Supply chained: Apple's sapphire production will be hard to copy

Though abundant in nature and everyday items like soda cans, aluminum didn’t figure prominently in modern electronics until just a few years ago. Then Steve Jobs discovered an appreciation for the metal, the unibody MacBook was born, and a chain reaction was set off that finds us now able to buy precision-milled aluminum hard drives, batteries, and even cameras. How did all this come to be? And is Apple about to repeat the feat with its latest investment in manufacturing, this time focused on sapphire glass?

"Aluminum is now cheaper and easier to implement thanks to Apple itself," says noted analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities. His assessment, shared by many others, is that Apple’s demand drove "related suppliers of aluminum casing to invest more on capacity and technology." They were all competing for the lucrative prize of satisfying the MacBook maker’s need to extrude, machine, anodize, and recycle vast quantities of the metal. You don’t need to agree with Steve Jobs that Apple "invented a whole new way of building notebooks from a single block of aluminum" to appreciate that its change in manufacturing fundamentally altered the supply chain for the material.

There are a number of practical distinctions between sapphire and aluminum that may also have motivated Apple’s new approach. Whereas the silvery-gray metal makes up 8 percent of the Earth’s crust and has no supply shortages, synthesizing sapphire takes a great deal of time and effort. Harvard physicist Frans Spaepen says that the process for making sapphire windows (sapphire’s commonly used in the place of glass but is structurally different) is "already very mature and is unlikely to undergo the kind of revolution that led to cheap aluminum." Vertu’s head of design Hutch Hutchison agrees, adding that the very qualities that make sapphire attractive as a material also make it a nightmare to work with. It’s a superbly tough and scratch-resistant material, he says, but that makes it "very difficult to cut, grind, and polish ... diamond tools have to be used for all of these processes." As a material, sapphire is thus the direct opposite of aluminum, which is prized for its malleability and versatility.

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