Like they did with the Powerbooks ?
What was the reason? Not only it's lighter than A...It's also strong as steel
What was the reason? Not only it's lighter than A...It's also strong as steel
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Why apple does not use Titanium on the macbook?
- Thread starter DBZmusicboy01
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Altemose
macrumors G3
It looked dated and I would imagine that it would be harder to make a unibody design out of it.
Titanium scratches very easily, more so than stainless steel or aluminum, which makes it a poor choice for a laptop material. Anodized aluminum is basically coated in thin layer of sapphire crystal (aluminum oxide), so it has incredible scratch resistance compared to any other material.
whiteonline
macrumors 6502a
christarp
macrumors 6502
Quite a few reasons:
Aluminium is cheap, titanium is expensive. Aluminium is easy to work with and can be extruded, cast, drawn, machined, etc. Titanium is hard to work with.
Aluminium is also a good conductor of heat whereas titanium is once again, not.
Titanium also isn't as strong as people make it out to be, "Titanium alloys have lower specific stiffnesses than in many other structural materials such as aluminium alloys and carbon fiber."
It's simply not worth it.
Aluminium is cheap, titanium is expensive. Aluminium is easy to work with and can be extruded, cast, drawn, machined, etc. Titanium is hard to work with.
Aluminium is also a good conductor of heat whereas titanium is once again, not.
Titanium also isn't as strong as people make it out to be, "Titanium alloys have lower specific stiffnesses than in many other structural materials such as aluminium alloys and carbon fiber."
It's simply not worth it.
maflynn
macrumors Broadwell
It failed to look well after a short period of time, The finish peeled off and looked like crap.
It is stronger than steel if we only look at tensile strength. It is a much softer metal and much easier to scratch than most steel and aluminum alloys.
Titanium is also harder to form/weld/machine. They are more than likely using a laser for the speaker grills and localized heating of titanium in presence of oxygen leads to brittleness which would make some of the features you see on your computer hard to fabricate.
Add to that the fact that Titanium is several times more expensive than aluminum and you've got your answer.
venom600
macrumors 65816
Spoken like someone who never owned a TiBook. They were gorgeous but fragile. Every surface was painted so you had to be super careful not to scratch the paint. The outer rim on the base of the computer was plastic and cracked frequently, as did the titanium display hinges.
However, it's been the most influential and unsung mobile design icon of the century, imho. Virtually every premium notebook today follows it's design principles, just like the previous generation of notebooks followed the Powerbook 100 design.
dmccloud
macrumors 68040
Using current pricing, aluminum sells for $1.83/kg, while titanium is $6.20/kg. That's three times the cost just for the raw materials, and since titanium is more expensive to process and refine, that 3x price differential becomes 10-15x differential for the finished product. Plus as others have said, it's not the best material for a laptop because of its lack of stiffness and rigidity as well as its inability to conduct heat.
sb in ak
macrumors member
Yep. I owned one of those babies for several years, and even rebuilt it when I spilled water into the keyboard, frying the logic board. But the paint peeled, the plastic cracked, and the hinges really sucked too. The Unibody aluminum design is heaps better but it did all start with the TiBook.