Yea, ok maybe Sword spends his weekends beating plowshares into blades. ;-) If he does, more power to him. The world neds more people who know how to make fine weapons.
My beef here wasn’t about the liquid part of the technology. I can see the upside to that straight away. The issue I had was the idea that Apple was solving some strength or ding resistance problem with this material. There really isn’t any problem with aluminum in this regard, and there is always titanium for the yuppie poseurs who want to one-up the rest of us mere mortals packing aluminum-cased Macbook Pro’s.
FWIW, I’m an Apple user, own two Macs, wife owns one, we will be buying more in the future. So I’m not some Apple basher, but I’ve been around Apple since the Apple II, so Steve’s Reality Distortion Field rarely works on me any more.
The one downside of this type of material I’ve read about is that the lack of plastic deformation means that you get little to no warning before yield failure. It seems like the ultimate in a work-hardening failure.
I could foresee a problem with this property in a small widget that gets dropped repeatedly, then one day the case shatters. An aluminum or stainless case would dent or scratch, but not shatter on the (eg) 50th drop.
The other issue I could foresee is in laptops with hard disks. If one dropped a laptop encased in this type of material such that it bounced really well, that’s going to drastically increase the G-loads a hard disk needs to withstand w/o crashing the head.
Dave, I think Apple's purpose here is less esthetic than practical. Apple will be able to reduce the thickness of the walls of the cases, increasing the volume of the inside space, allowing more room for battery capacity, giving longer operational time before recharging.
I could foresee a problem with this property in a small widget that gets dropped repeatedly, then one day the case shatters. An aluminum or stainless case would dent or scratch, but not shatter on the (eg) 50th drop.
The other issue I could foresee is in laptops with hard disks. If one dropped a laptop encased in this type of material such that it bounced really well, that’s going to drastically increase the G-loads a hard disk needs to withstand w/o crashing the head.
Unfortunately, I haven't seen anything that speaks to the ductility of this material or its ability to withstand strain past its yield point or its fatigue resistance. All of the things that you speculate may be true but if it were so it would be a terrible problem that would be obvious enough to cause Apple not to be interested. They already have built cases of titanium and aluminum so they know the capabilities of these materials as well as the cost of manufacturing using them, so I give them more credit on this matter than you are willing to go as of yet.
Perhaps I will get off my lazy butt and actually look into this question yet.