How Much Titanium Is Really in the Titanium Apple Card?

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Apple’s new credit card, released in August, has been praised for its approach to privacy, for features that make it easy to see where your money is going, and for its minimalist aesthetic. “It’s the most beautifully designed card ever,” Apple’s Jennifer Bailey said when the company announced the card in March.

A support document for the card, which reads if it were the care instructions for a piece of fine jewelry, boasts of the laser etching used to imprint customers’ names, a “multi-layer coating process” designed to give the card a pleasing white matte finish, and the card’s material—titanium—a fact that’s mentioned 13 times in the document.

But how much titanium? To find out, a Bloomberg Businessweek reporter sent his card to a mineralogist, University of California, Berkeley professor Hans-Rudolf Wenk. Professor Wenk used what’s known as a scanning electron microscope, or SEM device, to determine the card’s atomic makeup. He found that the answer is about 90%. The rest of the card is aluminum, according to the analysis.

The Apple Card isn’t the first credit card to be made with metal, as both American Express and Chase offer their own heavy cards, but Apple’s stands out, given the company’s push to market its metallic essence. It’s also Apple’s first product made primarily from the strong, lightweight metal since the PowerBook laptop was discontinued 15 years ago, and it could be a manufacturing test for new titanium Apple Watches launching this fall.

This story is from Bloomberg Businessweek’s special issue The Elements.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Max Chafkin at mchafkin@bloomberg.net

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