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.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
