Apple will buy up to $100M of titanium from Perryman, a family-owned producer in Pennsylvania, over the next three years, the company announced.
Some of the metal will go into the casing of the iPhone Duo, Apple's first foldable phone. The rest will go into other Apple products, though Apple's description singles out only the Duo by name. The company framed the deal as part of a push to source more parts in the US.
The key phrase is "up to." That is a ceiling, not a purchase order, and the minimum Apple is guaranteeing Perryman has not been disclosed. Spread evenly over three years, the ceiling works out to about $33M a year. That is a modest figure for a company of Apple's size, and a meaningful contract for a family-owned supplier.
Titanium itself is not new to Apple. The company has used it in iPhone frames since the iPhone 15 Pro, so the story here is where the metal comes from, not what it is. Domestic sourcing announcements are also a familiar genre in Apple's playbook, and they tend to be easier to announce than to scale.
The number to watch is the one missing from the announcement: how much of that $100M Apple is actually obliged to spend.