiate its screen from an array of Gorilla Glass protected displays.
Sapphire ingots add an extra cost to the equation costing as much as five times those for iPhone covers made from other materials but that shouldn’t be a problem for a high-margin iPhone maker which has a lot of room to experiment with these sort of things. We’re just not sure users will care about this kind of details. What do you think?