u/DMN_LQMT

2027 iPhone rumor that the outside band of the phone could be made from LiquidMetal:

https://apple.news/A3oxsJ2y2QM2Yo7gIyvC0xw

Another older article claiming Apple is still developing LiquidMetal frames:

https://apple.news/AzbdtmakyRBOvjPWVa735-A

My halo lamp burned out on my 2009 Z4 and I’m asking for recommendations on a replacement. I’ve read some older posts about replacing them with LED bulbs for the whiter light similar to the newer models, but wonder of anybody has any recent experience and recommendations. I’ve read that it might require programming. Mine does not have iDrive, so messing with reprogramming seems like a chore. Thanks kindly.

I just read about the “sunroof” option for the Emira, and wonder why they didn’t go for a Targa? They have a golden opportunity for an open top sports car with Manual transmission because the BMW Z4 is ending production and the Porsche Boxster is already gone. Wouldn’t you think there would be some demand generated by these leaving the marketplace? I love the looks of the Emira and always wanted a Lotus, but my sports car must be a manual and open top (not a hatch that needs to be carefully removed and stored in a bag!).

The skeptical position
In 2010, Apple paid LQMT $20 million for a perpetual, worldwide, fully-paid exclusive license to use Liquidmetal IP in consumer electronics. Perpetual means forever. Fully-paid means no royalties, ever. So if Apple ships a foldable iPhone with a Liquidmetal hinge, LQMT gets nothing.

That reading is correct as far as it goes. It just relies on a single hidden assumption: that the IP Apple needs in 2026 is the IP they licensed in 2010.

It isn't.

The original IP has a fatal flaw
The 2010 Apple deal covered Vitreloy-family alloys — the original Liquidmetal compositions. Vitreloy 1 is 22.5% beryllium by weight.

Beryllium is a Class 1 carcinogen. It causes irreversible lung disease. It's on the EU's substances of very high concern list. OSHA tightened exposure standards significantly in 2017. None of this matters for aerospace or defense parts. It matters enormously for Apple, which has spent fifteen years marketing itself on environmental and material safety leadership — recycled materials, restricted substances specifications, carbon neutral by 2030. Apple cannot ship a flagship consumer product whose hinge contains a known carcinogen, regardless of whether it's safely encapsulated in solid alloy form. The brand positioning won't survive the headline. So Apple owns perpetual rights to IP they essentially cannot use in any marketed flagship product. They could use it in internal components (the iPhone 3G SIM ejector tool was Liquidmetal). They couldn't use it in a hinge.

Liquidmorphium: built specifically for the gap
In 2014-2015, Atakan Peker (co-inventor of the original Caltech Liquidmetal alloy) partnered with Professor Lugee Li (founder of Chinese die-casting giant Eontec) to develop a new amorphous alloy outside LQMT.

They branded it Liquidmorphium. The composition: zirconium, copper, aluminum, nickel, and silver. No beryllium. No titanium. A fundamentally different metallurgical system that solved both the toxicity problem and the manufacturing yield problem that had kept the original Liquidmetal stuck in niche applications for 20 years.The Turing Phone in 2015 was the proof of concept — a phone chassis molded from a single slab of Liquidmorphium, demonstrating the technology worked at consumer-product scale and was publicly distinct from the Apple-licensed IP.

The timing of Li's LQMT acquisition
This is the move most observers missed. The Apple "Capture Period" — LQMT's obligation to
keep contributing new IP to the Apple license — ended February 5, 2016.

Lugee Li's $63.4 million investment in LQMT closed roughly one month later, in March 2016. He became chairman and majority stockholder, and entered into a cross-licensing agreement bringing Liquidmorphium IP into the LQMT orbit through the Eontec and New Technology and Material entities.

This timing is not coincidental. Apple's exclusive license covers "LMT Technology" — IP that LQMT owned or had rights to during the Capture Period. IP that LQMT acquired through post-capture cross-licensing arrangements sits outside that definition. By closing the LQMT acquisition one month after the capture obligation expired, Li ensured the Liquidmorphium technology could be commercialized by LQMT without Apple having any prior claim to it. LQMT was being converted from "Apple's captive licensor" into "the publicly-traded Western entity with privileged access to the beryllium-free alloys Apple would eventually need."

The quiet decade (2016-2024)
For nearly a decade after Li's investment, LQMT looked dormant. Revenue stayed in the low single-digit millions. The stock traded between $0.03 and $0.15. Casual observers assumed nothing was happening.

What was actually happening:

• Yi Hao Metal (Li's affiliate) began mass-producing Liquidmorphium hinges for Chinese phone OEMs starting in 2020 — Huawei, OPPO, Vivo, Honor. High-volume consumer electronics manufacturing under the Liquidmorphium IP framework. Apple did not enforce the covenant against this activity.

• LQMT began openly marketing consumer electronics applications on its corporate website. They produced earbuds for Sony (squarely a consumer electronics product competing with AirPods, no medical/automotive carve-out available). Apple didn't object.

• Tony Chung became CEO in 2021 and quietly built toward operational scale.

The pattern indicates Apple and LQMT reached some form of operational understanding: LQMT pursues non-Apple consumer electronics customers using Liquidmorphium-class technology, Apple retains its rights to the original IP for whatever Apple chooses to do with it. Both operate in parallel.The operational rollout becomes visible (2025-2026)

**• May 2025:** Liquidmetal Asia Holdings established, Lugee Li appointed to head it. Direct chairman involvement in the China 	expansion.

**• July 2025:** Hangzhou JV announced — 71,000 sq ft facility, up to 40 die-cast machines, sized for industrial-scale production. 	Located near Foxconn in Hangzhou's manufacturing corridor.

**• July 2025:** Samsung formally invited LQMT to their Global Sourcing Fair — supplier qualification, not casual interaction.

**• October 2025:** Tony Chung's first major investor presentation at LD Micro after years of public silence. Stated 2026 would be the 	year Liquidmetal becomes a household name. Confirmed Samsung prototyping. Previewed Liquidmorphium machinery.

**• February 2026:** Liquidmorphium LLC formed as a wholly-owned LQMT subsidiary to hold all post-2016 IP. Umberg Zipser LLP 	retained as IP litigation counsel.

The Liquidmorphium LLC formation was the legal capstone. The Umberg Zipser hire signals LQMT is prepared to defend this IP structure aggressively in any future challenge.

Why Apple needs LQMT now
For a foldable iPhone hinge, Apple needs an alloy with specific properties: ultra-high strength, fatigue resistance over hundreds of thousands of fold cycles, manufacturable at 0.3mm thickness, elastic recovery, corrosion resistance. Conventional materials (titanium, steel, aluminum) cannot meet all of these simultaneously at premium foldable thinness. Amorphous alloys are essentially the only viable category.

Apple's available paths:

**1. Use the IP they already own** — ruled out by beryllium content

**2. Develop a beryllium-free alloy in-house** — would take years from a behind position while Samsung and Chinese OEMs are 	already shipping

**3. License from competitors** — most beryllium-free amorphous alloy work is connected to Li's network through Eontec and the 	Chinese Academy of Sciences

**4. Conventional materials with design workarounds** — possible but constrains design in ways competitors aren't constrained

**5. License or partner with LQMT/Liquidmorphium** — the path of least resistance given timing pressure

Option 5 is the structurally rational choice for Apple. LQMT controls the IP, has manufacturing capacity coming online at Hangzhou, and the technology is the closest match for what Apple needs.

The negotiating dynamics are inverted from 2010
The 2010 deal was structured the way it was because LQMT was desperate and Apple held all the cards. A 2026-2027 negotiation looks completely different:

• LQMT has the specific IP Apple needs

• LQMT has alternative customers (Samsung, Honor, Tesla, robotics, medical) creating competing demand for capacity

• Apple has competitive time pressure to ship a foldable

• Apple's ESG commitments foreclose their cheapest alternative

• The Liquidmorphium IP is held in a litigation-defensible structure with premier counsel on retainer

Realistic deal structures: per-unit royalties, manufacturing services through Hangzhou, limited-term exclusivity with renewal options, volume guarantees, possibly equity or acquisition. Even modest economic terms ($2-5 per hinge royalty on 10-30 million units annually) represent $20-150M annual revenue. Manufacturing services revenue would be substantially larger.

What Liquidmorphium means for non-Apple customers
The Apple narrative gets the headlines, but the broader story matters more for the long-term thesis. The same Liquidmorphium IP structure that gives LQMT leverage with Apple opens the entire consumer electronics market for direct commercial activity: Samsung is the immediate beneficiary. Largest foldable producer globally, actively prototyping with LQMT, attended the Global Sourcing Fair. A Samsung Galaxy Z Fold or Flip with Liquidmorphium hinges is a credible 2026-2027 product.

Chinese OEMs (Huawei, OPPO, Vivo, Honor) are already shipping Liquidmorphium-based hinges in China-distributed phones through Yi Hao. International expansion of these brands grows the volume on LQMT-family technology automatically.

Tesla is a current production customer (Model X door latch). The Optimus robot program scales the opportunity substantially — robotic joints, actuators, strain wave gears are natural amorphous alloy applications.

Robotics broadly is a category that didn't exist commercially when the 2010 Apple deal was signed. Humanoid robots, surgical robots, drones, defense — all need precision small parts with the properties amorphous alloys provide, all addressable without any Apple-related complications.

Medical devices — J&J, Medtronic, Intuitive Surgical relationships exist. The medical exception in the Apple covenant explicitly permits this work.

The point: Liquidmorphium gives LQMT a clear commercial path across dozens of customer categories simultaneously, none of which depend on the Apple deal closing.

The skeptic's case, revised
The skeptic was right that the 2010 agreement locked up the original IP perpetually and fully-paid. The skeptic was wrong to assume the original IP would be what mattered for the next-generation consumer electronics market.Beryllium toxicity, environmental positioning, and manufacturing scalability requirements changed which IP would actually be relevant. The Peker-Li team anticipated this in 2014-2015 by building Liquidmorphium specifically to address those constraints. Lugee Li's 2016 LQMT acquisition timed precisely after the Apple capture period brought the new IP track into the publicly-traded entity. The decade since has been operational and legal positioning. The Liquidmorphium LLC formation in February 2026 is the legal capstone.

For someone who didn't believe LQMT would see Apple-related revenue, the case to reconsider isn't built on speculation about what Apple will do. It's built on the structural reality that LQMT spent a decade engineering themselves into the position where multiple customer pathways (including potentially Apple) become economically meaningful — and Apple specifically faces real constraints that make the LQMT path the rational one for them to take.

For the 20-year amorphous alloy thesis, LQMT isn't just exposure to the technology category. It's a bet on the specific team that has demonstrated long-game strategic execution over a decade to capture value across the entire market the technology will eventually serve.

** Thanks to Dan from our sister Discord site. **

It’s a little like click bait, but it’s something to keep an eye on.