Back in 2010, Apple signed an exclusive agreement with Caltech spinoff Liquidmetal Technologies, providing Apple with the rights to use Liquidmetal’s advanced metal alloys for consumer electronics purposes. Liquidmetal’s amorphous metal alloys or bulk metallic glasses posses a number of characteristic properties such as high strength and corrosion resistance while remaining relatively light and able to be cast into a variety of forms.
Apple quietly tested Liquidmetal’s alloys in the SIM card eject tool for the iPhone 3G, but the materials have otherwise not been confirmed to have appeared in any other Apple products, as one of alloys’ inventors noted in 2012 that their use as major design materials was still several years in the future.
Evidence of Apple’s continued interest with Liquidmetal alloys has surfaced a number of times over the past several years, including in a granted patent from July covering a process for mass producing thin sheets of the Liquidmetal alloys and a series of technical patent applications published in November describing methods of working with the alloys to create products.
A number of patent applications addressing additional innovations with Liquidmetal alloys have been published since that time, — For more information read the original article here.
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