I’m seeing a lot of products made of titanium or “titanium” (item in question does not feel and weight like titanium, like cookware, and titanium is VERY poor choice for cookware because titanium is a VERY poor heat conductor).
This include iphone 15, cookware that I’m seeing sold in various shopping malls, etc.
And yes, this somehow justifies extreme markup, even though titanium is really not precious in any way. It’s expensive, but not gold/silver expensive.
Actually as far as cookware, which I saw at the breeze mall next to the Taipei 101 (that metronome looking building). I asked what part of this cookware is titanium and the sales guy showed me a video that doesn’t actually tell me very much. Far as I can tell it’s a teflon coated pan that resists scratches from metal spatula. I said titanium is actually not a good choice of cookware material because it conducts heat poorly. About all it’s got going is that it doesn’t react with food or biological stuff so they’re used a lot in medical implants…
Which for iphone 15 maybe they’re priming us for having iphones implanted into our body?
But anyways I asked if I can heat it until it’s about 400-500F or so, very useful for searing steaks by the way, and they said if you do that with those pans it will release not so good stuff. So back to cast iron pans I guess…
But anyways I’m just wondering what’s so great about titanium? They’re good in some niche applications but various types of steel is actually better if you’re not looking for rust resistance. Otherwise I got some titanium plates around and I don’t see what’s the big deal. They’re good for electrochemistry though. I doubt that’s what people are going to do with their iphone 15.
Most of the stuff I see that’s titanium is meant to be lighter weight than their stainless counterparts. Backpacking kitchen stuff, for example, if you want lightweight, you’re pretty much looking at plastic (for utensils and plates), aluminum (dents easily, also a terrible conductor, will melt if too close to an open flame, may or may not cause Alzheimers…) or titanium (significantly more durable, can use over a camp stove’s direct flame). In a home context, I guess if you have a health condition that makes picking up heavy pots and pans difficult, it might be nice to have? But I do not for the life of me know why or how anyone is stupid enough to still be buying non-stick pans. We’ve known those are killing us for at least 20 years now.
The funny thing for me is the titanium water bottles that have come out alongside cheaper (but still very expensive) stainless ones. They’re barely any lighter when empty, and by the time you put water in it, that tiny bit of weight difference becomes negligible. So that’s just a really expensive water bottle, basically, which plenty of people love to have!
But titanium does seem to be gaining popularity. Like anything, if you don’t need it, don’t buy it.
My wedding ring is made of titanium. My wife wanted a platinum one because, well, she liked platinum, so my titanium one matches hers fairly well in looks. It was also cheap, strong and light, which were my main requirements. Can’t remember looking at stainless steel ones.
No, aluminum is a fantastic conductor. It ain’t as good as copper but it’s a much better conductor than steel. There’s a reason why aluminum is used for frying pans and such, because they’re a very good conductor.
Titanium is a very poor conductor, in fact much worse than steel, so much so that when machining it you MUST have good coolant, and when deep hole drilling them you must have through bit coolant, or you will burn the bit in short order. Just splashing coolant onto the metal isn’t enough, you must get it right at the cutting edge.
Also titanium chips are fairly flammable. It isn’t magnesium but light some titanium chips and you will know what I mean. If this is combined with cutting oil and coolant this can become extremely dangerous. Steel shaving in large quantities is bad enough, so much so that it has sunk ships (due to saltwater induced rusting leading to a fire), titanium is worse.
It means shops machining them must deal with a potential fire hazard. Remember water and CO2 will only make a metal fire burn hotter!
I have a couple, along with some cast iron, steel, and ceramic pans. I don’t consider myself particularly stupid, but I’m careful what I cook in them and I hesitated before buying new ones six-ish months ago.
My understanding is that cooking in non-stick pans at low to medium temperatures is probably fine in the grand scheme of things. Polyfluorinated hydrocarbons are pretty difficult to avoid anyway (e.g., they’re in a lot of food packaging and stuff, even the parchment paper I get from Costco has them), and a whole load of other complex and poorly characterized chemical reactions go on during cooking that aren’t indubitably better anyway (e.g., high-temperature seasoning of cast iron pans using oils to form polymers - this probably results in some weird carcinogens as well).
Yeah, I noticed that too. I’m just trying to restrict myself to refuting three demonstrably false statements per day, and there’s still 2.5 hours left before midnight so wanted to see whether something more interesting comes up.
In fact only an oxy acetylene torch will do it, not because of its high melting point, but because its conductivity is so great that any piece of aluminum bigger than the flame just wicks the heat away, so even though a butane torch gets hot enough, it just can’t get it hot quickly enough.
And if you got anything in the pot, forget about it.
But definitely don’t recommend heating the pot empty because it can and does warp.
According to this video, the titanium is only a skin on the outside of the phone, interior is all aluminum, and as the video shows, not very durable at all. Don’t put it in your back pocket needless to say.
And according to this iphone 15 is essentially marginally better than iphone 14, but seems now everyone is clogging up all the apple stores to buy their iphone 15 even though they’re already using iphone 14.
