Apple’s Mystery Liquidmetal Product Revealed… [Competition Answer]

There’s been a lot of speculation that Apple will use space-age Liquidmetal alloys to make morphing iPhones or other sci-fi technology, but the company has already used the exotic alloy — and in the most unlikely place.

The pin for ejecting the iPhone 3G SIM card is made from Liquidmetal alloy. Photo: Leander Kahney

The pin for ejecting the iPhone 3G SIM card is made from Liquidmetal, an extremely hard and light metal alloy, according to Atakan Peker, the alloy’s co-inventor, who spoke to CultofMac.com last week.

Peker recognized the metal when he opened his iPhone 3G. It’s as hard as nails and has a distinctive color and feel.

“That’s my metal,” he said. “I recognized it immediately. Take it from an expert, that’s Liquidmetal.”

CultofMac.com has independently confirmed that Apple used Liquidmetal. Apple sourced the part from Liquidmetal Technologies as a test of the company’s manufacturing capabilities. Apple has a very strict policy that normally requires at least two separate sources for parts. The policy is insurance against supply problems like factories burning down.

But because Liquidmetal is state-of-the-art, there weren’t two sources of Liquidmetal parts. Liquidmetal Technologies didn’t even have two production lines. Apple decided to source a non-essential part: a SIM card ejector pin. The pin was also a good test of Liquidmetal’s unique properties — it must be strong and inflexible.

“It is practically unbendable by hand unless you want to hurt or cut your fingers,” Peker said.

Peker co-invented Liquidmetal in 1992 with engineering professor Bill Johnson when he was a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology. He was the first scientist to make Liquidmetal, a form of bulk metallic glass, in the lab.

Peker subsequently went on to become VP of research at Liquidmetal Technology, a Caltech spinoff set up to commercialize the technology. Liquidmetal is the commercial name of a series of bulk metallic glasses developed at Caltech. Apple has signed an exclusive agreement to use the company’s IP in consumer electronic products.

It’s not clear how long Apple sourced Liquidmetal for SIM ejector pins. European models of the iPhone 3G have ordinary steel pins, and maybe also those shipped to Asia, Peker said. ”They’re not Liquidmetal,” he said. “They bend like paperclips.”

DON'T MISS

The iPhone 4 doesn’t ship with a SIM card pin.

Congratulations to reader @crosby who was the first to correctly name the Liquidmetal part in last week’s competition. @crosby wins a brand new Magic Trackpad.

35 comments »

About the author

Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac, and author of three books about technology culture: Inside Steve’s Brain, the New York Times bestseller about Steve Jobs; Cult of Mac; and Cult of iPod. Leander has written for Wired, MacWeek, Scientific American, and The Guardian in London. Follow Leander on Twitter @lkahney and Facebook.

(sorry, you need Javascript to see this e-mail address)| Read more posts by Leander Kahney.

Posted in Apple, Cult of Mac, News |

Jerry
It all makes sense now. A very good competition… had me thinking for a good one hour and still guessed wrong (metallic underside of the magic mouse).
Lynch
why doesn’t the iphone 4 come with it? does the ipad? do they expect us to all find a paperclip (small size) and do it ourselves? I thought it WAS a necessary part, they COULD go without it, but it’s sure not wanted.
Larry
Here in the UK, the iphone 4 DOES ship with a SIM card pin. It’s behind the black ‘case’ containing the instructions…just like in the previous versions.
pse
Here in France also, the iPhone 4 comes with a pin extractor.
Lynch
How would you all in europe rate the durability of the pins?
JP
I was having a discussion about screen scratches with a floor sales guy a few months back at the Apple store. I was shopping cases for my iPad. I showed him the damage I had caused putting my phone in my pocket with a folded piece of sandpaper. (Yes, stupid, lots of tiny scratches) He showed me his screen with one fairly dramatic scratch. He then admitted to trying to scratch his screen with a number of things, keys, nails, etc. after seeing the same on YouTube.
“What finally made that?” I asked.
He held up the SIM pin hanging on his ID lanyard with a grimace.
Caleo
I’ve got a Cruzer Titanium drive that has a liquidmetal casing — I can confirm that it scratches glass (just tried it on my desk, heh).
Very cool stuff, the drive is virtually crushproof, I wager it could handle a day in the middle of a freeway getting run over by cars and still be functional.
danb
Is it possible to differentiate the LiquidMetal pin from a steel one just by sight? My UK sourced iPhone 4 pin has ‘CHINA’ etched on one side, I’d hazard a guess that this was achieved by laser.
Does the genuine LiquidMetal pin have an incription at all?
Greg
/rant mode on
Arrgghhh! When will writers quit using the term ‘space-age technology’ Hell, we’ve been in the space age since the early 1960′s. Space age is nothing new, it’s more than 40 years old.
/rant mode off
Larry
Just compared the SIM pins of both my iphone 4 and iphone 3G. The iphone 4 SIM pin DOES look special…shiny and very hard (I couldn’t bend it) and it certainly has an inscription on it, while the one that came with the 3G is definitely steel…it’s ‘soft’ and bendable.
http://www.talkingfuture.com martin_tf
Doh, I was going to say that and then went with the plugs because of the US only clue.
Lynch
@danb my 3GS sim pin has china on it. And did the lack of sim pin for iPhone 4 turn out to be untrue? I don’t have one
Susan
Only in the US does the iPhone not ship with a sim card pin. Everywhere else includes it.
Vertti
Very nice competion! Congratulations for the winner! :)
http://www.ravenatic.co.uk Ravenatic
the iPhone 4 does come with a sim ejector tool in the UK!
http://www.simplycite.com Benoit Leblanc
The iPhone 4 is also shipped with a microSIM ejector tool in Canada.
Normo
OMG people – get out more!
Barbarossa
Apple now takes a huge block of aluminum and machines away 90% of it to make a body for the MacBook Pro or the Mac Mini. Of course, the waste metal is recycled but the machining takes time and energy. Using the LiquidMetal alloys allows the same parts to be cast in bulk like so many plastic spoons. However, Apple probably won’t do this for larger components due to the added weight of the alloy. Other than Zirconium, it can contain Titanium, Copper, Nickel and sometimes Aluminum or Niobium.
Aluminum dents easily. The LiquidMetal alloys are very springy, not only harder to deform but less likely to leave a permanent dent, so although it would make great case, people would object to the excess weight unless the case could be made even thinner. That is a possibility.
The alloys themselves are not that expensive, just the licensing, and Apple has already paid for that. The metal is easy to cast at a relatively low temperature and unlike other cast metals (Aluminum, Magnesium, Zinc, & other whitemetal alloys) the finished casting is very strong and very hard. Because the alloy is made of atoms of widely dissimilar sizes, a crystal structure cannot form as the metal cools. It ends up as an amorphous soild like glass. Without a crystal lattice there are no weak points to easily fail or to propagate cracks.
Apple also has a patent for parts (casings, mostly) made of ceramics which are not only very hard and durable but totally transparent to radio frequency waves (RF) allowing signals to go through the case.
The best of both worlds is to have a part made of a lightweight porous closed-cell ceramic and then to fill the spaces with a LiquidMetal alloy (think of a brick soaking up molten aluminum and then cooling.) This metal-reinforced ceramic would be literally bulletproof. Tiny parts could be press-formed from a ceramic paste, fired, and then filled with the alloy giving lightweight but immensely strong parts that were also corrosion resistant. Think hinges, handles, buttons, antennas, cases, &c.
Atilla
This is classic intelligence misdirection.
Paul
You Appl€Tards are so lame!! No European-designed phone that existed in the 10 years before the arrival of the Jesus phone ever were designed so badly that they required such a stupid little fiddly “SIM ejector”!
Intosh
Wow. Just wow. Like the guy above said. GET OUT MORE, people!
http://netputing.com netputing
I can confirm that my iPhone 4 from Rogers (Canada) does come with a super hard (read unbendable) sim extractor. I guess it must be still made from LiquidMetal or some very hard metal.
Rob
iPhone 4 in Japan comes with SIM ejector tool. (Don’t know or care what it’s made from though).
Ted
Is it compatible with a 128K Mac?
MarkG
No one seems to comment on WHY you don’t get an iP4 extractor pin in the USA when everybody else does? Intriguing. Or may be I need to get out more too!
http://www.dereth.org Dereth
Hmmz… I have here 2 SIM ejectors that look quite the same… one is CHINA and the other is TAIWAN…
How do you tell any of them are liquidmetal?
TDP
iPhone 4 in the Netherlands comes with a SIM card pin and it bends, took me ages to actually pull out the SIM holder itself and bent the PIN (at one point I thought it would snap after a few attempts)
Dubious claim iro LiquidMetal, sounds more like a bit of trumpet blowing for the sake of it.
Diegaulle
Mine ist bent and it happened in my jeans pocket. Maybe it´s my balls are made of adamantium?
dave
lol @ all the haters posting on here..
you obviously read all the nonsense comments so you’re just as bored as the rest of us!
why bother with the slamming comments at all?
that seems, to me, like more of a waste of time than anything!
Hercules
My pin is made from Kryptonite – I feel weak when I touch it.
http://www.facebook.com/dingbat99 Alex Harrison
“The iPhone 4 doesn’t ship with a SIM card pin.”
err yeah it does!
Chickin lil
He probably means the iPhone 4 for Verizon
xmassausages
i didnt get a sim card pin with my iphone 4
xmassausages
i didnt get a sim card pin with my iphone 4
xmassausages
i didnt get a sim card pin with my iphone 4