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.
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
If there was a laptop out there using that, Id buy
It's called an iPad. The keyboard is so separated that is isn't even included by default.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
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)
The totally separable keyboard concept alone was really cool. If there was a laptop out there using that, Id buy.
No its not. Just buy a wireless keyboard. The fact of the matter is, the only things that a consumer can't replace in a laptop is the screen, CPU and mainboard. I mean easily. The harddrive and ram are easily replaceable by anyone who cares to. This is basically just a feel good video of a trio of college students who don't understand the market well enough to make something useful.
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.
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.
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.
The fact of the matter is, the only things that a consumer can't replace in a laptop is the screen, CPU and mainboard.
And the battery. And the keyboard. And the optical drive...
Sure, for these you can still get a spare part. At least as long as it's new and not too obscure. That's different from being able to replace it with something new and different, though. I think this sounds like a fantastic idea. Cheaper, more flexible hardware. If somebody would force it down the manufacturers' throats I would be happy. :)
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.
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.
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