MacPro

Jobs was focused on finding a practical, durable solution for the iPhone, so he looked to Corning, whose glass products were already known for their innovation and quality. Corning’s Gorilla Glass, with its superior strength-to-cost ratio, was a much more feasible choice. Even now, synthetic sapphire is far costlier and more challenging to produce in large, thin sheets than Gorilla Glass. So, in the early 2000s, it would have been even more impractical as a display material.

Sapphire glass only began gaining interest in the smartphone industry years after the iPhone launched, as companies started to push for more scratch-resistant surfaces and explored new materials, spurred by Apple’s later interest around 2012. But back in 2006, Jobs’s decision to partner with Corning was a pragmatic one; Gorilla Glass was simply the most viable material available for a high-quality, resilient smartphone screen.

Apple currently uses sapphire glass in a few key areas across its products:

Camera Lenses: Sapphire glass is used to cover the rear camera lenses on iPhones and iPads. Its scratch-resistant properties help protect the lenses from damage, ensuring clear, high-quality photos over the device’s lifespan.

Apple Watch: Sapphire glass is standard on higher-end models of the Apple Watch, such as the Apple Watch Ultra and some stainless steel models. For these models, scratch resistance is especially important, given the device's exposure to daily wear on wrists and, often, during physical activities.

Touch ID Sensors: Sapphire glass has been used on Touch ID sensors in devices like the iPhone and iPad, as it provides durability and scratch resistance for frequent finger contact.

Apple Watch's Heart Rate Sensor: In some Apple Watch models, sapphire is used to cover the heart rate sensor on the back of the watch.

Sapphire glass works well in these areas where components are relatively small, and the primary concern is scratch resistance, not impact resistance. For larger screens, like the iPhone’s main display, Gorilla Glass remains the more practical choice due to its impact durability and cost-effectiveness in large, thin sheets.

So, Apple didn't waste its money on sapphire glass and it didn't fail, it just wasn't the success that those who hyped the stock had hoped for after rumors of iPhone screens using it.  If I recall Apple never confirmed those rumors, it was a GT Advanced Technologies that did all the talking.

about 4 years.  It's always fun to make lots of assumptions and project into the future. In doing so I imagine in say 40 years what seemingly AI miracles could be accomplished with the machine in your hand being 1000 times as powerful 

Same here.  However, I bet your 1000-times increase is way short of the mark in terms of performance gain.

This sort of abstraction is based on a fallacy that future progress will follow the same pattern as past progress.  Moore's "Law" broke down because that no longer holds.  Until about the mid-2000s, we were rapidly and steadily taking advantage of the relatively easy scaling offered by the available EM spectrum for exposing masks.  Since that time the rate of improvement has gotten slower, much harder, and much more expensive because we've reached extreme frequencies which are hard to use, we've hit the power leakage problem at tiny feature sizes, and so many more issues.  Each process node improvement is a slow, expensive victory with ever more diminishing returns.  For a lot of kinds of chips its not worth the cost of going to a smaller process, and that means there is less demand to drive shrinking to the next node.  So it is not justified to look at the progress over M1 thru M4 and extrapolate linearly.  We aren't at the end of the road, but getting to each successive process node is less appealing. 

scratched too easily, and he wanted a product that would feel and look high-quality, something that would age well. So he reached out to Corning Inc., a company known for its expertise in glass manufacturing.

Jobs met with Corning’s then-CEO, Wendell Weeks, and told him that he needed a tough, scratch-resistant glass. Weeks told Jobs about a glass formula Corning had invented in the 1960s called “Gorilla Glass.” Though it was incredibly strong, it hadn’t been commercialized because they hadn’t found a market for it back then.

Jobs was determined to make Gorilla Glass a reality for the iPhone. According to the story, Weeks initially thought it would be impossible to produce enough of this glass in time for Apple’s planned iPhone launch. But Jobs, with his famously persuasive style, told him, “Don’t be afraid. You can do it.”

Corning quickly ramped up production, reactivating the Gorilla Glass formula and scaling it to meet Apple’s demand. By the time the first iPhone launched in 2007, Gorilla Glass was ready, and it went on to become a foundational material in smartphone design, not just for Apple but eventually for much of the mobile industry.

Pema said:

Verstager is total moron. There is ZERO chance of Apple ever releasing its propriety OS for either the iPhone or iPad to 3rd party vendors. 

I would agree, but that's not what's being asked of them. As I'm reading it, Apple/Google will have to allow 3rd party vendors to call on/use/access the hardware on an iPhone or Android phone, to facilitate connections.  This is not about installing iOS on some third-party product. 

Finally someone who actually read the article and doesn’t respond with the default American “EU sucks! I love Apple like my mommy” reaction.

What the EU is asking is not to turn iOS into Linux.

What is happening right now will eventually happen in the US as well; allowing third party stores, allowing users to truly choose between vendors of services (e.g same access to APIs by iCloud, Dropbox, etc). It’s to allow for competition.

Don’t forget: Apple doesn’t operate in the market. They ARE the market now.