Ceramic Shield

Apple has usually been a bit cagey about the glass that it uses in its iPhones, but this year it clearly has a bit more to boast about.

While analysts have speculated for many years that Apple used a variation on Corning’s Gorilla Glass, the closest admission we’ve ever heard from Apple is that it does in fact work with Corning, and it confirmed that during today’s event by sharing that Apple’s material design engineers had actually collaborated with Corning’s team to produce an entirely new cover glass that will provide four times better drop performance than the iPhone 11, which used glass that was already considered to be the toughest in the industry.

Dubbed “Ceramic Shield,” the new glass is better than Corning’s newest Gorilla Glass 6, and was developed using a high-temperature crystallization process that involved growing nano-ceramic crystals within the glass matrix.

We’ll have to wait until folks get their hands on the new iPhones to see the investable collection of drop tests that will surely follow, but for the most part the iPhone has always fared reasonably well against the competition in this area.