The rationale behind Apple’s unibody aluminum housings isn’t just aesthetic appeal: it’s also sturdiness. Unibody aluminum adds a bit of heft to an ultra-thin Apple portable, but it makes that device also harder to break despite its thinness.
There’s always room for improvement though, and if a new patent published by the USPTO is anything to go by, future iPads might trade in their aluminum shell for ultra-strong carbon fiber.
The new patent application is for “Reinforced Device Housing” and it describes an outer casing for an electronic device composed of “layered fiber-in-matrix type material,” .e. carbon fiber re-inforced polymer. As you can see from the illustration, they seem to use the back shell of the iPad as a patent illustration.
A carbon fiber iPad? Sounds plenty sexy to us.
