Apple Patents LiquidMetal And Sapphire Mobile Device Construction Method

 
Apple just announced some exciting news. They have just decided to continue their exclusive licensing deal with LiquidMetal. If you don’t already know LiquidMetal is a fairly exotic metal alloy. Why? because it behaves like plastic. And the best news was that today it was granted a patent by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for use of that material combined with glass displays. This is including those made by sapphire.

The patent describes the process of bonding a display to a LiquidMetal device case, which could form the basis for a LiquidMetal-built future iPhone, iPad or iWatch.

Just a bit of back history, in 2013 an approved patent was speculating that Apple might incorporate liquid metals into its handsets and tablets…which would be amazing. Then the partner company pushing production is Liquidmetal Technologies….also amazing. And then Apple bought the rights to its patents back way back in 2010.

By renewing the patents Apple gives us fresh evidence that they’ve been toying around with sapphire displays, as it describes a method for coating sapphire displays to make them resistant to oily fingerprints.

Apple first used such oil-resistant coatings with its iPhone 3GS, whose display was much smaller than what the iPhone 6′s display will likely be and wasn’t made of anything as fancy as sapphire.