Samsung Uses Lower-Grade Titanium on Galaxy S24 Ultra; Reveals Teardown Video

Samsung has used titanium on the flagship Galaxy S24 Ultra's frame this year instead of Aluminium. The South Korean brand's biggest rival Apple also provided titanium on its latest iPhone 15 Pro series. Most recently, YouTuber Zack Nelson from JerryRigEverything channel, took the Galaxy S24 Ultra apart to find out the amount of titanium that Samsung has used on the phone. The teardown video revealed that Samsung used lower-grade titanium for the frame on the Galaxy S24 Ultra, while Apple treated the iPhone 15 Pro with higher-grade titanium.

Zack Nelson in his latest episode of JerryRigEverything strips the Galaxy S24 Ultra to find out the exact amount of Titanium being used to make the phone. The 11-minute video starts with removing the back panel. The handset features flat glass panels on the front and the back and the YouTuber was able to get inside the device quickly with a single slice from the knife around the exterior. The interior shows 17 Phillips head screws and beneath the screws, Samsung has arranged the 15W wireless charger with copper wires. The teardown offers a look at the arrangement of interior components. The haptic motor is placed inside the bottom speaker chamber and the handset seems to have a bigger copperish vapour chamber under the cell.

As the video progresses, Nelson states that Samsung has laid out a thin cosmetic border of titanium around the exterior. He then melts down the frame of the phone and an XRF scan indicates that Samsung packed grade 2 Titanium on the phone. Apple, in contrast, uses grade 5 Titanium on its latest iPhone 15 models. He claims that a purple anodised aluminium frame fills up the majority of the inner space.

The Galaxy S24 Ultra's metal was put through a 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit furnace to separate the materials. The plastic elements quickly burned out while the edges and corner pieces remained. After melting the plastic and Aluminum, the YouTuber notes that Samsung performed an over-moulding process to form parts around one another with Aluminium, plastic and Titanium materials. Apple, on the other hand, developed a custom solid-state diffusion process that fuses Aluminium directly with Titanium. Both phones have about the same thickness of Titanium around the outside, but Apple's grade 5 Titanium is about four times more expensive.

Nelson opines that Apple could be using $10-15 (roughly Rs. 800 to Rs. 1,200) worth of the material in every iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. Samsung, on the other hand, could be using $3-5 (roughly Rs. 250 to Rs. 400) worth of Titanium in the Galaxy S24 Ultra. The added cost is of shaping and casting the metal to work with titanium. The YouTuber states that both titanium exteriors are more cosmetic than anything else. Apple might be getting some minor strength improvements with solid-state diffusion, but with a plastic intermediary, Samsung is not getting any additional strength.