The Black iPhone 4 was released nearly a month ago, but there was no sign of the white flavour of the smartphone. Apple said that due to manufacturing difficulties, it wouldn’t be available until late July. At Apple’s press conference last Friday, Steve announced that the iPhone 4 in White will be on it’s way at the end of this month.
So why has the White iPhone 4 been delayed for so long? Well it is a manufacturing issue alright. More specifically, it’s an issue with the glass panels of the White iPhone 4. According to Chinese newspaper 21st Century Business Herald, the problem stems from a little-known Chinese factory by the name of Lens Technology, who are responsible for transforming the raw materials into the final product for the iPhone 4 glass panels.
The factory current employees some 14,000 workers, but there is a major bottleneck at the moment. Its glass manufacturing process involves the following steps: developing the tooling, cutting the raw material, fine-milling using CNC (computed numerically controlled) machines, sanding the edges, polishing, strengthening, cleaning, coating, screen printing, baking, anti-shatter treatment, assembling, and packaging. So it’s not as straight forward as you would think.
The factory is still working out the perfect combination of paint thickness and opacity, so you get that brilliant white color, but also so that there’s enough room for the digitizer overlay.
When Engadget got a prototype earlier this month, they noticed that it was a slightly darker white compared to the likes of the iPod dock white.
So it’s a combination of all these factors that is holding back the production of the glass panels for the iPhone 4, and the factory is going to be struggling to keep up with demand. Each of it’s machines can only cut out 3 glass panels an hour, so let’s hope they’ve got a hell of a lot of them on the job.
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