Dell the maker of Alienware gaming PC’s is taking sustainability and e-waste seriously with the big PC Company rolling out a brand-new design concept for a notebook that has interchangeable components.
Called Concept Luna the proof-of-concept reduces the need to replace components.
The entire system contains less screws than before reducing the time needed to replace components.
And you will never have to worry about replacing a broken fan, because there isn’t one: a shrunken-down motherboard placed in the top cover allows the laptop to passively cool itself.
Also gone is the need for screwdrivers, no glue solvents are needed to pry loose a broken keyboard or peel off a cracked screen; both components simply pop free after a pair of keystones holding them in place are removed.
“Concept Luna,” is a very clever proof-of-concept notebook developed by Dell’s design team with observers claiming it could well be the future for notebooks and gaming machines.
Dell design strategist Drew Tosh described Luna as a “front end concept” intended to “solve some of the larger problems we’re trying to get ahead of in the future,” namely e-waste and climate change.
A notebook that is easy to repair and upgrade is less likely to be replaced with a new one that takes yet more energy and resources to produce.
When that computer eventually does stop working, parts can be harvested to live on in other machines rather than winding up as rubbish in landfills.
“We’re really focused on reuse and recycle,” Tosh told The Verge. “And really, it would be more like reuse, reuse, reuse, and recycle only when we really have to.”
And if you though the concept is set to make notebooks big and clumsy you are wrong because the prototype Dell is showing off is as sleek and portable as any notebook in their current range.
So far, only a few prototype versions of these notebooks exist.
But the design Dell is showing off is as sleek and portable as any laptop in the company’s current line-up.
Observers claim that if a modern-looking notebook with these sorts of features can be mass produced, it would make it that much harder for other leading consumer tech brands to argue there’s an inherent trade-off between repairability and design.
Companies like Dell have ambitious goals to go carbon neutral, and they’re well aware that recycling old tech won’t ever be enough to reach those goals.
Concept Luna goes far beyond recycling, injecting sustainability into how laptops are designed to make them far more reusable in the future.
