In August 2010 Apple bought the license for consumer products of Liquidmetal, a durable lightweight material, metal in nature but without corrosion problems and with greater resistance than aluminum. One of the biggest advantages of Liquidmetal is that much more could be done easy the manufacture of, for example, the housing of an iPhone, and at the same time make it more resistant to shock and deformations.
In spite of the fact that it is called Liquidmetal there is nothing “fluid” in the. By now everything points to the fact that the only component that Apple uses Liquidmetal is in the extractor of SIM cards of the iPhone.
The reason is that the manufacturing processes on Earth today are adapted to other types of materials such as plastic injection mold or the aluminum sculpture. None of these processes are compatible with the new material, so it is necessary to develop a whole new set of techniques and machines in order to work with large amounts of material quickly.
But the last patent of Apple and Liquidmetal makes suspect that companies have taken with how to create sheets of Liquidmetal of between 0.1mm and 25 mm thick to work with earth. The patent indicates that the process is capable of creating up to 6,000 kilometers of foil to the year and with them Apple will be closer to be able to manufacture any product.
