Comment by gnatolf
10 hours ago
'liquid metal' sounds cool. It's probably a metallic glass. I super dislike that it seemingly will be synonymous with the brand name by Apple even though that stuff has been around for decades.
Not that there are particularly many places where this is used - mostly because it really is just very expensive. In the awesome position that Apple is in, economic feasibility is so much easier to achieve, with like tens of millions of guaranteed parts to be preduced.
It's not metallic glass. It's an injectable, super strong alloy. You can manufacture things like you're using injection molded plastic.
To be honest, British also has an injectable stainless steel, but its application domain is much more different.
Are you sure? Liquid metal was the name of a bulk metallic glass. There were usb flash drives using it as a case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidmetal. Wikipedia lists apple licensing this technology.
Metal injection molding is also a thing but I haven't heard it called liquid metal. Usually its MIM.
Shoot, the article even outright says
>Liquidmetal has also notably been used for making the SIM ejector tool of some iPhone 3Gs made by Apple Inc., shipped in the US.
Honestly, I didn't know that "amorphous metal alloy" is also called metallic glass. I computed it to something else entirely. So you're right on that front.
MIM is something else, that's right, but properties of Liquid Glass allows it to be injection molded AFAIK.
MIM process is completely different from casting Liquid Metal. MIM generally starts as a powder and heated and molded, Liquid Metal can be just "melted and molded".
I have a stainless steel razor built with MIM. Has no resemblence to SanDisk Titanium's feel (which I also have).
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