Gorilla Glass has one more massive trick up its sleeve; its manufacturability. Hall admits that he is less "less familiar with the details of sapphire production, but it's my understanding that all methods are batch-based while the relevant glass making process is continuous in nature."
This means sapphire screens will be more expensive to produce, with analysts currently claiming that Gorilla Glass is approximately 10% of the price ($3 rather than $30).
So my iPhone will get more expensive?
The reasonable assumption then is a sapphire screen will make your next iPhone more expensive, unless Apple finds a way to either absorb the cost or manufacture enough to scale down costs.
It might have just been able to do that following a deal with GT Advanced, a company that has developed a method for creating a sapphire sheet that is thinner than a human hair and can be mounted to a glass display.
This method makes production of sapphire screens significantly cheaper.
The deal worth $578 million in prepayments has also allowed GT to purchase nearly 1000 furnaces to help produce the sapphire screens thereby allowing economies of scale to reduce the costs even further.
Are there any problems?
All the work that Apple is doing with GT Advanced should see it overcome the largest problem that faces any potential sapphire screens, but that doesn't mean other problems won't arise.
A big problem that has faced sapphire to date is the purple flare that surrounded areas of bright light on the iPhone 5's camera.
This purple fringe was attributed to the sapphire lens, although was likely caused by chromatic aberration (a light distortion that can be tricky to correct on large lenses, let alone those found on smartphones).
Another key problem that any potential iPhone with sapphire screen will face is one that we have already touched upon, screen brightness.
If you've shelled out for a new iPhone you're going to be pretty miffed if you can't use it outside.
This is something that is likely to be significantly reduced with thinner sapphire screens mounted to glass, but can also be remedied with brighter screen technologies such as AMOLED displays.
Put everything together and we're left salivating. Can you imagine a 5-inch sapphire AMOLED iPhone 6? We can but dream.
