Gadgetory

ever since the iPhone 5s Apple has claimed to have sapphire crystal as their iPhone camera lens this includes the iPhone 6 the 6s and even the iPhone se sapphire crystal is a man-made material that is extremely hard and almost impossible to scratch with everyday objects since it ranks about a9 on Mohs scale of hardness right next to diamonds so it's a pretty big selling point when a company brags about using it t so is another company that brags about sapphire crystal on their watches it is even written right here on the back so let's compare T so sapphire hardness with apples sapphire hardness these pics let me know where an object falls on Mohs scale of hardness glass even tempered glass or Gorilla Glass will always follow to five or six plastic will be a two or three and sapphire will be an eight or a nine as you can see from my pics on this watch face there is absolutely no mark until a Mohs eight pick leads the first visible groove if you remember from my iphone 7 durability test a few days ago when I scratched the camera lens of the iPhone 7 with my pics it left a visible mark at a most six which led me to assume that the lens is just regular tempered glass since it has the same hardness level it was only after I made the durability video that I noticed apples still bragging about the sapphire on their iPhone 7 so I figured it was time to test all of the sapphire iPhone lenses now full disclosure this hurts me even more so than snapping a phone in half I'm a camera guy so deliberately scratching a camera lens even for science is extremely painful i retested the iPhone 7 and got the same result as 6 a seven and an eight pick all leave their mark scratching much sooner than sapphire crystal should scratch the sapphire lens on the iPhone se also scratched with a six and seven the iPhone 5s showed marks at a six and seven and even the iPhone 6 scratched at a six and seven so we can easily conclude that each of the iPhone Sapphire lenses are much softer than the T cell watch face at this point I thought the case was closed and I got ready to post a video saying Apple just isn't using sapphire crystal but I grabbed a diamond tester that I have laying around and tested the outer glass surface and bewildering ly enough did positive for sapphire which is strange because as we've clearly seen the hardness level does not match what sapphire should be when I test the underside of the lens the Sapphire reading is much lower also interesting I'll explain that in just a second as you can see when I test my tea so watchface it is off the charts and Sapphire readings but that is only because it is a larger surface area and easier for the Machine to identify just for reference this is a real sapphire it's a pretty small stone but still a level 9 on Mohs scale of hardness this is just showing the mineral picks in action as well as a control for the tester tool so both companies claim to have Sapphire so why is there a difference in hardness I looked at both my tea so watch and iPhone camera lens under a microscope and found some interesting things first of all remember that this scratch on the watch happened at a level 8 we can see the damage pretty clearly under the microscope the thin groove and the little chippings that permanently disfigure the crystal but if we check the Sapphire iPhone 5s camera lens under the microscope we can see something entirely different remember that this is the most six line this is the most seven line and this crack here happened as I was lifting lens out of the iPhone frame the level 6 and 7 picks definitely did permanent damage but under the microscope they look like small fractures instead of scratches still very permanent and still permanently disfiguring the lens so it's pretty clear that we're working with two different qualities of crystal here now that we've seen this damage let's figure out why Apple's Lin starts to fracture at a most six when it should be resilient to at least 1/8 like on the T so watch or a level 9 like we saw on the actual sapphire stone so I checked Apple's patent for their sapphire information and found a few strange things I will link this form down in the video description if you're interested in looking at it yourself one of the very first things it says is that Apple's patent is related to thin sapphire laminates then down here it talks about laminating regular glass with the sapphire coating instead of having the whole thing be sapphire interesting ly enough because glass may provide cost savings over sapphire it also specifically references camera lenses so is that why the lens is fracturing maybe it's not solid sapphire it could be just a thin laminate on top of regular glass because it would be more cost effective I realize that in order really analyze the lens before posting a video I need some bigger toys I headed over to a university where they have an XRF machine x-ray fluorescence is a non-destructive analytical technique used to determine the composition of materials remember that this particular machine is only qualitative not quantitative so it won't tell us the percentage of each element just if the element exists in the specimen when I tested the outside of the lens I get a huge reading of aluminum oxide which means that the lens is most definitely sapphire on the exterior when I test the inside of lens I get no reading for aluminum oxide but I do get a reading for silicon which is an ingredient of glass this means that the underside of the lens is made of or coated with glass but the XRF machine does not tell how thick each side is so in order to find the thickness of each layer of the lens I need an even bigger toy now this machine is an electron microscope costing close to a million dollars I wish I had one in my basement but Santa keeps on ignoring my letters either way in this test I have broken the actual iPhone 7 lens out of the phone and here we are looking at the cross-section of the broken lens this here is the total lens thickness and this electron microscope is showing the actual elemental makeup of the lens thumbs up for science the lens was cleaned before analyzing and this is what we see during the scan the different colors represent where the different elements are found in lens the carbon and silicon are not ingredients of sapphire only the aluminum oxide so from this image we can pretty safely assume that the sapphire we are looking at is not pure there are a pretty hefty amount of contaminants like the carbon and the silicon remember how my diamond detector tool had a lower reading on the inside of the lens that's because there is a silicon layer that you can see here but it is incredibly small in proportion to the rest of the lens so it's pretty much a non-issue I bet that the inner layer is more to minimize reflection or something minor because structurally it doesn't seem like you would add any value the vast portion of the lens is aluminum oxide the graph here is quantitative so it is giving us an accurate percentage of elements aluminum oxide carbon and silicon in this particular reading let's look at another segment remember that this side is the exterior this side is the interior of the phone and this is the profile of the crack it has an incredibly thin coating of something on the inside the lens niobium and silicon niobium improves the refractive index of optical glass allowing for thinner and lighter lenses so it looks like that particular element is intentional the majority of the lens body is the aluminum oxide which is what we call sapphire but we still have quite a bit of carbon and that's the main impurity here is the quantitative graph again the carbon is still a decent sized chunk the niobium and silicon are just on that very tiny inner layer now let's take a look at the elemental analysis of the sapphire crystal on my tee so watch the only two elements found on the surface of the watch in the scan are aluminium and oxide no Carbon impurity also the ratios of the T so sapphire are very different than the Apple sapphire Apple only has a 2 or 3% difference between the aluminium and oxide and T so has an almost 10 percent difference now I am NOT a chemist a geologist or an engineer I personally graduated in business but these numbers sure are interesting between a lens that does fracture and a lens that doesn't after filming and editing this video I noticed one of em kbh DS most popular videos which I will link in the video description it is about the prototype sapphire screen of the iPhone 6 that he posted a couple years ago he came to the independent conclusion that it's crashed at a 7 on the Mohs scale which if that prototype was indeed a real piece of Apple sapphire it does match the same recipe that they are currently using for their camera lens it makes me wonder if the sapphire screen prototype and the current sapphire camera lens both scratch early is the Sapphire Apple watch made of the same weak recipe and the bigger question how impure can your sapphire be and still call it sapphire in conclusion just because my results show that the lens scratches earlier than sapphire doesn't mean it's a bad lens it is still scratch resistant just like glasses and the pictures are still great it's just not as scratch resistant as we all thought it would be if you like seeing technology reviewed from the inside hit that subscribe button my behind the scenes stuff can always be found on my Instagram and Twitter at Zach's jerry-rigged thanks ton for watching hope to see you around