Titanium?

[davidg4781]

I’m watching some older keynotes and Steve’s talking about bringing the sex with the power.

Do y’all think we’d get a higher end MBP made from titanium? TiMBP? He’s saying it’s lighter than aluminum, but is it stronger? Brittle? I want to say I had a titanium case for my Palm Trēo and it chipped once when I dropped it. But that could’ve been magnesium.

 

[dmccloud]

Titanium is a brittle material compared to aluminum, and those macs had known issues relating to the hinges for the screen breaking. The other issue is that since paint does not easily bond to a titanium surface, many of those Macs had major issues with the paint rubbing off in spots all over the machines, especially on the corners of the devices. With the aluminum bodies, the color can be baked into the aluminum during the anodization process, which is why the aluminum MacBooks do not have significant issues with scratches exposing "raw" aluminum."

 

[ArPe]

Titanium isn’t good for unibody and you can’t get enough of it for unibody at a good price. The price of titanium would increase if Apple caused a demand for the metal.

As @dmccloud says above, it was very difficult to paint or anodize the PowerBook G4 Titanium. The paint would flake off or pores would appear on the palm rest caused by skin moisture.

 

[dmccloud]

Here's an article that goes into some more detail regarding the issues Apple had with the titanium PowerBooks...

20 Macs for 2020: #5 – Titanium PowerBook G4 – Six Colors

Six Colors by Jason Snell, Dan Moren and friends

sixcolors.com

 

[mr_roboto]

Titanium is a brittle material compared to aluminum, and those macs had known issues relating to the hinges for the screen breaking. The other issue is that since paint does not easily bond to a titanium surface, many of those Macs had major issues with the paint rubbing off in spots all over the machines, especially on the corners of the devices.

Titanium isn't necessarily brittle - that depends on the alloy and especially how pure the metal is. High purity titanium (and alloys) can be very tough.

However, that didn't matter because what broke on TiBooks wasn't the titanium, it was plastic. The titanium parts were two stamped sheets: the bottom cover and the palm rest/speaker grille. These were not the primary structure of the computer, they were really more like skin on the frame. The frame was a big ring of some kind of fiber reinforced plastic. If you look at a picture of the TiBook, it's the whiter substance providing some visual contrast from the silvery paint used on the titanium. (Both colors were paint, not the actual material color, so paint chipping affected the plastic too.)

The mechanical stresses associated with the screen hinges went through that plastic frame, and it would frequently break at the hinge attach points. Another weak point was the front of the machine, where they molded a giant slot for the DVD drive into the plastic. And another was the hinges themselves, which were metal behind painted plastic housings, but prone to breaking. Basically, everything broke all the time except for the actual titanium parts.