Several months ago I wrote a piece about the potential use of Liquidmetal in the next-generation iPhone, set to debut in 2017. In my article, I discussed some of the rumors.

On the latest episode of ATP (Accidental Tech Podcast) John Siracusa, Casey Liss, and Marco Arment speculate on the next material Apple might use. This comes on the back of a great piece Greg Koenig, an industrial designer and co-founder of Luma Labs, wrote on why Apple is very unlikely to use ceramic in the next-generation iPhone, mostly due to the issues with production:

More bluntly, not only is Apple not using any new ceramics manufacturing technology in the new Watch Edition, they are not even utilizing the primary patent the original Quora article pins most of it’s extrapolations on – that patent described a vacuum liquid slurry casting process for ceramics. The Edition watch uses a very common pressed powder forming method. In short, not only does the ceramic Watch quash any hopes of a ceramic iPhone, I think it actually indicates that Apple isn’t chasing down ceramics for iPhone production any time on the horizon.

I agree with Koenig. Apple’s use of ceramic in the Watch is not indicative of the company using it on the iPhone. Apple claims it takes nine days to make one of those shiny white ceramic cases for the Apple Watch Edition. There’s simply no way to efficiently scale that up to making over 200 million iPhones a year.

That being said, I’ve been digging around and I think there’s more evidence suggesting Apple is getting close to using Liquid Metal, perhaps for the next iPhone.

Here’s what I’ve found:

First, in an interview on Business Insider in 2012, Atakan Peker, one of the inventors of Liquidmetal, believed that Apple would likely use Liquidmetal in a “breakthrough product.” He also said that Apple would likely spend between $300 and $500 million to mature the technology and that it would take roughly three to five years. Five years from 2012 is, wait for it, 2017.