Tim Worstall reports for Forbes that Apple’s next-gen iPhone, “will be made, at least in part, of metallic glass” and “that it will arrive in October. Let’s deal with the easy one first, the arrival date. Rather than the previously assumed summer launch it will be later. The basic reason is that Qualcomm, makers of some of the necessary chips, cannot ramp up production fast enough, thus the delay.”
“The second is more complicated: metallic glass is an odd material and many will get this wrong. A possibly more accurate description would be glassy metal,” Worstall reports. “But this metallic glass/glassy metal… is made of the pure metals, not the oxides. Here the ‘glass’ part is referring to its amorphous nature. Metals, as they cool, grow crystalline structures within them. Only small but there will be a lot of them, spread through the metal. This is often desirable and sometimes not.”
“So, researchers have for many years looked at making metals without such crystalline structures: that’s what the ‘glass’ part here refers to. The method used was to cool the molten metal at millions of degrees per second (that’s the rate, obviously the metals are not millions of degrees cooler at the end of one second). This gives us that piece of metal with no internal crystals as they’ve not had time to form,” Worstall reports. “Oh, and don’t be fooled by the ‘glass’ part of this. They are opaque, not transparent, so they won’t be used for the screen.”
Worstall reports, “The original such metallic glasses weren’t all that good but a company called Liquidmetal [LQMT] managed to get some decent recipes for alloys… These didn’t need cooling at that super high rate and it is also possible to mould them into interesting shapes. Apple we know has a licence to use these alloys in consumer electronics… For anyone who is interested in seeing what this metallic glass is like see if you can get hold of the special little tool that Apple hands out with the iPhone3 for removing the SIM card. That’s made of it and they deliberately made it out of this metallic glass to see how it fared out in the real world.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
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