On 2 March 2011, Steve Jobs presented iPad2, Apple’s brand new product, but don’t you worry; this will not be the Zillionth blog commenting on the merits of Apple’s new tablet; a lot of tech blogs have already done that very well.
Our primary interest in the Ipad has nothing to do with the animated tournaments of Angry Birds going on around the office!
(By the way, Rovio Mobile, the producers of the game have just joined Birdlife in an interesting campaign for the conservation of the most endangered species of birds.) In fact, our interest sparks from the fact that Apple decided to replace the controversial case, by a cover made of… Guess what? – Polyurethane!
As you can see from the official picture above, it comes in many colours; one can even spot the blue, green and orange (in this order) of our own Polyurethanes campaign logo, which is a complete coincidence, an exciting one but a coincidence none the less.
The versatility of polyurethanes was probably one of the reasons Apple picked polyurethanes for the Ipad2 cover, both allowing it to protect the screen with a rather hard surface and to be flexible enough to be folded in various positions, as can be seen on this video. Polyurethane can also be very light and thin; so many characteristics sought by Apple after many complaints over the previous case.
We were also quite excited to hear Steve Jobs saying that polyurethane “is used to make space suits”; it is a bit unusual to see people getting as thrilled as us about polyurethane, so the quote is most welcome!
We googled it afterwards and discovered that “the stuff they make space suits out of” (10:15 minutes into the video) has seemingly become polyurethanes’ new official definition, not to our dismay indeed. Yet, there are many more applications for polyurethanes. Keep following our updates, we’ll show you a lot of interesting uses in the weeks to come.