1. Why are people so bent out of shape over the idea that we may never see a Liquidmetal iPhone chassis or sapphire screen? If other materials achieve the goals of usability and damage resistance, what difference does it make whether the phone is made of Liquidmetal and sapphire or aluminumium and monkey glass?
2. Do I even WANT a sapphire screen? While it has the benefit of even greater scratch-proofness than Gorilla Glass, it has the liability of lower break resistance. Since I have not yet scratched a Gorilla Glass screen badly enough to affect my use of the phone, but have managed to smash one, I'm inclined to think that any scratch-resistance advantage offered by sapphire would simply be "more than already sufficient" while the reduced resistance to breaking would be a distinct disadvantage.
I agree with Knowitall, but I also believe that Touch ID will be embedded in all of Apple's products (including laptops and desktops). That combined volume would justify the investment in sapphire. As for liquid metal it will continue to be used in unique situations where it will provide high value in smaller part applications.
I am a huge fan of Touch ID and have waited on purchase of a new iPad until it is incorporated in the product line.
I thought I'd already read a week or so ago that TouchID was being added to all of portables. :???: Did I imagine it?
I thought I'd already read a week or so ago that TouchID was being added to all of portables. Did I imagine it?
You didn't imagine it, but you forgot that it was mentioned as part of an analyst's prediction. Or do I have it wrong? Has Apple actually announced this or is it still a rumour?
Either way, if Apple is opening up the Touch ID API to developers, it strikes me as VERY likely that it will be part of EVERY iOS device soon. It doesn't seem like the kind of thing they would provide to developers if it only worked with phones. Or would they? I'm not a developer so I don't know... is Apple known for providing third-party access to device-specific features?
You didn't imagine it, but you forgot that it was mentioned as part of an analysts prediction. Or do I have it wrong? Has Apple actually announced this or is still a rumour?
Thanks!. Seems like a no-brainer really. IMO of course Apple will add it to their iPads and laptops.
Do you know this to be true, or is this "I think that's what the guy meant?" If the former, thank you VERY much for the useful information! That kind of description goes a long way to helping stoopid people like me understand. I just wanna make sure it's accurate before I go repeating it to others!
I'm not setting myself up as any kind of expert...there could be other advantages to amorphous metals (or "metallic glasses" as they're also called.) They've been being discussed for 35 years that I know about, and the thing that's always mentioned as setting them apart is the lack of metal fatigue. It sounds like there are new ways of manufacturing them that I know nothing about, at least. As far as I knew, you had to spray them into a vacuum, so tiny particles would solidify too quickly to form crystals, and then sinter them into solid pieces. (If you approach the Curie Point from below, you can get them to amalgamate without crystallizing.)
The cutting-edge technology last I heard was spraying the liquid metal onto a rapidly-rotating liquid nitrogen-cooled drum and forming a ribbon of metal, which could then be "ironed" together into large sheets. My knowledge is certainly way behind the current manufacturing technology.
I see people expecting liquid metal to be radio-transparent, though, and I can't see how that's possible. The metal would still have the same electrons in the same orbiits.... Maybe the fact that it's not quite as good a conductor as crystalline metal has a bearing on it?
EDIT: No, wait. With no crystal domain walls, it would be a better conductor than polycrystalline metal. I don't know...I'm puzzled by the whole thing.
You didn't imagine it, but you forgot that it was mentioned as part of an analyst's prediction. Or do I have it wrong? Has Apple actually announced this or is it still a rumour?
Either way, if Apple is opening up the Touch ID API to developers, it strikes me as VERY likely that it will be part of EVERY iOS device soon. It doesn't seem like the kind of thing they would provide to developers if it only worked with phones. Or would they? I'm not a developer so I don't know... is Apple known for providing third-party access to device-specific features?
Are those Touch ID APIs for Mac OS X development, too?
I assume you do what I started doing weeks, if not days, after getting an iPhone 5S. I started trying to use Touch ID on my iPad and then blankly starring at the display for far longer than is reasonable before realizing that there is no Touch ID.
It's rare when a new technology can so quickly rewire how you've been doing a task for many years and it's even more rare that additional security is also the more convenient solution.
Sapphire glass used more for its clarity and beinghard to scratch as opposed to being break proof Apple needs that clarity I would think For whatever it has in mind
"Titanium, for example, has also been around for many years, is stronger and lighter in weight than aluminum..."
Not true. Titanium is heavier than aluminum. It's just that it is so much stronger, you can use less of it, resulting in an overall reduction in weight.
I don't know where people get the idea that amorphous metal is "stronger" or "scratch-resistant". For a given bond strength, an amorphous material is 6/7 (I think) as strong as a single crystal of the same material. I don't see how scratchability would be any different.
The reason to use amorphous metal for anything is that there is no such thing as metal fatigue. In a polycrystalline metal part, repeated stress causes crystal domains to gradually deform, with their boundaries migrating to follow lines of stress. Get a line across a whole part that's all boundary, the strength goes to essentially zero, and...snap! Amorphous metals don't exhibit this behavior—don't stress them past their breaking point and they won't break. Ever.
I don't know of any Apple products where metal fatigue has been an important problem since the TiBook the article mentioned. (I could be wrong—anybody else have any ideas?) By contrast, the SIM ejector tool is just exactly the kind of thing that would benefit from this technology. Bend a paper clip a few times and you'll see metal fatigue in action. Avoiding that would be worth it for such a small part that could cause serious annoyance if it breaks.
What could Apple do with this stuff? The most obvious use for a hard, non-deforming, non-corroding and generally scratch resistant material: cases.
Plastics are flexible but not strong, and while metals are much stronger than plastics, they're not as flexible. Liquidmetal alloys can provide a more durable casing, which is much more resistant to dents, nicks, scratches and breakage than hard plastics. If you drop a plastic-encased phone, it cracks or scuffs. If you drop a metal-encased phone, it dents, or nicks. If you drop a Liquidmetal-encased phone, well, it should just bounce.
Bottom line: Apple wouldn't use (or invest in) liquid metal unless it allowed them to design something that cannot be done now. That means they won't use it unless it gives them a weight, strength, cost, or process advantage over plastic, aluminum, etc. Apple fans don't care about materials and it don't think Jonny Ive does either. But Jonny cares about his designs and many things he's designed require special advances in materials, process, etc. If he wants it razor thin, advance material design to make it possible.
It's what takes concepts to reality. Anyone can design a 1mm thick phone on a computer as a concept. Making the guts fit inside is what Apple does to stand out from the rest.
I, for one, am tired of the Apple rumor sites continually referring to the 'years and millions of dollars' necessary to make Liquid Metal useful, as some kind of immovable object. First of all, those 'years' have already passed, and as for investing millions of dollars, uhhh, well, we're talking about Apple here. They would not hesitate to invest a BILLION dollars to make a product special. It's time to retire this boring and irrelevant quote. If Apple wants to use liquid metal to make a unique product, they have the resources and talent to do so.
Gorilla Glass was sitting on the shelf at Corning until Steve Jobs called, and said I need a few million.
Are those Touch ID APIs for Mac OS X development, too?
On iOS the home button has several uses. If the Touch ID concept was to make its way to the Mac perhaps it could also behave as a home button to invoke the launcher or perhaps like Cmd+tab for running apps or even F11 or Spaces. I also wonder where they put the button on various Macs.
I don't know where people get the idea that amorphous metal is "stronger" or "scratch-resistant". For a given bond strength, an amorphous material is 6/7 (I think) as strong as a single crystal of the same material. I don't see how scratchability would be any different.
The reason to use amorphous metal for anything is that there is no such thing as metal fatigue. In a polycrystalline metal part, repeated stress causes crystal domains to gradually deform, with their boundaries migrating to follow lines of stress. Get a line across a whole part that's all boundary, the strength goes to essentially zero, and...snap! Amorphous metals don't exhibit this behavior—don't stress them past their breaking point and they won't break. Ever.
I don't know of any Apple products where metal fatigue has been an important problem since the TiBook the article mentioned. (I could be wrong—anybody else have any ideas?) By contrast, the SIM ejector tool is just exactly the kind of thing that would benefit from this technology. Bend a paper clip a few times and you'll see metal fatigue in action. Avoiding that would be worth it for such a small part that could cause serious annoyance if it breaks.
There was a use case for golf club drivers where the heads (of amorphous metal alloy) were shattering, so you are incorrect, though this is most likely due to lack of knowledge about the material at the time.
One of the first commercial uses of Liquidmetal was in golf clubs made by the company, where the highly elastic metal was used in portions of the club face.[5] These were highly rated by users, but the product was later dropped, in part because the prototypes shattered after fewer than 40 hits
To put the comparison of Liquid Metal to sapphire: sapphire is a known material and known process, and Apple is refining the manufacturing process to cost reduce; Liquid Metal is a wide range of alloys and processes still being defined for mechanical properties and production suitability with the added issue of expensive and mostly undeveloped production machines.
Do you know this to be true, or is this "I think that's what the guy meant?" If the former, thank you VERY much for the useful information! That kind of description goes a long way to helping stoopid people like me understand. I just wanna make sure it's accurate before I go repeating it to others!
I believe he's right about the fatigue proneness of ordinary metals, which consist of crystalline domains throughout, whereas liquid metal would be amorphous, like glass, another liquid.
But I don't think he'll turn out to be right that Apple has no use for fatigue-resistant materials. I can imagine that their hoped-for (by me and a few others) iWatch stereo video glasses might have frames made from Liquid Metal, along with lenses with laminated scratch-resistant sapphire.
Of course this is a complete fantasy, and maybe far from reality. Or not.
A liquid metal iPhone is coming. When? Who knows, but it is most definitely coming in the not too distant future. It's just a matter of when the tech is ready for mass production. The benefits and cost savings will be massive.
The only problem for Apple is that there are competing technologies that will launch soon after. Apple will have once again been a R&D department for the rest of the trade. Once Apple and partners have ironed out the details, Samsung and company will incorporate it too, just as they followed suit with Gorilla Glass. It will have become a commodity.
Let's remember, at one time aluminum was worth more than gold because of how rare and difficult to produce it was. What was once limited to royalty, Innovations in productions soon made it affordable to the masses.
Comments
Two thoughts:
1. Why are people so bent out of shape over the idea that we may never see a Liquidmetal iPhone chassis or sapphire screen? If other materials achieve the goals of usability and damage resistance, what difference does it make whether the phone is made of Liquidmetal and sapphire or aluminumium and monkey glass?
2. Do I even WANT a sapphire screen? While it has the benefit of even greater scratch-proofness than Gorilla Glass, it has the liability of lower break resistance. Since I have not yet scratched a Gorilla Glass screen badly enough to affect my use of the phone, but have managed to smash one, I'm inclined to think that any scratch-resistance advantage offered by sapphire would simply be "more than already sufficient" while the reduced resistance to breaking would be a distinct disadvantage.
I thought I'd already read a week or so ago that TouchID was being added to all of portables.
You didn't imagine it, but you forgot that it was mentioned as part of an analyst's prediction. Or do I have it wrong? Has Apple actually announced this or is it still a rumour?
Either way, if Apple is opening up the Touch ID API to developers, it strikes me as VERY likely that it will be part of EVERY iOS device soon. It doesn't seem like the kind of thing they would provide to developers if it only worked with phones. Or would they? I'm not a developer so I don't know... is Apple known for providing third-party access to device-specific features?
Thanks!. Seems like a no-brainer really. IMO of course Apple will add it to their iPads and laptops.
I'm not setting myself up as any kind of expert...there could be other advantages to amorphous metals (or "metallic glasses" as they're also called.) They've been being discussed for 35 years that I know about, and the thing that's always mentioned as setting them apart is the lack of metal fatigue. It sounds like there are new ways of manufacturing them that I know nothing about, at least. As far as I knew, you had to spray them into a vacuum, so tiny particles would solidify too quickly to form crystals, and then sinter them into solid pieces. (If you approach the Curie Point from below, you can get them to amalgamate without crystallizing.)
The cutting-edge technology last I heard was spraying the liquid metal onto a rapidly-rotating liquid nitrogen-cooled drum and forming a ribbon of metal, which could then be "ironed" together into large sheets. My knowledge is certainly way behind the current manufacturing technology.
I see people expecting liquid metal to be radio-transparent, though, and I can't see how that's possible. The metal would still have the same electrons in the same orbiits.... Maybe the fact that it's not quite as good a conductor as crystalline metal has a bearing on it?
EDIT: No, wait. With no crystal domain walls, it would be a better conductor than polycrystalline metal. I don't know...I'm puzzled by the whole thing.
Are those Touch ID APIs for Mac OS X development, too?
I assume you do what I started doing weeks, if not days, after getting an iPhone 5S. I started trying to use Touch ID on my iPad and then blankly starring at the display for far longer than is reasonable before realizing that there is no Touch ID.
It's rare when a new technology can so quickly rewire how you've been doing a task for many years and it's even more rare that additional security is also the more convenient solution.
I STILL do that!
Are those Touch ID APIs for Mac OS X development, too?
The article I read only mentioned iOS8:
http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/06/02/apple-opens-up-touch-id-to-third-party-app-developers
Apple needs that clarity I would think
For whatever it has in mind
"Titanium, for example, has also been around for many years, is stronger and lighter in weight than aluminum..."
Not true. Titanium is heavier than aluminum. It's just that it is so much stronger, you can use less of it, resulting in an overall reduction in weight.
What could Apple do with this stuff? The most obvious use for a hard, non-deforming, non-corroding and generally scratch resistant material: cases.
Plastics are flexible but not strong, and while metals are much stronger than plastics, they're not as flexible. Liquidmetal alloys can provide a more durable casing, which is much more resistant to dents, nicks, scratches and breakage than hard plastics. If you drop a plastic-encased phone, it cracks or scuffs. If you drop a metal-encased phone, it dents, or nicks. If you drop a Liquidmetal-encased phone, well, it should just bounce.
It's what takes concepts to reality. Anyone can design a 1mm thick phone on a computer as a concept. Making the guts fit inside is what Apple does to stand out from the rest.
I, for one, am tired of the Apple rumor sites continually referring to the 'years and millions of dollars' necessary to make Liquid Metal useful, as some kind of immovable object. First of all, those 'years' have already passed, and as for investing millions of dollars, uhhh, well, we're talking about Apple here. They would not hesitate to invest a BILLION dollars to make a product special. It's time to retire this boring and irrelevant quote. If Apple wants to use liquid metal to make a unique product, they have the resources and talent to do so.
Gorilla Glass was sitting on the shelf at Corning until Steve Jobs called, and said I need a few million.
http://techland.time.com/2013/01/11/a-story-about-steve-jobs-steel-balls-and-gorilla-glass-you-with-the-cracked-phone-read-this/
Oh, I really don't think that is what you meant.
Are those Touch ID APIs for Mac OS X development, too?
On iOS the home button has several uses. If the Touch ID concept was to make its way to the Mac perhaps it could also behave as a home button to invoke the launcher or perhaps like Cmd+tab for running apps or even F11 or Spaces. I also wonder where they put the button on various Macs.
I don't know where people get the idea that amorphous metal is "stronger" or "scratch-resistant". For a given bond strength, an amorphous material is 6/7 (I think) as strong as a single crystal of the same material. I don't see how scratchability would be any different.
The reason to use amorphous metal for anything is that there is no such thing as metal fatigue. In a polycrystalline metal part, repeated stress causes crystal domains to gradually deform, with their boundaries migrating to follow lines of stress. Get a line across a whole part that's all boundary, the strength goes to essentially zero, and...snap! Amorphous metals don't exhibit this behavior—don't stress them past their breaking point and they won't break. Ever.
I don't know of any Apple products where metal fatigue has been an important problem since the TiBook the article mentioned. (I could be wrong—anybody else have any ideas?) By contrast, the SIM ejector tool is just exactly the kind of thing that would benefit from this technology. Bend a paper clip a few times and you'll see metal fatigue in action. Avoiding that would be worth it for such a small part that could cause serious annoyance if it breaks.
There was a use case for golf club drivers where the heads (of amorphous metal alloy) were shattering, so you are incorrect, though this is most likely due to lack of knowledge about the material at the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidmetal
One of the first commercial uses of Liquidmetal was in golf clubs made by the company, where the highly elastic metal was used in portions of the club face.[5] These were highly rated by users, but the product was later dropped, in part because the prototypes shattered after fewer than 40 hits
To put the comparison of Liquid Metal to sapphire: sapphire is a known material and known process, and Apple is refining the manufacturing process to cost reduce; Liquid Metal is a wide range of alloys and processes still being defined for mechanical properties and production suitability with the added issue of expensive and mostly undeveloped production machines.
I believe he's right about the fatigue proneness of ordinary metals, which consist of crystalline domains throughout, whereas liquid metal would be amorphous, like glass, another liquid.
But I don't think he'll turn out to be right that Apple has no use for fatigue-resistant materials. I can imagine that their hoped-for (by me and a few others) iWatch stereo video glasses might have frames made from Liquid Metal, along with lenses with laminated scratch-resistant sapphire.
Of course this is a complete fantasy, and maybe far from reality. Or not.
I think rumor fatigue is a bigger problem...
The only problem for Apple is that there are competing technologies that will launch soon after. Apple will have once again been a R&D department for the rest of the trade. Once Apple and partners have ironed out the details, Samsung and company will incorporate it too, just as they followed suit with Gorilla Glass. It will have become a commodity.
Let's remember, at one time aluminum was worth more than gold because of how rare and difficult to produce it was. What was once limited to royalty, Innovations in productions soon made it affordable to the masses.