Apple has spent 16 years on Liquid Metal and the iPhone Fold hinge is where it finally matters.

Apple has held an exclusive license to one of the strongest commercial metal alloys on the planet for almost 16 years

Eleanor Pace·Jun 2, 2026·7 min read

Apple has held an exclusive license to one of the strongest commercial metal alloys on the planet for almost 16 years, and in all that time it has shipped exactly one product made from it: the little metal pin that pops open a SIM tray.

That is the strange backdrop to the latest iPhone Fold rumor, and it is worth keeping in mind before anyone declares the wait finally over.

A new leak claims Apple will use Liquid Metal for the folding iPhone's hinge. The claim is plausible. Whether it is "confirmed," as the leaker insists, is a different question entirely.

What the leak actually says

In March 2025, supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said Apple would use liquid metal materials for key components of the iPhone Fold, naming the hinge specifically. Kuo is the most reliable name working on Apple hardware, so the claim carried weight when he made it.

Now a leaker posting as Fixed Focus Digital on Weibo says the hinge material is confirmed, and adds that a prototype has gone out to "global operators" for testing.

That second detail is where the caution starts. Fixed Focus Digital has a middling track record, and a prototype "in testing" is not the same thing as a shipping decision.

There is also the awkward timing. A separate report in May 2026 described a problematic hinge that could delay the device. If Apple is genuinely targeting a September launch, it is unlikely to still be evaluating two competing hinge designs this late in the process.

Either the troublesome hinge and the Liquid Metal hinge are the same part, or one of these reports is reading the tea leaves wrong.

2015 patent showing liquid metal being used to mod a device - Source Apple

A 16 year head start

Here is where the history matters, because it is the reason the rumor is believable at all.

In August 2010, AppleInsider revealed that Apple had signed an exclusive agreement with a California firm called Liquidmetal Technologies. The deal was structured so that Liquidmetal's intellectual property went into a special purpose subsidiary, which then granted Apple a perpetual, worldwide, exclusive license to use the alloys in consumer electronics.

The sum was never officially disclosed, but Liquidmetal paid off $10.9 million in debt the very same day the deal closed, which tells you roughly what it was worth.

The material itself came out of the California Institute of Technology. It is an amorphous metal alloy, sometimes called metallic glass, because its atoms sit in an irregular arrangement rather than the repeating crystalline structure of ordinary metals.

That irregularity is the whole point. Depending on how it is cast, the alloy runs roughly two and a half times the strength of the titanium used in consumer goods and about one and a half times the hardness of stainless steel.

It resists corrosion, and it is elastic enough to spring back to its original shape after being flexed.

Apple did not let the license lapse. It renewed the agreement in 2012, again in 2014, and again into 2016, and it kept filing patents throughout. One of them, granted in 2015 and shared with Liquidmetal Technologies, covered a method of building products layer by layer.

And then, for the most part, nothing. The only Apple hardware ever made from the material is the SIM ejection tool that used to ship in the box with iPhones.

For a company that paid millions for exclusivity and kept renewing it, that is a remarkably thin return on the investment. The likeliest explanation, floated for years, is that the SIM tool was a test, a small low risk way to keep a hand in the manufacturing process while the harder problems got solved somewhere out of view.

Concept Rendering of the iPhone Fold Hinge

Why a hinge is the use that finally fits

This isn't the first time the rumor mill has promised a Liquid Metal Apple product, and every previous time it failed to materialize. A Liquid Metal iPhone chassis has been five minutes away for over a decade. So why take this version of the story any more seriously?

Because for once the material's strengths line up with a real engineering problem rather than a marketing wish.

A folding phone hinge has to survive being flexed tens of thousands of times without fatiguing, stay rigid enough to hold the two halves in alignment, and accomplish all of it in as little space and weight as possible.

An alloy that is stronger than titanium, springs back to shape after bending, and can be cast into complex forms is close to a tailor made answer. The very elasticity that made Liquid Metal useful for tennis rackets and flip phone hinges a generation ago is precisely the property a foldable needs most.

That is the real difference between this rumor and the parade of Liquid Metal casing rumors that preceded it.

A unibody Liquid Metal iPhone was always a solution looking for a problem, because aluminum and titanium already handle that job well. A hinge that has to open and close hundreds of thousands of times is a problem looking for exactly this solution.

Reasons to stay skeptical anyway

None of that makes the leak true, and a few things are worth holding onto.

The named source on the latest report is not a strong one, and the most load bearing part of the claim, that the material is now confirmed rather than merely planned, rests entirely on that source.

The element that deserves trust is the part Kuo reported more than a year ago, that Liquid Metal is the intended hinge material. The newer "confirmed and in testing" framing adds urgency without adding much in the way of credibility.

There is also the question of exclusivity. It is not publicly clear whether Apple still holds the exclusive rights it bought in 2010, given that the last confirmed extension ran only into 2016.

After this much continued effort and patent activity, it is reasonable to assume the relationship survived in some form, but that is an assumption, not a fact.

Finally, there is the related claim, from leaker Digital Chat Station in May 2026, that Apple's hinge design could become an industry standard and even migrate to a future folding iPad.

That is a tidy story, and tidy stories about unreleased Apple products deserve a raised eyebrow.

Apple does not typically hand its hardware breakthroughs to competitors, and a part the company spent the better part of two decades preparing is an odd candidate to start that habit with.

The longer view

If the iPhone Fold ships in September with a Liquid Metal hinge, it will rank among the longest deferred payoffs in recent Apple history, a bet placed in 2010 that finally found the product it had been waiting for.

That would fit a familiar pattern. Apple has a habit of acquiring a capability long before it has a use for it, sitting on it through years of skepticism, and deploying it only when the rest of the design catches up.

But the honest position today is narrower than the headlines suggest. What is well supported is that Apple wants a Liquid Metal hinge and has spent 16 years getting ready to build one.

What is not yet supported is that the decision is final, or that a prototype in testing is the same thing as a product on a shelf.

The material has been almost in an Apple device for nearly two decades. It would be fitting, and very much in character, for the foldable to be the thing that finally closes the gap. It would be just as in character for it to take one more year.

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