Why Does IPhone Use Zirconia Ceramics?

Some people think that if Apple iPhone uses the zirconium oxide ceramic material, then the equipment production costs increase, the final manifestation of the iPhone will further increase the price. However, according to the analysis, if producing zirconia ceramic to meet the market demand according to the current iPhone 7 body design, then the cost is lower than the current iPhone 7 aluminum body, The latter need to go through smelting, nano-precision CNC machining and other steps.

Therefore, iPhone, even including iPad, MacBook Pro in the future, including all Apple devices have continued to improve the foundation. The reason is simple: Zirconia ceramics are particularly useful for modern computing devices.

Why does Apple use zirconia ceramics? From the material’s own point of view, the reasons are:
-strength
-signal penetration
– Heat conduction / heat dissipation – Alumina / Aluminum nitride
– Scratch and wear resistance
– The difficulty of production

From the current situation, for aluminum CNC machining, Apple has reached a certain level of depth, and in the future, the availability of this material on the iPhone has reached its limit. Apple wants to make the device thinner and thinner, but as long as they continue to use the material, Apple’s goal is even more difficult to achieve because its bending strength has reached its limit. And as long as Apple integrates more chips in the device and uses a more powerful processor, the heat generated by the device is greater and the thermal performance of the device is higher, which makes Apple more one reason to use zirconia ceramics.

Starting with the iPhone 5, Apple abandoned the stainless steel on the iPhone 4S and instead used anodized aluminum to forge the fuselage. The result was a lighter, thinner, more metallic, gorgeous, color-rich generation iPhone product. At that time, in addition to Apple, the smart phone industry, few manufacturers will use this material on its equipment. In contrast, aluminum material has widespread use on smartphones and Apple has no particularly big presence in this regard. In other words, now the gap between other manufacturers and Apple is getting smaller and smaller, Apple must accelerate the pace of their own development. Perhaps we can analyze many reasons why Apple must use new materials, but one of the most important reasons is that Apple has to use the new materials to produce iPhone, to highlight their unique.