I have some old laptops that I stopped using partly because some parts failed (especially the battery) but mostly because they were increasingly slow compared to the state of the art: the parts subject to Moore's Law or the even faster pace of disk densification are hopelessly obsolete.
But there seems to be a floor of something around US$200 on the price of a new laptop, despite the best efforts of the OLPC program and the various hardware manufacturers who cloned it as "netbooks" and "MacBook Air". Presumably a substantial part of this price is the display. But mainstream laptop displays haven't gotten denser or better in a lot of years. They've just become shiny, making them hard to read. (At some point, maybe the ultrahard glass Corning developed for the iPhone will make its way into laptop displays, making them still shiny but at least less prone to scratching; and maybe they'll get past 150dpi or so.) So it ought to be feasible to reuse displays on a massive scale. Similarly, keyboards should be quite reusable. I just took a keyboard out of a T20 by removing two screws. Our kitchen scale is out of batteries, and a makeshift balance involving some thread and two plastic coke bottles full of lentils ended in the sort of failure that requires a broom, but I estimate that it's somewhere around 200g. Surely keyboards salvaged from smaller laptops (not including separate F1 through F12, PrtSc, ScrLk, Pause, Insert, Delete, Home, End, PgUp, PgDn, volume up, volume down, power on, and "ThinkPad" keys, or the clitmouse and mouse buttons) would weigh even less. A couple of US$5 ATMega 28-pin AVR microcontrollers would probably suffice to decode whatever its 42-pin unpublished pinout is. Even a full-size keyboard like that one could be pretty ultraportable. It's 290mm wide, about 145mm high (disregarding the mouse buttons, which stick out an additional 40mm in the middle), and about 6mm thick. The "main" part of the keyboard, from 12345 to CtrlAltSpace, is only 96mm high. (Our 9" netbook is only 230mm wide.) You could build a fairly comfortable writing-oriented ultraportable computing device around that keyboard and, say, the battery, charger, and display of an old cellphone. Or you could use the keyboard, display, and chassis of old laptops, along with new CPUs, memory, storage devices, and batteries, to build new laptops. Kragen -- To unsubscribe: http://lists.canonical.org/mailman/listinfo/kragen-tol
