A year ago, Dell announced the Concept Luna, a fully repairable laptop made from sustainable materials.
It looks like it could be a similar concept to one of the most innovative laptops ever made: the groundbreaking Frameworks laptop. And if so, it would be an important step forward for both environmental and right-to-fix activists.
Concept Luna
“We don’t throw away an entire car when we need new brakes or tires,”
Dell
and yet laptops are more or less designed to be junked when they’re out of date.
The American technology company says it aims to give its laptops longer lifecycles while reducing their carbon footprints.
It’s been a whole year since we launched our first product. We haven’t made any progress toward putting it on shelves yet.
Design
However, Dell does claim it’s made some progress on it. Specifically, it has
“worked over the last year to further refine the modular design of Concept Luna, eliminating the need for adhesives and cables, and minimizing the use of screws.”
It’s a system that can be dismantled in “minimal time,” according to the company.
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What Parts Can Be Removed?
You can easily remove almost everything from the Concept Luna prototype without using any tools, screws, or anything else.
You can remove the keyboard, you can remove the speakers, and you can remove the battery and fan. We also watched Dell’s robots smoothly disassemble and reassemble the laptop, flashing various statistics about each component on a screen as they did so.
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QR Codes
You might see that some of the parts have QR codes printed on them. Those codes, Dell’s representative told me, would take you to a page where you could buy replacement parts.
“Would” is, of course, doing a lot of hard work in that sentence. Because, despite the various innovations that Dell claims to have invented, Concept Luna is still just a concept. Dell hasn’t given me any kind of timeline for when it plans on releasing a product like this.
When Will It Release?
It isn’t even clear whether they’re planning to launch a product like this. They haven’t committed to launching one yet.
Throughout the Luna demo, Dell’s reps stressed to me that they’re still essentially just playing around with the concept of a fully repairable PC. They aren’t sure which product category it would fall into, for example, or who their ideal customer might be.
Repairability
Perhaps the end product of this project will be an increase in repairability across many different devices from Dell. By 2022, the Latitudes and Inspiron laptops might be full of annoying screw holes, but at least they’re working on fixing them.
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Framework Laptop
You can already purchase the Framework laptop, and it’ll be easy enough for you to build it yourself from the start. It has some screws here and there, though.
If Dell is so committed to repairing its products, why doesn’t it just start manufacturing them again? I’ve been asking for an answer to this question since last year, but haven’t gotten any real answers yet.
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Ecosystem Support
Dell isn’t saying that there’s a lot more than just raw horsepower behind making a product like this. Other companies, including Dell itself, could probably put out something similar to a Concept Laptop tomorrow.
But solid raw horsepower alone doesn’t make for a solid repair-friendly laptop; it requires a strong commitment to ecosystem support.
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