Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
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.
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.
[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.
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.
Read radical news here
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.
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 don't think there's any technical reason to make common maintenance tasks like replacing smashed screens, bad inverters and broken keyboards so fiddly, even if those components are non-standard.
I'll go further and say that for most laptops (say 14" or greater screen and 22mm thick keyboard section) there's no practical reason not to adopt a standard form factor for components because there's plenty of room. Naturally if you want to make something thinner than has ever been done before then you're talking about non-standard components and layouts, but that is no reason to pass the price premium of custom designing and building every piece of the laptop to people who are pragmatic buyers. When technology makes 13mm thick laptops practical, there is no reason not to standardize *that* too. It'd be incompatible with the larger standard, but so what?
Imagine a world in which there was something like the ATX case standard for notebooks with a 13" screen or larger and a keyboard section thickness of one inch. Custom built parts could be replaced with standardized, generic components: batteries, fans, screens and related driver hardware, keyboards, power supplies, internal fans -- basically everything. Every single component of the notebook would be cheaper, and it could be replaced by the local screwdriver shop. If your CPU fan failed, you could pop down to your local screwdriver shop and they'd replace it for you in ten minutes. It'd be cheap, because they wouldn't have to stock an array of parts that are functionally equivalent, but arbitrarily different in shape.
Conversely, imagine a world in which every desktop computer were assembled from custom built, incompatible components. Bad power supply? You'll have to get a Compaq power supply. Want to upgrade your video? Buy a new computer. Keyboard broken? Send the whole thing in to an authorized service center. As absurd as this scenario obviously is, we accept it for laptops. It shouldn't be like this. This isn't three dimensional tangrams; except for the most extreme designs, it's filling a more or less equivalent rectangular space with essentially the same components. The idiosyncrasies of most laptops are the result of engineers starting with a blank slate for that task and coming up with equivalent, but incompatible solutions.
The reason laptops haven't been standardized is marketing, pure and simple. That's the hard reality these kids are going to run into. Like young people everywhere they're looking at this problem with fresh eyes an seeing the obvious problems. The way laptops are built make them hard to recycle, but making laptops easy to recycle also makes them easy to repair and upgrade. Repairing and upgrading are even better from an environmental sustainability standpoint, but making this possible requires an act of selfless idealism by the manufacturers that will never happen.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"form factor for components because there's plenty of room"
If's there's plenty of room and it's not there for cooling or structural reasons that is a design failure. If you want to pay extra to go back to the days of luggables I won't stop you but I shouldn't have to pay extra to make use of advancements that make a laptop better at its purpose for existing, being portable.
I'm not sure why we'd have to return to the era of luggables, any more than choosing a standard form factor desktop PC means we have to go back to the era of minicomputers.
There is plenty of room because electronics are smaller than they were twenty years ago, but the average hand remains the same size. Manufacturers have responded by making things thinner, but after some point the consumer would benefit more from standardization than the next increment of thinning. I think we've past that point.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I believe such arguments indicate a lack of imagination.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Be patient. PCs didn't become completely standard when ATX was widely available... They became standard when mini ATX was widely available, and just as cheap as ATX.
Laptops also need to shrink until a common form factor that is small enough for all is as cheap as a larger form. Then economies of scale really kick in.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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
I call bullshit. I'm not Mac zealot by any means, but I recently had to open a unibody Macbook Pro to get an errantly inserted SD card out of my roommates optical drive. 8 or 9 screws, the bottom comes off, and you have access to every stupid component you need access to. No separate panels, no 50 billions screws, none of that. No excuse why the PC laptop makers can't take a fucking hint and make them as simple to deal with as well.
Also, that video about clean the fan is cute and all, but really, and fairly new can of air with that narrow tube blown full force into the air inlet/outlet grills will dislodge the majority of dust. No need to go taking the whole damn thing apart for that.
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.