First Look: Dell’s ‘Concept Luna’ Targets Laptop Sustainability With Modular Parts

In the run-up to CES 2022, Dell showed PCMag a host of concrete products to be unveiled at the show, and expected to ship in the new year. But the PC maker also showed off several prototypes and concepts, the most intriguing of which debuts in advance of the Las Vegas conference. “Concept Luna,” unveiled today, is a forward-looking vision for sustainable and recyclable laptops.

Concept Luna isn’t a single product. It's a holistic approach to addressing the disposable nature of today’s laptops, and a way to implement the tenets of “Right to Repair” into a major manufacturer’s pre- and post-sale processes.

Luna was demonstrated to us on a single prototype unit, plus a working sample. Dell gave us a walkthrough of how a theoretical future laptop—designed with Concept Luna’s goals in mind—could be disassembled for repair, recycling, and extending its lifespan.

Check out the video above for how this works in practice, and to hear a Dell representative explain the company's vision.

Laptops for Tomorrow: Recycling and Downcycling

If you watched the video, you can see how a theoretical laptop would come apart for repair. The idea is that every aspect of the laptop is replaceable, from the keyboard to the screen to everything underneath. But that alone is not the entirety of the concept. After all, products such as the Framework Laptop have already pioneered the concept in shipping hardware.

Given the volume and variety of laptops that Dell produces, Concept Luna is about creating a unified design and infrastructure to make laptops last longer, and for their components to potentially have service lives beyond their first laptop. The idea is that parts can be recycled, or that the components be outright reused, cascading down into “new” products. If laptops were to share a chassis, or at least a chassis size and certain internal form factors, the same motherboards could fit into a wider variety of laptops, or a working panel could be re-installed on another functional system of a later generation.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Dell’s vision is to be able to have itself, or ideally consumers, be able to replace and recycle the parts in any given laptop, creating an interchangeable, cycling ecosystem. One key difference, though, is that the recycling would not only consist of what you traditionally think of—reducing the component to its raw materials for future use—but also applying an older (but still functional) part to a new, fully warrantied product. That product would be clearly rated for the level of performance that the “old new” part can deliver.

One example Dell used was taking a laptop’s Core i5 processor/motherboard unit that has been used for years, and gauging its performance level versus modern standards. Based on that judgment, Dell could decide if that chip/board was now providing roughly Core i3-level performance due to its degradation or new, relative place in the market, and then implement it into a less expensive “Core i3”-equivalent system instead, saving on both the materials and production costs on a new chip.

That’s just one example, but the idea is that scenarios like that could apply across the internal wiring, the motherboard, or the display panel. Right now, if a laptop’s panel goes bad, many users would discard the whole system. Under the Luna paradigm, Dell or the user could more easily replace the panel and restore the laptop to working order. Similarly, today, in many cases we'd consider a whole older laptop dead if, say, the motherboard dies. But in the case of a Luna-style design, some of the remaining working parts may at least be harvestable. (Parts that take a beating like the keyboard are unlikely to be good candidates for that, but other bits of the laptop, such as the screen, could be reusable.)

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Dell would like to be able to use universal chassis, or at the very least standardized internal layouts (say, with the foundational screw holes in the same spots) to be able to re-use components across a range of products, extending lifespans across the board.

From the video, you can see in the Concept Luna prototype's interior that plenty of work went into having as few parts as possible soldered on or nailed down, reworking how components attach and how cables are routed.

The Luna Long View

This, of course, is a lofty vision at the scale of a company like Dell. It presages a lot of infrastructure work, both to have the internal procedures and systems in place, and to build laptops in a new way within modular constraints. But the first prototype showed what was possible, and Dell had a working system alongside the “breakdown” demo unit you see in the video above.

Concept Luna is definitely a long-term view—Dell would like to achieve some of its design goals by 2030. Given the complexity of laptop innards and the wild pace at which mobile silicon changes, we have some healthy skepticism on how achievable Luna might be in the pure form we see here. But, as a stated goal, it’s a positive for the company, consumers, and the planet, even if it manifests itself only in an altered form in years to come.