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Laptop Design For Disassembly
retroworks writes "Stanford and Finland are cooperating on a project to make a 'modular' laptop which can be more easily disassembled and upgraded, and eventually recycled. Video presentation by smarterplanet.com is a sober answer to the Jaime Guittierez 'Clean the Fan' video."
until at the premium-model level
Good luck with that.
Laptop manufacturers (yes, all of them) want to make disposable machines. Not only is it cheaper to make them that way, it encourages users to buy new rather than upgrade.
In the past, computer makers had to cater to the geek market, and the geeks wanted to be able to tinker. Although the Slashdot crowd refuses to accept it, the geek market is tiny relative to the mass market.
This would mean cheaper assembly costs for manufacturers.
Otherwise known as Finland and Friends.
The totally separable keyboard concept alone was really cool. If there was a laptop out there using that, Id buy.
That thing designed for landfill from the get-go.
Reading TFA it quite clearly says "Students from Stanford and Finland's Aalto University", so a much more proper way to say it would've been "Stanford and Aalto University of Finland". (since most of the readers have probably never even heard of Aalto University) How would the summary of "Aalto and United States cooperate on project to..." sound?
So they take a regular old macbook, make it twice the size and replace the aluminum frame with a big clunky plastic one. And in the process, disconnect and reconnect everything with cheap flimsy wires. Real innovative.
iOrange, modular and easy to work with.
This type of machine will appeal to a select group of people. Desktop macs starting in the late 90's were more easily expandable and easier to work on than any desktop PC. A single latch opened the machine. Hard drives were exposed at the bottom, memory was right there. No one cared. For a long time the powerbooks were reasonable easy to work on. Once the cover was open, secured with Torx, it was pretty easy to replace a hard disk, replace a keyboard, replace an wireless card, replace pretty much everything. Just like all machines, though replacing anything would be 10% the cost of the machine, so many opted to buy a new machine, or get Apple Care for 15% of the machine and have Apple fix it for three years, which would mean a four year lifetime.
But then no one cared preferring to buy a cheaper machine even though it was less elegant to upgrade.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
They could use Thinkpads as the base for thier idea
Almost all components, except the Processor,Motherboard and screen are CRU's
Making the Screen and Processor a CRU shouldnt be too difficult(Its not very difficult as of now either), cant say about the Motherboard.
By Thinkpads, I mean the real thinkpads(T,X,W Series)
That thing is a relatively chunky system even compared to some laptops in the market that are lamented as too large.
A manufacturer would find a customer base that rounds to zero with an offering like this.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Deja Vu.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/11/08/1717232/Bloom-Laptop-Designed-For-Easy-Disassembly?from=rss
Oh right.
The obvius solution to the problem of a fan that cannot easiliy be acessed: Encase the fan in plastic, so the dust never gets into it.
Why not just remove it?
Also btw. wtih this "modular" laptop you would still ned to disattach the fan and void warenty to clean it.
I know Mac is a magic word and answer to world peace and all. And the song is cute.
But really, do they have a clue? Did the guy try to open up a Macbook? It's worse than his HP. The official Apple answer to cleaning the fan is to buy a new computer :)
before the manufacturers will do it... same as the WEEE regulations had to come in before they would finally take back their broken items... it will take legislation to force them to design for disassembly and design for repair... currently, they hide behind other product liability regulations where they can use "scary" labels and weird proprietary fasteners to prevent the owner from taking the machine apart...
my new netbook has a "warranty void if tampered with" label over one screw hole which effectively prevents me from swapping out the hard disk and sticking a new one in to put a clean Linux install on (thus keeping the original disk ready to slip back in if needed).
Being a fully "qualified" geek who has built systems from scratch since almost day one of the personal computer revolution this sad fact really annoys me as I'm perfectly competent to fix things if I can get at them...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Many others tried the "modular" laptop design. result, everyone ignored it. there is no video card standard, there is no formfactor standard, no screen standard... etc...
So we get the mildly upgradeable laptops, most do away with a processor socket and go with a bga soldered to the board to save $0.32 per unit made eliminating processor upgrades.
It's a great exercise in though and design, but in reality cheap and custom is what everyone will stick to.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Maybe not quite as modular and able to be disassembled as what the they're going for in the article, there is at least one manufacturer called Clevo out there making barebones, totally upgradable laptops at the premium level. Granted they use mobile components, but CPU and GPU are discrete, up to 3 hdds and 4 sticks of ram in some cases, a mini pcie slot, etc.
They actually offer one that allows you to use desktop i7 processors.
Long signatures suck.
They should try to make a standard for tablets. I think the chance of moving the laptop industry to this is small...the removal of the screen didn't look very user friendly anyways. I agree that the amount of waste produced is tragic though, Mayne they should try to make a standard for tablet screen size, and then design screens that attach to tablets with a standardized port. Then at least screens should be able to be salvaged.
Scared to close my eyes! I want to get out of here!
[off-topic] It's a glitch in the Matrix, you don't need to worry, much...
[on-topic] Some laptops can be upgraded, at least the video-card can. Additionally for what laptops are used for, medium-end models today do pretty much everything you need it to do, even 3 years from now. I think we passed the point where we need to buy the latest and greatest every 6-months unless you're a hardcore gamer, in which case just get a PC already. I was asked which netbook was better and my answer was simple. They all do about the same thing which is almost nothing more than word processing and internet. If battery is the most important thing, which clearly should be for what it is, then you may want to go with the one with the better battery. Just don't spend any less than $300 for a netbook and you'll be OK. Laptops are almost the same these days. If they can play videos on full HD smoothly, browse the web, capable of multi-tasking like a pro, and more than able to run Doom, then that's all you really need, the rest is just bells and whistles in my opinion.
What a piece of clueless high-school optimism this project is.
They wrap the innards of a netbook into the a casing regular size casing. Look at the space wasted on the fastenings for the screen bezel and the additional thickness added by all those thick plastic sheets between motherboard and keycaps. With that much space and weight wasted, at least they could have gone on the full eco-trip and made the casing out of cardboard or recycled wood. They totally miss the main selling point of a laptop: Small and light.
At least the project leadress was blond and pleasant to look at. But to improve the video, they should have cut the scenes where the geek or the invention appeared.
To sum it up: rather worthless - except for blondie if one is attracted to the type.
How about building computers that are meant to last
That wouldn't work because of Wirth's Law. As computers become faster, new versions of software become slower due to new features or due to new language or library features that trade off programmer time for runtime. You can't upgrade the software because the new version's system requirements exceed your hardware, and you can't keep using your existing software on a public network because someone has discovered a critical security defect after the software's announced end of life.
http://www.thedesignblog.org/entry/evobook-laptop-concept-with-detachable-keyboard/
which was thought of, pushed and rejected already 2 years ago
It's really a matter of purchasing a computer that lasts, such as this 4 yr old MacBook I'm typing on today. It's been through hell and back, and still works.
I used to purchase wintel laptops for a FD I did IT work for, and we always spec'd ThinkPads as they were bomber, well except for the Chief who had to have a Dell with all the bs, home use bells and whistles. His priorities weren't fiscal, they were personal.
Ocean is land, covered with water.
The iPad is explicitly not designed to do much of what I do on my netbook. By explicitly, I mean Apple's developer agreement prohibits any application that does it. So I've chosen not to replace my netbook with an iPad.
A similar story has been at SlashDot already at November: 2010: Bloom Laptop Designed For Easy Disassembly. Though these projects are still not available in the shops. In the meantime you can have a look at these free do-it-yourself disassembly guides for laptops and notebooks.
A friend of mine had a laptop from Dell with a modular slot that would accommodate a 3.5" floppy drive or a slot-load CD/DVD disc drive. The laptop package came with both and promised other accessories were available.
Aside from this, hdd, and ram; what else would you like to upgrade in your average laptop? I have seen Gigabit Ethernet via ExpressCard Slot, clunky video card solution and a few vendors sell USB 2.0 sound cards that beat laptop audio for performance.
These are certainly clunky solutions that probably wouldnt fit in your laptop's case, but they do exist.
You're gaining easier upgrading, recycling, and service. None of these directly benefits the manufacturer.
What you are giving up:
- lower cost
- smaller size
- greater durability
And to a lesser degree these designs usually have fewer built-in features because space cannot be fully taken advantage of to cram in little extras like bluetooth or surround sound.
We've seen this idea pitched a few times here before and nobody wants to talk about all the tradeoffs they'll have to make. Manufacturers don't like it. In the end the users don't like it either. It's not a good idea overall.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I get through laptops pretty regularly, (life on the road + 4 kids), so don't buy expensive ones - cheapest with the biggest screen. Then I swap out the big memory and hard-drives that I used to upgrade the fried one. Easy to do, since most laptop chassis from big manufacturers are designed to be easy to build to order...
I find that cheap laptop + home upgrade = plenty fast PC for peanuts...
tiny social democrat country. big innovation. thank you.
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On my sadly departed Toshiba laptop the best way to get to the damn fan was with a Dremel - cut out the bottom of the case over the fan and ductape the plastic piece back when vacumed clean. I disassembled it once and decided that it was far too risky to try a second time.
I hope this is successful, although others have tried! My only beef with the idea is that the design is intended to have no screws.. (If anyone else has ever broken off a plastic tab when disassembling/ reassembling anything, you should know what I'm talking about! Besides, I just wouldn't want my laptop falling apart in my hands.)
Plus, I wouldn't mind having a slightly oversized laptop for the sake of customization (and cooling options). On that note, my first laptop was an Inspiron 9100. That sucka was HUGE, but it got the job done!
Perhaps if a company invests in this the design will be improved..
(I'm rooting for Cooler Master/ Corsair/ Antec!)
Also, I would hate to see a single laptop manufacturer take the idea and lock it down to a single brand and trick the consumer into "Going Green" to further boost their sales.
Here's hoping a universal standard for laptop components can be reached..*yeah right :-( *
Come on, the Apple Bluetooth keyboard I have is ridiculously small for what it does, having full sized keys and all. If you can carry a tablet with you certainly this could squeeze into your bag. No cables and the batteries last a long time. Easy peasy.
Ocean is land, covered with water.
Modularity costs thickness. That's the problem. Thinness is a key sales point for laptops.
Some of the components in a laptop are custom, and some aren't. Design involves cramming the ones you can change around the ones you can't. This results in oddly shaped PC boards, flat cables running around the insides, and boards stacked over thinner components.
Incidentally, "cleaning laptop fan" is a heavily spammed phrase in search. The top 10 results in Bing are all content mills.
Things I would like to upgrade in my laptop that aren't normally upgradeable:
* motherboard (I'm OK with video chipset being on this)
* cpu - a few models allow this, but the upgrade path is very narrow
* LCD - it is offered as a factory option for some premium laptops
You can argue all you want about how difficult it is, or how "clunky" it would be. But I believe such arguments indicate a lack of imagination.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Imho, the only real obstacle should be form factor standardization.
MacBook Airs are now fairly simple on the inside, users obviously cannot replace the flash drive, memory, cpu, gpu, etc. given they're all parts of the main board, but batteries, screen, and main board could be user replaceable parts, and the fans could be cleanable. I doubt you'd sacrifice much space making the flash, ram, cpo, and gpu all user replaceable too.
Why should more than one company make a MacBook Air however? You need enough space for product differentiation, which likely goes beyond simply installing better or cheaper parts. And once they need slightly different ports you've lost main board compatibility.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
It's not up to the level of geek fantasy what-a-white-box-laptop-could-be. However, for practical purposes, if you get one of the big-chassis Thinkpads or Dell Latitudes (in the case of Dell, this would be a Latitude E-series today) then a ton of parts are interchangeable and upgradeable between models in the same chassis series. And it's been that way since the Latitude C-series at least. They're a lot easier to work on than the consumer-model laptops, too.
These days I just buy disposable junk like everybody else, though.
I believe such arguments indicate a lack of imagination.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
So easy to work, with even a child can fix it. The designers should look at whats been done in that project for some field proven ideas.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
which is almost nothing more than word processing and internet
meh, you probablly wouldn't want to video edit on one (though people used to do so on less) and you won't run the latest 3D games but to say they are capable of "almost nothing more than word processing and internet" is dramatically understating their capabilities.
The main problem with most netbooks IMO is the screen resolution. I was really really disappointed when the 10 inch machines came out and the screen resolution was no better than the 9 inch ones and in particular was still below the 1024x768 that many app developers assume as a minimum. 12 inch netbooks don't appeal either since I can get a proper laptop with a C2D that is about the same size. I did eventually manage to get a 10 inch machine with a decent screen resolution but it was far from cheap.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
this is where freedombox / tiny core linux and other similar ideas could flourish.
How, I didn't see the OP mention Apple once?
Apple consumers and other consumers have little difference in the way they treat their machines. Apple does not want you upgrading your Macbook, they want your to buy the newer model, each and every year. Heck, Apple does not even want you upgrading their desktop machines.
The only difference between Apple consumers and other laptop consumers is that Apple consumers don't seem to understand that they are paying 50%+ more for the exact same hardware made in the exact same Chinese factories.
But how many know how to change them themselves? It's a dead simple procedure but most people don't want to learn it. They're happy to believe it's a magic box with blinking lights and whistles. If they need more storage space they'll buy another magical box (external hard drive) that gives them more storage. People wanted cheap laptops, the manufacturers gave them what they wanted.
The GP is quite correct, only geeks want disassembable laptops and they are a very small market. Even business these days consider machines too cheap to spend man hours fixing,
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.