Dell's Concept Luna Pitches Robotic Laptop Recycling
Laptops
Speaker 1: One of the things I really like about CES's time is getting to see all the prototypes and concept pieces from different companies. One of them I got a chance to see ahead of CES is from Dell, and it's called Concept Luna.
Speaker 1: And if that sounds familiar, that's because I saw version 1.0 of this last year. Now they're back exactly a year later with a new version of it. And what is Concept Luna? It is a highly recyclable laptop. Let me tell you what that means. That means this [00:00:30] concept is you would have a laptop designed by Dell. That is very easy for either you as a consumer or more importantly, Dell as the computer maker to take apart, separate out all the different components, and if possible, reuse some of them, recycle others, throw out others, even replace parts that aren't working. Uh, but everything is very modular, very plug and play. So for the version of concept Luna, we saw this year, there was just one little tiny tool, kinda like a little, uh, pokey stick that goes [00:01:00] in a hole and that unlocks basically the entire laptop.
Speaker 1: You can take off the whole keyboard array, the speakers, the motherboard, uh, the touchpad, everything. And if you have a part that let's say is not working, you could conceivably get a replacement and very easily put it in yourself. There are a couple of other companies that are working on, uh, laptops that are very upgradeable with replaceable parts. This is about taking the parts out of the laptop when you're done with it, when it's at the end of its useful life, and seeing if any of those parts can be reused in other laptops. [00:01:30] Let's say you have some speakers that are perfectly fine, those can go in another laptop as replacement parts. Let's say you have a laptop that you had hooked up to a monitor and a keyboard enough, so you never really used, uh, the keyboard, uh, or even the screen on this laptop.
Speaker 1: You could take those parts out and reuse them somewhere else. Now the second part of the new V2 concept, Luna, is that you don't need a person to sit there and take the laptop apart and sort all the pieces. They have a couple of robot arms that have been programmed to recognize what every part of the laptop [00:02:00] is, even test some of them to see how worn they are, if they still work or not, and then take them out and, you know, sort them as needed. And that replaces the need for a human to do that, and it makes it very easy to do this at scale. Are we gonna see the concept, Luna idea evolve into products you're gonna buy from Dell then be able to recycle right now? No. Maybe years from now, possibly. But for now it's just what they call a concept piece where they have some interesting new technology or ideas and they show off a prototype they've built to, you know, let you see that it works [00:02:30] and then maybe they'll incorporate it down the line. It's really more forward looking than anything else. So I'm very excited to see Concept Luna four a second year in a row. Dell says it's just a concept, so you shouldn't expect this in real products anytime soon, but I think it's a good idea of where we should be going in terms of reusing and recycling our laptops.
