Gadgetory

there's an old saying about throwing stones if you live in glass houses and a Dodge that only really works because normal glass is highly shatter a bowl but these days we use glass for a heck of a lot more than Windows we interact with our phones tablets and even some laptops through touching a glass screen and considering these are all portable devices that we drop hit and generally mistreat you'd think it would be far easier to shatter them now don't get me wrong the Internet is full of stories of people who've cracked their iPhones but many people go years and years without anything happening to their glass displays this is at least partially thanks to toughened glass which is nearly ubiquitous on modern mobile devices but how exactly does something as thin and lightweight as modern smartphones stand up to your cat's claws or drops onto hard concrete floors many kinds of toughened glass such as Corning's ever-popular Gorilla Glass work because they have been chemically toughened intuitively it might seem like chemical toughening is no substitute for just making the glass thicker but certain chemicals can have a massive impact on materials think of how strong and light carbon fibres are but toughened glass like Gorilla Glass that might be in your smartphone is made by a process called ion exchange you see the glass that corning uses as a base for Gorilla Glass has sodium ions embedded in it which can be easily displaced by larger potassium ions sheets of this sodium containing glass are dipped into a bath of liquid potassium salt that's heated up to 400 degrees Celsius or over 750 Fahrenheit for our American viewers the heat allows the potassium in the bath to displace the smaller sodium ions because the potassium ions are larger they actually compress the glass on a molecular level giving it much greater strength and resistance to scratches and other kinds of damage now if you'd like to learn more about Gorilla Glass specifically including what it can actually do in the real world and some of its other various limitations you can learn more about it in this video but even though Corning currently has a huge share of the touchscreen glass market with Gorilla Glass that doesn't mean it's the only technology out there specifically sapphire glass has been tossed around quite a bit as a possible replacement for silicon based glasses the aluminum oxide molecules that make up sapphire gems bond together in a trigonal crystal structure that makes it extremely strong and hard to the point where it's almost impossible to scratch and because the typical blue color of sapphires is due to impurities that can be removed synthetic sapphire can easily be made to be colorless it's also even more transparent than current types of common smartphone glass so why isn't everyone using it yet well a huge part of the reason is simply cost according to estimates from corning sapphire glasses about 10 times more expensive to make than Gorilla Glass in fact Apple invested around a billion dollars in a sapphire factory in Arizona that ended up failing partially due to manufacturing difficulties I guess producing a quarter-ton cylinder of sapphire in a furnace reaching thousands of degrees is no small task sapphire isn't perfect either because while its hardness means it's tougher to scratch it also means that it's brittle so it might not provide much better shatter resistance than current technologies but in a world that's increasingly reliant on mobile devices that we want to be thin light and portable sapphire screens may become the more popular choice in the near future just don't present a sapphire iPhone on a ring when you're proposing to your future spouse that would be weird but what you could do along with presenting a ring to your spouse in order to get married is set up a cool website for the two of you with Squarespace they have 24/7 support via live chat and email so if you have any problems you can contact them and it only costs $8 a month and when you sign up for a year you get a free domain they have responsive design so your website can scale to look great on a computer a tablet or even your sapphire glass phone they've a commerce module so you can sell tickets to your extremely exclusive wedding and they have cover page modules so that once everything fails you can make like a dating resume of sorts they even have new accelerated mobile pages also known as amp which makes your site load faster on mobile devices on average they load four times faster than non amp pages saving your visitors and possible suitors much valuable time start a trial with no credit card or spouse required and start building your website today alright guys thanks for watching this video if you liked it like if you dislike it dislike it check out our other channels like Linus tech tips and channels super freaking fun if you have any suggestions for future videos let us know in the comments down below and this shirt will be available semi soon it is the like gold play button for tech quickie because we recently passed the million subscribers and that is awesome I'll see you next time