It’s a given that we will one day be discarding our present laptop computers. It’s also a given that e-waste is currently a huge problem, that looks like it’s only going to get worse. While most of the materials in a laptop can be recycled, all of those pieces of glass, metal, plastic and circuitry are stuck together pretty tight, and require a lot of time and effort to separate. What is needed are laptops that are designed to be taken apart, for easy recycling – that’s why a group of graduate students from Stanford University made one.
As part of Stanford’s ME310 industrial design course, design software maker Autodesk asked the students to create an easily-recyclable consumer electronics product, using the company's software. What they came up with was the Bloom laptop, which can be completely disassembled by hand, in under 30 seconds, and in ten steps. By contrast, a traditional laptop requires three tools, up to 120 steps, and takes about 45 minutes.
Needless to say, this limits the number of computers that can be taken apart in one day, making the recycling of them less financially-viable. It also leaves the disassembly process in the hands of trained workers, whereas the Bloom can be taken apart by its owner.
A by-product of making the computer modular was the development of a detachable wireless keyboard and trackpad – a feature that allows users to type from wherever they wish, without having the screen right there in their face. Upgrading is also much easier, as users can just pop out the obsolete piece, buy a new one, then pop it in.
The ME310 students won Autodesk’s Inventor of the Month award for this October. They were assisted in the Bloom project by students from Aalto University in Finland.
Via Core77
Which of course means it will never see the light of day, as nothing is proprietary.
If it\'s properly done, so that if dropped it won\'t go into a heap of bits, it will make for a practical PC.
Really while there is all the mega trend laptops, I for one would rather tend to forsake the latest and greatest for a damned good utility model. A model T of laptops so to speak.
Alternatively, I think the future is in extremely small computers with no keyboards and projected displays to greatly reduce the materials involved. Then the hardware required for an upgrade will be less than the size of the HDD in today\'s laptops.
That\'s always limited the number and specifications of interchangeable components, all always only available from the laptop\'s OEM.
When the manufacturer moves on to a new model line, all new development for the old modular line stops.
If a group of companies would get together and create a universal central laptop bus module with ports for a CPU carrier, video board, RAM backplane, and a pair of SATA drive ports for hard and optical drives, plus a \'generic\' backplane port where modules supporting all the other typical ports (USB, eSATA, Firewire, ExpressCard) in any combination could be plugged in.
The next issue would be how the cases provide access to the ports. Molded holes that are part of the cases wouldn\'t do. They\'d have to use fixed dimension port plates similar to ATX desktop PCs.
Given such a \'dream platform\' for laptops, the only things that would differentiate them is what components are plugged together and some exterior styling. In the long run it would save OEMs money because the internal tooling design could be reused over and over, but profit margins would drop to the levels of most desktop PCs.
Given all that, I still don\'t see a huge jump in the number of people upgrading a laptop by swapping out components. Most desktop computer upgrades are still done by replacing the entire unit, especially after two years as technology advances make it more cost effective = more overall performance for less $ than upgrading major parts like the CPU and video board.