It’s almost 2023, and if you follow the tech industry, you know all about the big push for "right to repair" in the devices you buy. The Framework Laptop is the most market-ready notebook computer right now that leans in that direction. (See how we upgraded our Framework to Intel's latest silicon.) But Dell's Concept Luna could have an impact that’s many times that size, coming from such a big PC manufacturer.
We first saw Concept Luna in 2021, when Dell outlined its vision for an easily repairable laptop with modular parts. The idea promised both economic and environmental benefits. In the run-up up to CES 2023, Dell gave us a demo at a preview event in New York City to show how far Luna—still a prototype concept at this stage—has come in the time since.
The video up top shows off the updated Luna design, as well as some of the automation developments. Read on for more details below.
Explaining Concept Luna: A Vision of a Modular Laptop Future
First of all, what is Concept Luna? Don’t confuse it with Amazon Luna, which is a gaming service. If you missed its debut last year, Dell’s Concept Luna is centered around a fully modular laptop chassis with internal parts that can be swapped out easily and individually when they go bad. That way, if something goes wrong with your machine, you don't have to throw out the whole laptop, or spend lots of time and money on tedious disassembly and reassembly. Laptops are among the trickiest tech items to fix, because they are so densely packed inside.
It’s not just about fixing stuff you paid good money for, either: It’s also about environmental concerns. The costs for tech products and their internal components are rising everywhere. That’s true of laptops as much as any other kind of tech, and there’s therefore a real need gaining steam for more-modular laptop designs. Under Concept Luna, broken or malfunctioning parts can (ideally) be reused, upcycled, or recycled.
In the time since we first saw the Concept Luna design, Dell made quite a few improvements. The most important is that Dell significantly improved the modularity of the build, minimizing the number of cables and screws inside the body. This makes it easier to replace and fix parts, and crucially, it also makes it easier to automate the process.
That's because tiny cables are tricky to work with, when you’re talking about robotic repair; usually, you need the dexterity that only fingers have to unravel and press delicate cable connectors into place inside a laptop. If machine assembly can identify, remove, and replace parts quickly, a modular design like Luna’s becomes that much more attractive.
A Faster and Cleaner Assembly Process
The demo at the preview event showed us that the new Luna laptop can be fully disassembled in about a minute or less, with minimal need for screws. A small tool pops open the keyboard panel, giving a repair person, or a machine, easy access to everything beneath, all of which can be removed without much trouble. Cables and screws have been replaced with contact connectors and clips where possible.
The quicker disassembly time is a boon not only to the users and Dell’s repair team, but also to the company’s recycling partners. The fewer parts that are soldered or fixed to one another, the more easily they can be removed, recycled, and shared. Displays, keyboards, batteries, and motherboards all age and take damage at different rates—separating them into discrete parts, like you can on a desktop, is ideal for this concept, when it comes to replacement or disposal.
You can see that the individual parts in the Concept Luna laptop include QR codes, which make it easier to identify and order replacement components. The pieces also have their own telemetry, tracking which machines they’ve been used in before, for how long they’ve been in service, and—for parts like batteries—their estimated remaining lifespan. Dell or the user could flag which part is failing, the automated system can run a diagnostic, and the repairs can be carried out.
Now, I understand one main concern here: Should Luna hit the market, I think we all hope Dell is not intending to sell new, or like-new, laptops with old or refurbished parts that came from older laptops. These used parts would ideally be deployed in discount-priced used systems, or to replace your laptop’s malfunctioning pieces with working versions of similarly aged components.
Building a Machine-Friendly Design
As for that automation, the second half of Dell’s demo showed off how well a robotic repair station can access and swap components in the new Concept Luna design. Laptop automation is not new by any means, so don’t be swayed too much by how cool it is to watch this demo, but it’s an effective illustration of how a human and robot access and change this same design so easily. Dell mentioned, too, that for our safety, the repair station demo you’re looking at here was running many times slower than it would in a factory, to boot.
That brings us full circle to the holistic Concept Luna approach. Right now, this experimental design is limited to this one chassis, which is not a retail product yet. The design benefits are clear and impressive, though, and the theoretical idea is to spread the concept (if not the exact internal design) to Dell’s other product lines.
If the many Latitude laptop fleets sold to IT departments around the world could share a similar swappable design, there is the potential for both financial and environmental savings, and increased upgrade accessibility and convenience for the end user. Even if it only stayed within the Luna chassis, the project could still mean a lot of raw materials saved and recycled.
That’s all still years off, and if Concept Luna ever does move beyond just a concept. But even from the concept presented here, it’s easy to see the benefits of this simple-access, modular design for more sustainable upgrades and repairs.