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Your next smartphone will be a lot harder to scratch:
It takes about two years for Corning to develop each new generation of Gorilla Glass, the resilient material that graces a critical mass of smartphones. That process has for several update cycles focused on protecting screens against drops, fending off shatters and cracks by boosting what's known as compressive strength. The newly announced Gorilla Glass Victus, though, gives equal weight to preventing scratches. That's harder than it sounds and more useful than you'd think.
[...] There's also the fact that making glass that's both scratch and drop resistant is, well, hard. The manufacture of glass is often a game of compromise, which you can see most clearly in the quest for durable foldable phones: the stronger it is, the less it can bend. In this case, getting those two properties to play nice is less a direct contradiction than it is a process of reinvention.
Phone screens had previously been designed to resist drops, but with consumers upgrading their phones less frequently scratch-resistance has grown in importance.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday July 26 2020, @05:44PM
I visited SyQuest's development offices about 6 months before they went out of business. They were the original removable hard drive manufacturer - at the time being absolutely destroyed in the marketplace by IoMega and their similar-ish high density semi-floppies. Anyway... we needed a 100MB model, as low cost as possible, and they were just about to bring a 135MB 5.25" drive to market (good thing I visited in person to see that it was a true 5.25" drive and not a 3.5" drive like their previous model, our M.E. did a too quick review of the drawings they sent us and assumed that the new drive was a 3.5" with ears like the one he was holding... oops...) Anyway, while I was there, they were in the middle of qualifying the 880MB drive, planned successor to the 440MB drive that was ready for production, planned successor to the 220MB drive that was about to enter the shipping channels, planned successor to the 135MB drive that was about to hit the market in a few weeks.
Funny thing, they also had a true 3.5" 1GB drive that was about to hit the market a month or so after the 135MB model, at the next higher price point - if I recall, the 135-220-440-880 line was planned to roll out at the $99.95 sweet spot, while the 1GB model would retail for something like $249, with a 2GB and 5GB model following at somewhat slower pace than the $99.95 line update rate.
Point being: the tech is there, Moore's law is as much an artifact of business/consumer psychology as it is technological constraint. SyQuest could have jumped straight from 135MB to 880MB at that price point, but it would have reduced their profit potential which was already critically low - so finance drove the decision to keep the doubling line, not the R&D department.
Some years later, IBM took a bold move and jumped HDD performance/capacity by something like 10x in a single step - it's rare, but entirely possible to do.
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