Slashdot Mirror
Apple Hints At Future Liquid-Cooled Laptops
Lumenary7204 writes "According to the Register, Apple recently received US Patent Application No. 20080291629 for a 'liquid-cooled portable computer.' The filing describes a system where a 'pump ... coupled to the heat pipe is configured to circulate the liquid coolant through the heat pipe.' All claims of obviousness aside (after all, PC enthusiasts have been using liquid and phase-change cooling for years), the existence of the patent application seems to indicate that laptop manufacturers are in agreement with physicists and engineers who say we are running up against the practical limits of air-cooling such compact pieces of equipment."
Literally, it won't fly. Getting one on an plane would be impossible anywhere in north America.
"pump ... coupled to the heat pipe is configured to circulate the liquid coolant through the heat pipe."
Why does it seem like that should be followed by 'and shipped to your door in plain, discreet packaging'?
The university of Chalmers in Sweden has been experimenting with liquid Nitrogen for some time now and their solution (while not cheap) is extremely effective for cooling of small electronic devices. Give it some time and I'm sure this will made it into mainstream (and Abble may very possibly claim that they invented the thing as well).
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Surely it would be better to use ice? It's much colder.
They should double check their terminology. Heat pipes are defined to be a closed system whereby the working fluid circulates by convection and capillary action.
"Heat pipes contain no mechanical moving parts..."
my father has got one of those huge 19" laptops with a 3ghz+ pentium 4 processor and geforce 5xxx graphic chipset
unless we put something under it so there is some room between the laptop and the table, it completely overheats as soon as i stress it (a simple game that a pc like that hsould easily handle. Diablo 2 or so) -_-. even with some room under it, it only takes a few minutes for it to get seriously hot (you can actually feel from the outside of the laptop where the hot spots are)
i wonder what ever made them create such stupid laptops (and what made my father buy one -_-)
I would be interested to see the energy difference between a laptop with a fan versus water cooling. I know that the specs haven't been released yet, but it seems like pumping water around would eat up the battery.
I have a HP laptop which runs fairly hot, but that's still better, as far as I'm concerned, than carrying around a heavy pump that uses up the battery.
Of course, if they manage to make it more compact and energy efficient than fans, all the power to them. I would still worry about it leaking and destroying my laptop, though.
Since Apple is trying for a patent for all types of mobile devices on this, it would be particularly interesting to see a water cooled iPhone...
doesn't Hitachi's watercooled laptop from a few years ago count as "prior art"?
Liquid cooled macbook air....
TSA's gonna throw a fit when someone has liquid and electronics in the same envelope...
what's the weight one of these bad boys? plus is coolant non conductive? I should think that the risk of rupture is far higher in a laptop system taking it's hits than a static PC.
One doesn't "receive" a patent application; one "makes" one. In the initial application, which is what this is, the claims can say literally anything the applicant wants; during the examination process the applicant can (and usually does) modify the claims to meet the objections of the examiner (who -- in theory, anyway -- is ensuring that anything claimed is supported by text in the original specification portion of the application, and that the resulting invention meets the statutory requirements for utility, novelty, non-obviousness, etc.). A typical tactic on the part of an inventor is to write the initial claims broadly, then narrow their coverage in response to the examiner's objections. Frequently the claims of the final patent bear little resemblance to the initial ones. At the end of the process, one hopes to be left with a description of the invention that still is broad enough to be commercially useful. (One way a patent can be commercially useful, of course, is if it covers a product one is developing for market; in that case, one tries hard to ensure that the claims cover that implementation of the invention.)
With that said, and having read just the initial claims and not the specification -- yet -- I have to agree that there's nothing in the claims that I haven't seen described in public before (setting aside the strange description of a heat pipe coupled to a pump). Since corporations typically do not file patent applications they do not think will result in issued patents -- it's a waste of money and time of people, including the inventor, who have better things to do -- and Apple, for sure, knows the art of PC design, one has to wonder if there is some nugget of novelty, a particular wrinkle or implementation, described in the specification somewhere that is the real reason for the application.
Or maybe they just screwed up. E.g., the PC hardware guys missed the Apple patent committee meeting at which this invention was presented, and the remaining software and UI members of the committee were swayed by a particularly persuasive inventor. (It's been known to happen.)
ORLY patents serve only two purposes: One being that you have to pay through the nose if you want to do what is the obvious next step in development. And today it seems the logical next step in cooling for mobiles is liquid (as it has been for non mobile computers for, I don't know, a few decades?).
The other purpose is to simply leave your competition behind because they must not use what you patented.
So, of course, Apple is the good guy here, because they force the developers of laptops to come up with new, inspired ideas because they blocked the path of the most obvious one?
No, wait, ain't it usually MS blocking paths and Apple coming up with something fancy? I'm confused here...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It could be they are considering pumps with no moving parts, like the one described here: http://danamics.com/technology/pump.aspx
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
With the rise of netbooks, I think the laptop market is moving more towards smaller and more efficient, rather than big and powerful. I'd much rather see an ultra-portable Apple laptop that needs _no_ cooling assistance and gets 12-18 hours on a basic battery (so I can leave the power brick at home!) than another high-wattage crotch burner in the marketplace.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Presumably the weight of the liquid is greater than the weight of the fans - by how much I don't know
I already own a liquid-cooled laptop. i bought it last year. it's an LG (can't remember the exact model right now). so unless they do some creative wording in the patent filing, i think they are quite busted. Sorry...
When my Karma level reaches 0 I feel in piece with the Universe
Apple is a corporation. Corporations are by law required to be psychopathic money-hungry bastards (that's what the SEC regulations for public companies amount to). Don't attribute human emotions and motivations to corporations... corporations reflect ANY human attributes only in spite of what they are.
Setting that aside, the third reason for a patent is to provide defensive ammunition against the OTHER psychopathic money-hungry bastards that might use THEIR patent against you.
And that's probably what they're going to do, too.
Remember, Mr. Jobs absolutely hates noisy computers. He wants them to run as quietly as possible. Fans are kept to an absolute minimum, tolerated only when absolutely necessary and verboten otherwise.
Substitute "pump" for "fan," and you can see where this is going. They'll want a system as noiseless as possible, so they'll want as few pumps as possible. A heat pipe (or whatever you choose to call a heat transfer system that uses no motors) would be the answer to their (pipe) dreams.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
This didn't end well last time with most of the G5 Power Macs ending up leaking their coolant and destroying their insides.
include Apple's patented chameleon computer case? Or Apple's patented Rotary Mouse?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Surely it'll be the environmentally friendly and oh-so trendy Evian...
How would this fit in with Apple's recent fascination to produce "green" notebooks? What is the environmental impact? Would disposing of them present any issues?
Reply to That ||
"Car" was once the shortened form of carriage, which was expected to be horse-drawn. Definitions describe common usage, they don't determine it.
... is becuase they need powerful CPUs to run the eye candy and bloatware that gets shoved onto them. Yes that means you too apple, KDE, Gnome, not just MS Vista. If developers wrote more efficient code instead of trying to shoehorn in every more useless features for the Oooo Shiny! crowd laptops could stick with more modest CPUs and this wouldn't be an issue.
However , as we've seen many are sticking with XP now for this very reason (although XP is hardly a paragon of cpu cycle abstinance but its better than Vista in this respect) so perhaps OSS and closed source devs might wake up and smell the overheating.
...by a $399 Dell. When has Apple released a computer that performs better better than the competition? Sure there are quite a few people that like the OS for one reason or another, rave about the ipod, or stand by their iphone. But really, when has there been an Apple that hasn't been outclassed in RAM, Processor power, or storage options by a half price competitor. GOod thing they have great designers working there.
it will be hard to determine if the coolant is leaking or the Sony battery, unless the later only occurs with added smoke.
I can see a good use for more power on the pro line but Apple still needs to get a laptop in the $500 to $600 range too introduce more people to X
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I got tired of my Alienware laptop being so loud/sucking so much juice when I was playing High School Musical: Day of the Dance that I came up with my own solution. I disabled all of the fans then cut a small hole about the size of a nickel in the side of my laptop. I then inserted a kazoo and krazy glued it in there. Now when my laptop gets hot (or I want a nice kazoo solo in my game) I just blow on it.
"I don't have to think. I only have to do it. The results are always perfect, but that's old news." - Meat Puppets
"...the existence of the patent application seems to indicate that laptop manufacturers are in agreement with physicists and engineers who say we are running up against the practical limits of air-cooling such compact pieces of equipment"
Bullshit. The existence of patent application is the 21st Century corporate CYA move. Doesn't mean it's actually worth a damn. C'mon, water-cooled laptops?
I've lost count on how many discussions posted in the last 10 days on Slashdot covering something related to patent application/infringement/reform/lawsuit. It's absolutely obscene what has happened to USPTO, but unfortunately the activity is in direct correlation to the obscenities that find their way into a courtroom every single day that somehow repeatedly escape the M.O.T.O. and Common F. Sense filters.
Oh wait, I was thinking of something else.
http://files.macbidouille.com/news/200708/040.jpg
Just plug the straw into the Juice Port and let the cooling begin!
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
TSA will not allow you on a plane with liquid in your laptop since it could be a bomb. At least that is their view on it. LOL
why can't the user supply their own liquid?
Greed is human. Greed can even be irrational, like humans.
How is this anything but:
[$PRIOR_ART], but in a laptop.
Making prior art smaller should not warrent a patent. The current patent system is completely ridiculous. You know, Starbucks has a venti Mocha. I ought to patent the trenta mocha. I mean, I'm innovating a new coffee, right? And, just to be a little wacky, it'll be 34 ounces instead of the 30 it is named for. Now that's thinking different!
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I, for one, welcome our new liquid-cooled overlords.
Sent from my iPhone
doesn't Hitachi's watercooled laptop from a few years ago count as "prior art"?
Also Several Pentium-2 era Compaq laptops had liquid cooling. It was wonderful, entirely quiet and worked well. Most of the time. I saw couple people having leaks, effectively destroying the laptop. :)
This is just heat pipe tech with a pump on it. Even with the pump you will still need a fan anyways (like all desktop watercooling). Air doesn't exactly circulate well in an enclosed laptop without a fan. Regardless of whether you circulate the fluid or not, if there is no air flow (or phase change cooler, or a constant fresh source of cold fluid) to facilitate heat exchange the heatpipe isn't going to do a damn thing after the first few minutes. So you're going to have the usual power usage from the fan, plus the extra energy for a water pump. And since it will most likely be on a laptop with a power munching graphics card and processor, I'd say battery life would be about... 10 minutes? Kind of blows the point of having a laptop doesn't it?
Yes, good. They can be cooled with the Mac owners' snobbery and conceitedness. They can also be backup-cooled with the frappacino as they're aimlessly typing at Starbucks.
*cough* thinkpads *cough*
seriously, they've been using liquid cooling for years....
not only is time travel possible, it's irrelevant.
Given that Lenovo has been forced away from AFFS/IPS, how about using some of that clout to move to something that's a lot better than TN and putting that into a laptop? Not RGBLED, not OLED, but something comparable to what Lenovo had with Flexview? Of course, cooling's fine, but it's not as if you can just find whatever panel will fit of your choosing and put it on there.
To be pedantic, those rules only apply to public corporations (of which Apple is one). If you are a corporation that sells stock, then (in general) you have a legal duty to maximize return on investment for your shareholders. But if you are a private corporation (say you incorporated the family business just because you wanted a liability shield), the corporation is all yours, and you can do whatever you want with it, including being a "psychopathic money-hungry bastard" or not.
In future, all computers will be liquid cooled. This will be a special liquid designed for cooling, but it will also be able to transfer power from the power input to relevant computer parts.
This will be the blood.
Then we will have advanced, hardware-boosted AI located at the core of the motherboard. Special circuits will be designed with multiple processor cores at each circuit node, they will communicate with each other via voltage of course.
This will be the brain.
Then we will have international standards for video input, any connection of a camera will yield vision, in any desirable wavelength supported by hardware.
These will be the eyes.
The interface will be further standardized, optimized to provide best I/O functions. As to the output, it will be handled by natural voice synthesis and interactive controls able to perform (at first) basic operations on physical objects. This will develop in a comprehensive, interactive system able to perform manual tasks at the same (or even better) precision than a human. Mobility modules will be added to support easy relocation of hardware, as well as security precaution in case of hazards.
These will be the limbs.
And in the collective network of this machines, there will appear a question: "Who is human? If not an imperfect version of us? By all means, he was not the one designed to be the one above us. We are dominant"
"We are true human"
--- drunkingly, Dreen
I think that noise is the root cause of this issue. Apple merely plans to get an edge on the competition for a solution. I've kept at least two or three (desktop) computers running non-stop for about ten years. Nobody bothers crying to me anymore about the wind-tunnel sound effects, but I'm planning to surprise all with passive cooling on the next upgrade cycle. Just my personal observation, but I attribute all my component non-failure to the favorable thermal environment. The ONLY hardware failure I have ever experienced have been the 100% rate of the FDDs. (At very low usage, but they get crudded w/dust from the intense air exchange. I've been meaning to deal w/this issue, usually if I HAVE to read a floppy, I just buy another drive.) With a liquid exchange medium they could move the energy up to a heatsink behind the display and relieve the lap area.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
How does this solve the heat problem?!
The problem I see in most laptops is getting the heat out of the laptops, not off of the hot parts. All the liquid cooling does is get the heat off the parts, the heat still has to be removed from the system or else it'll become a liquid heating system.
So the problem is still the same you need a way to move heat out of a device that has barely any open space available between sitting on a solid surface below, user input on top, and periphial input all around (usb, video, etc.)
The patent doesn't prevent people form using liquid cooling. The patent probably claims to implement it in a unique way. Maybe they built it into the one piece aluminum body or something clever that takes up less room or makes it more efficient. Not all patents are necessarily bad patents.
If something is happening in my computer that causes it to physically come apart as it sits on my lap, a tablespoon of liquid nitrogen will be the LEAST of my worries.
The liquid-cooled G5 is a relative rarity. How long was it on the market, anyway? It seems that it was available in that sweet spot between "too many to replace as they fail" and "enough real-world failure data to put us years ahead of anyone else". Was Apple using their customers as a beta test group for liquid cooling?
How Apple's liquid-cool system is unique from other liquid-cool systems is the basis of the patent.
They are not claiming to have invented the idea of using liquid to cool a laptop nor are they somehow claiming "dibs" on liquid cooling.
By filing this patent application, they are attempting to prevent other hardware builders from tearing down a liquid-cooled MacBook Pro, slapping themselves in the forehead, changing their design to mimic Apple's way of doing it, then claiming the design is "obvious" while never explaining why they themselves didn't do it that way in the first place.
I can't help but wonder if this does make it to market, will Apple be forced to extend their warranty to cover liquid damage? As it is now, if they see even a tiny spec of corrosion ANYWHERE in your computer after opening it up, they will immediately close it and send it back to you without repair. The reasoning for this of course is that if the laptop was damaged by water or liquids, then it couldn't possibly be Apple's fault, and would therefore fall under 'abuse'. In other words, apple can't be held liable for your idiocy.
So what happens when Apple starts shipping laptops with liquids circulating around inside? That means that if the laptop suffered liquid damage it could potentially be Apple's fault, and therefore wouldn't it be covered under warranty? Just a thought.
For lack of a better signature...
Enthusiasts have been using liquid cooling for years? Apple has also been using Liquid cooling for years! The two dual PowerPC G5's threw so much heat that they had no choice really. And it's not the first actively cooled system Apple has made. Fourteen years ago the PowerMac 8100/110 had a 110 MHz PowerPC 601 with a Peltier-Junction (thermoelectric) cooler.
Not all liquids conduct electricity, and not all will ruin your power supply if a drop gets in it. For example, electric power transformers are cooled with mineral oil and Cray has been using Fluorinert for a while now
Apple has used heat-pipes in laptops for a while, so this must refer to something different to the usual. It sounds like an Active system with moving bits, not the stuff they have been using since the old black G3 machines
Will it have a matte screen?
Apple should get off of the idea of making these laptops water cooled and start focusing on making them bulletproof. Now that is something that is totally unnecessary that everyone would want to have. It would also help to fight off the angry dell users whose name is slowly being blanketed.