Thanks for the info, it has been a while since I talked to anyone who knew anything about commercial growth.
If 8" wafers have those issues then do you think it is then feasible to expect an iPhone screen out of sapphire any time soon?
Or will iPhone screens be thicker and thus can absorb more issues seen in thinner wafers, or do screen-grade sheets simply have a higher tolerance for fault densities and not need to be substrate grade?
They will be in a position to strong arm if they get manufacturing cranking, however I don't think the Apple of today would use something like this simply as extreme leverage against a supplier (though some pressure will of course be inevitable).
If they're smart (and don't for a second think they are not) then they really will move forward with this as another development in the American jobs and fabs and labs that they've started with the Made in USA Mac Pro (I'm not even American but I support smart manufacturing to keep an ever-changing creation industry local).
Sapphire is not just for external materials, it is also a commonly used substrate for growth of various semiconductors for a range of devices (main substrate for GaN (blue LEDs), silicon on sapphire (SOS) tech). There are many reasons to use it as a substrate (transparent, radiation resistant, excellent thermal conductivity but low electrical conductivity) though some disadvantages which have largely been accounted for (poor lattice match to Si, GaN).
We used to get GaN grown on piddly little 2" sapphire wafers, which were themselves to start with hideously expensive. Growing on larger sapphire wafers is very interesting (think of how most production fabs are geared for 12" Si wafers).
Before you know it you may also find internal components made from material grown on sapphire made by Apple in Apple products.
I'm not entirely sure what your point is supposed to be. If your definition of safe is "completely devoid of any possibility of risk," then I wonder how you justify getting out of bed every morning. A more reasonable argument is that safety is always a relative measure. Injuries attributable to common vaccines are uncommon, permanent damage is incredibly rare, and death occurs at a frequency that can best be described as vanishingly small. On the other hand, many of the diseases that we vaccinate against often cause permanent damage or death, and weakening the herd immunity puts not only the individual at risk, but society at large. So, yes, there are some potential (though very small) risks to vaccination, but that does not mean that they are unsafe.
Man, that second sentence is awkward. I should have edited.
Suppose that there exists a configuration of N pulleys. To this configuration, we add an additional pulley. The two pulleys that are nearest to this new pulley are separated from the new pulley by a segment of conveyor that runs between two additional pulleys that are (potentially) quite distant. This configuration provides a counter example to the induction suggested above.
Except that the argument wasn't really "potentially vulnerable to attack" is not the same as "compromised" (though it is certainly easy to see how one could come to that conclusion by ignoring the context---and maybe I am misinterpreting the parent, as well), the argument was that all (but only) SSL sessions using the newer versions of OpenSSL were/are vulnerable (i.e. compromised), and that by virtue of not every server in the world automatically being updated to these newer versions, the statement "every SSL session is compromised" was hyperbole.
One should also note that while the dictionary definition of "compromised" is essentially identical to "vulnerable," there are nuances of meaning in the way in which the two words are used. I would suspect that most people would regard something being "compromised" as more severe than something being "vulnerable." In fact, your example of science fiction seems to make my argument for me. You aren't really disagreeing with the parent, only nitpicking semantics (unless you really do believe that "every SSL session has been compromised," in which case there is a bigger problem with SSL than Heartbleed). If you are going to argue the point (viz: "compromised" and "vulnerable" are synonyms without distinction), why don't you explain what it means to "decimate" something, and how too many people seem to use the word incorrectly.
Life is a healthy respect for mother nature laced with greed.