Insights Into the Future of the Laptop

An anonymous reader writes "ThinkPad founder Arimasa Naitoh sat down for a chat with CNET.com.au about the future of the laptop. The article includes a few concept design images, as well as details on why Lenovo believes that fuel-cell technology is poor and that Origami will never succeed as a primary device." From the article: "Although Lenovo has traditionally targeted the business crowd, it recently released the consumer-targeted Lenovo 3000 series, as 'many people want to have a ThinkPad that is not black'. Naitoh shuns the use of aluminium in laptop manufacturing, calling it 'weak', instead praising titanium (used in the construction of the 3000) for its light-weight and scratch-resistant properties. Naitoh also showed off a number of ThinkPad concept designs with innovations such as raising displays and removable keyboards. He didn't give any word on whether these would be incorporated into official ThinkPad models, but we've snagged some pictures for you anyway."

Re:What I want...

[cerberusss]

You're describing this [laptop.org] except it doesn't have an ARM but some AMD processor. From the FAQ:

The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, with a dual-mode display--both a full-color, transmissive DVD mode, and a second display option that is black and white reflective and sunlight-readable at 3× the resolution. The laptop will have a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, with 500MB of Flash memory; it will not have a hard disk, but it will have four USB ports. The laptops will have wireless broadband that, among other things, allows them to work as a mesh network; each laptop will be able to talk to its nearest neighbors, creating an ad hoc, local area network. The laptops will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data.

Re:ARM powered laptop with flash

[simp]

It was made 10 years ago, the Psion 5MX. For it's time it was very good. The included agenda/database software is even today a good match for the modern PDAs. Unfortunately these days everybody seems to be facinated with running Windows CE on a small PDA screen and call it an improvement... I'm getting old.

Interesting stuff

[99luftballon]

Lenovo appears to be playing a smart game, looking to expand from the business market to the professional consumer. With companies like Acer and HP looking more a the entertainment machine concept Lenovo is looking to a higher value market. The Origami stuff is interesting too. The whole idea is a loser (sub laptop capability for more money) and he's wise to stay out of it. All this stress on using titanium could also be a nod towards industry fears that Lenovo might compromise quality for price. Maybe they've decided to rely on low manufacturing costs to keep prices at reasonable levels.

Re:Titanium - Scratch Resisitant??

[skingers6894]

Same here. I just gave my 2 year old Albook to my Mrs and it looks like new! The last time I did that (with a TiBook) it looked like it had been drop kicked all over the road!

Re:Titanium - Scratch Resisitant??

[dbIII]

If you treat the surface to make it a nitride you get a very hard surface and a nice gold colour - take a look at industrial cutting tools for an example. Titanium alloys are a bit stronger than aluminium alloys but are a pain to work with and very expensive. As for strength - the same thickness of a half decent steel is stronger than a titanium alloy but of course the titanium alloy is lighter in weight.

Alumiumium alloys can also be fairly scratch resistant if they are anodised to give a thick hard oxide layer - probably what has been done with the alumiumium powerbook.

Re:Titanium - Scratch Resisitant??

[Anonymous Coward]

So what did Apple get wrong then? My TiBook was looking pretty ragged after two years of use. By contrast, my 15" Aluminum G4 PowerBook doesn't have a scratch on it....

The scratches are not in the titanium, but in the paint that Apple used to make it appear more "metal-like". The anodized aluminum on the AlBooks don't need paint to look like metal (although some parts are painted, like the keycaps which are actually plastic). It holds up better against scratches, but is also easier to dent.

According to lenovo, trusted computing is future

[plasmacutter]

These people are on the active promoters list [trustedcom...ggroup.org] on the official website of the trusted computing initiative.

I can tell you one thing about their future, it won't involve my dollars.

Re:Titanium - Scratch Resisitant??

[engagebot]

The problem is that not all of the TiBook was actually Ti. Only the casing of the screen is actually Ti, and the whole bottom casing is just silver-colored plastic. The white frame that goes around the edge of the machine is some other kind of metal thats painted white. All these painted surfaces scratch off and look beat up, whereas the AlBook is actuallly silver.

Re:Titanium - Scratch Resisitant??

[dhovis]

Well, it may depend on the specific alloy they use. The Ti-Powerbooks were made using CP-Ti(Commercially Pure). Frankly, that isn't a structural alloy. In fact, it has no alloying elements at all! Now the lay person would say "It's really pure, it must be really strong!". Bzzzzz....Wrong. That makes it fairly soft compared to, say Ti-6Al-4V [alleghenyludlum.com], which is kind of the standard titanium alloy that is used for most things titanium.

With the Al-books, Apple switched to an "aircraft grade" aluminum alloy. That can mean a lot of things, but generally, aircraft grade aluminum alloys are some of the strongest, lightest alloys on the market. It is also a lot easier to form aluminum. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if the Al-books were forged, which would increase their strength. There is no way they could have forged the Ti-book parts, forging titanium is a very expensive process. Also, the Al-books were hard anodized, which leaves them with a thin, hard, adherent layer of Al2O3 on the surface. Al2O3 is also known as sapphire, so it adds to the scrach resistance, at least for superficial scraches, anyway.

Now, I am a Ph.D. Materials Scientist, so I would be remiss if I didn't mention that scratch resistance and strength are two entirely different things. Generally, making something scratch resistant will also make it brittle. If you had to choose between your laptop scratching or shattering, I know which one I'd choose.

That is as much insight as I can probably provide. My expertise these days is on the high temperature oxidation of Ni-based superalloys.

Not just strength and scratch resistance

[TTK Ciar]

There's also the entirely different matter of stiffness (rigidity) and its relationship to mass. Steel, Aluminum, and Titanium are all plenty strong for building a laptop, but because their densities are dramatically different, a given mass of each translates to different thicknesses, which becomes the dominating factor in determining the plate's stiffness.

The stiffness of a plate is approximately proportional to the cube of the plate's thickness multiplied by the material-specific flexural modulus. Most steel alloys have a flexural modulus of 205GPa, while cheap construction-grade Aluminum (alloy 6063, temper grade 6) has a modulus of only 69GPa. So a given thickness of steel is stiffer than the same thickness of aluminum, but steel is three times more dense than aluminum. This means that for the same mass budget, you can get an aluminum plate three times as thick. The cube of this ratio of thickness is 27, which when multiplied by the aluminum's modulus gives you an overall stiffness nine times greater than that of steel. This higher rigidity is highly desirable in products such as laptops, which you do not want to have flexing under the user's hands, or in the owner's backpack. The casing could have plenty of strength (ie, not break), but fail to protect the internal components from damage due to insufficient rigidity.

An annealed high-strength titanium alloy (Titanium Ti-8Al-1Mo-1V [matweb.com]) is only 55% as dense as most steels, is as strong and resilient as hardened steel (about 50% stronger than mild steels like the kind your car and laptop are made from), and has a modulus of 121GPa, betwixt that of steel and aluminum 6063-t6. So for a given mass budget, a plate of this titanium alloy would be about 1.8 times thicker, and 3.4 times more rigid, than a steel plate, but only 0.38 times as rigid as the aluminum 6063-t6 plate.

I am thinking the main draw of titanium for laptops is probably scratch resistance (some titanium alloys are much more scratch-resistant than both steel and aluminum), which I guess would be a big draw for some customers. Personally I'd rather want the tougher aluminum laptop. (Better heat dissipation too, and probably somewhat cheaper, though the material costs of a laptop are a small fraction of its actual cost.) It's not like the aluminum laptop would be that much bulkier. 1.5mm steel is more than enough strength for such a product (your car's body is probably made from 1.5mm steel), and a triple thickness of this of aluminum would be only 4.5mm -- about 1/6th of an inch. I could totally live with that.

-- TTK