“We weren’t necessarily trying to build a notebook, we were trying to figure out what are the big things that have to be solved in order to impact our entire product line,” Drew Tosh, director, advanced design strategy, Dell Technologies, said about Concept Luna, a sustainable laptop that endorses the right-to-repair movement.
Announced during the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) last month, Concept Luna gives a peek into a repairable, sustainable laptop for the future. Although just a concept at the moment, Luna reimagines a laptop from the ground up with the aim to cut down 50 per cent of the carbon footprint of an existing notebook.
Drew and his team, who work on concepts devices and future alphas at Dell, started working on Luna around two years ago. “The first five months went into research,” Tosh told indianexpress.com over a call from Austin, Texas. “We had done a lot of sustainable material directions but for this [project] we stepped back and looked at the entire system where we met our supply chain partners.” He added: “We really spent a lot of time just trying to understand the problem that we were trying to solve.”
Dell’s Concept Luna takes a different approach not only in design but also in how it’s going to be made. The role of materials that consume less energy and how components are going to fit in require a reimagined approach to designing a notebook. The motherboard that goes inside the Luna is 75 per cent smaller and uses 20 per cent less components to manufacture. Every other component in the laptop is then rearranged around the motherboard which sits near the top for extra cooling exposure. The use of screws is reduced by 10x over a regular laptop and the battery would be lithium iron phosphate, which has twice the life cycle of a traditional lithium-ion battery.
From the left Page Motes, head of global sustainability, Dell Technologies and Drew Tosh, director, advanced design strategy, Dell Technologies. (Photo: Dell)
One thing that makes Dell’s Concept Luna a whole new breed of the laptop is its emphasis on upgradability – and reparability. Dell said disassembly, which includes repair and reassembly time, is just 1.5 hours. “With a few screws, users could replace the keyboard on their own; plus, the motherboard could be removed from the laptop and replaced with a newer one.
“Luna was really important, because it helps to be both in education vehicle to really kind of make both internal and external people aware of the complexity that we’re trying to solve, but it also allows us to kind of break down the pieces and help the teams really understand how they can make those impacts,” he explained.
The fight for “right-to-repair” is getting a lot of momentum lately, and tech companies like Apple are compelled to take action. Advocates for the “right to repair” are trying to force manufacturers to make their products more repairable, and improve third-party access to important tools, parts, and information.
Tosh agrees laptops in late 2000s were easy to repair but things started to change when it became nearly impossible for users to replace a battery or get inside the laptop and repair it on your own.
To achieve a thin-and-light laptop form factor, it required manufacturers to move from using cylindrical battery designs to a rechargeable lithium-polymer (LiPo or Li-Poly) battery. “Some think that they [PC brands] took it away because they didn’t want to make it easy to remove the battery…it was because the whole industry was driving towards lighter thinner and more powerful laptops and we were getting more powerful batteries from these directions and optimizing the design by not having to make it removable,” Tosh said. “It becomes a service and a regulatory aspect right because you’re in essence opening up access to the power of the system.”
Concept Luna gives a peek into a repairable, sustainable laptop for the future. (Image: Dell)
With Concept Luna, Tosh said not only Dell is trying to make aspects easier to repair, but also easier to repair for someone who may not technical knowhow, letting end users do their own service operations.
“We are out of the theory or concept stage, and we start trying to figure out how do we implement all of these things that are mass-produced, because you can build 100 or 1000 of something one way, but to build millions of them another is a different scale,” Tosh said when asked about Dell’s plans to mass-produce Luna which is still a concept device.
For Dell, Concept Luna isn’t a marketing opportunity, rather it is something more personal. “We know this stuff [Luna] is hard and we know that we’re not the only ones on the journey,” said Page Motes, head of global sustainability, Dell Technologies.
Page said Concept Luna is a part of the moonshot goals the company has set to decarbonise its products and make a deeper impact in the circular economy space. “By bringing [Luna] to life is a real example of how we are trying to take ideas and really put them into action,” Page said.
