Two interesting little rumours about the next generation of Apple‘s iPhone, what we assume will be called the iPhone 5.
The first is that it will be made, at least in part, of metallic glass. The second is 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.
Read more after the jump!
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.
The thing is that glass itself, what we use to make bottles and so on, is made of metals: but metal oxides. The standard glass is silicon dioxide and yes, silicon itself is a metal. We sometimes dope this glass with other metal oxides to change the optical characteristics: thallium oxide is used in faceplates for deep sea divers and lanthanum oxide in camera lenses.
But this metallic glass/glassy metal is nothing to do with any of that for it 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.
Such glassy metals have some unusual properties but as far as a phone case is concerned nothing particularly magical. Less likely to break than plastic, almost certainly easier to recycle, won’t chip or crack in the same way but that’s about it. It’s not like we’re making Jumbo jets for half the price using a new alloy.
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.
The original such metallic glasses weren’t all that good but a company called Liquid Metal managed to get some decent recipes for alloys, zirconium/beryllium/copper nickel for example. 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.
It’s unlikely that first alloy will be used by Apple. While beryllium in an alloy doesn’t cause any problems the dust of it causes a horrible disease berylliosis. Akin to asbestosis, a particularly vile form of lung/chest cancer. As there won’t be any dust floating around of the alloy this isn’t a problem: but you can imagine someone getting the wrong end of the stick and creating a health scare out of it.
What’s much more likely is that they will use a later alloy, zirconium/copper/nickel/niobium. Those last two are actually pretty expensive metals to use but then the margins on iPhones are sufficiently large that Apple will be able to cope I’m sure.
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. -forbes.com
