Re:Inside Apple’s Broken Sapphire Factory
by softdev12 on Wednesday November 19, 2014 @07:29PM
(#8633698)
This is really incredible. To summarize for people who don't have access:
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.
Re:Inside Apple’s Broken Sapphire Factory
by ChuckMcM on Wednesday November 19, 2014 @07:51PM
(#8633776)
Actually they said "more than half" were unacceptable, but still your summary is basically an accurate one of the article.
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.
Re:Inside Apple’s Broken Sapphire Factory
by mcphage on Wednesday November 19, 2014 @08:56PM
(#8633977)
I assume this article is Apple telling their version of what happened. Honestly, though, it's kinda what I expected—GT agreed to produce iPhone screens for Apple, which they were unable to do effectively enough.
Re:Inside Apple’s Broken Sapphire Factory
by jmcguckin on Wednesday November 19, 2014 @08:24PM
(#8633879)
Typically, news sites with a paywall (e.g. WSJ) will give you access if the referrer is from Google. I simply google the headline and follow the link back to the story and am granted access.
Re:Inside Apple’s Broken Sapphire Factory
by dang on Wednesday November 19, 2014 @09:24PM
(#8634076)
It's not that simple. HN prefers accessible stories, but it also prefers original sources and demands substantive ones, and many of those are behind paywalls. Are we to ban the NYT, Economist, and New Yorker? That would be chopping off a foot to spite a hangnail.
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.
Re:Inside Apple’s Broken Sapphire Factory
by melling on Wednesday November 19, 2014 @09:21PM
(#8634060)
Why not? Plenty of people here can read it so there can be a discussion, which should convey most of the information that's in the article. In the end, everyone reading HN benefits.
Re:Inside Apple’s Broken Sapphire Factory
by fallinghawks on Wednesday November 19, 2014 @10:11PM
(#8634239)
It's odd. I googled the article, got a link at theaustralian.com, went there, no paywall. But then copying and pasting the resulting link, it goes to the paywall.
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.