It is, although the pressure is adjustable. After all, you don’t know beforehand how your prototype chip will behave, more pressure might be needed. Also, over time, the elastomer will flatten and therefore you’ll need to press it down harder. But the idea is to avoid early damage to the elastomer, so you set the force you need and then the quick-locking knob lets you open and close the socket in a second without having to be careful about it. It’s really meant for heavy use in a lab environment.
Locating the elastomer on a board isn’t actually difficult. The old types that I used had two locating pins in the elastomer itself that went into matching holes on the circuit board. And of course the frame itself made sure it didn’t move while installing the chip. Newer types are actually a Star Trek level meta-material, literally a plastic that conducts electricity through only one dimension. There’s no need to locate them at all. They can even make it as double-sided tape, it’s crazy shit.
Cool idea… until a bunch of people buy them, do their own “upgrades”, proceed to break them, and then return them expecting them to be covered by warranty (no way the company can prove it wasn’t defective to begin with). Company will be bankrupt within 3 years.
I see no reason why a laptop manufacturer would let themselves be vulnerable to that behavior when every other computer part manufacturer will happily void your warranty at the first sign of unauthorized tampering.
I mean, I don’t think Asus would let people RMA a graphics card they pulled the heatsink off to install a water block.
I don’t see many “normal” types buying these. These are going to be bought by engineers, enthusiasts, and IT managers. I see them being popular with for example field research stations and oil rigs. Bringing parts in from shore or the University or whatever is expensive, so if you can bring parts that’s great.
I’m only posing a scenario, don’t rip me up on ruggedness.
Ooh, ruggedness ! Now that you mention that word, it reminds me of my love of industrial laptops. I’ve used Dell’s rugged (ruggedized ?) 14’’ Latitude with touchscreen on a few missions and let me tell ya, I just love the chunkiness. The integrated handle. The huge removable batteries. The watertight port covers. So what if it’s 5 cm thick and weighs four kilos ? I work out
Modular laptop parts would make it possible for a lot of people to design and build “extra-strength” laptops. It would remove the complexity and cost of designing laptop motherboards.
Now, granted, if I really wanted to do that there are already industrial SBC’s in the 3.5’’ format that carry everything up to a Core i7 processor. In fact some even have a socketed processor, @FaunCB
And even a PCIe x16 slot !
It’s never gonna fit in a “thin and light” laptop chassis, but it should fit in something like this :
The more I think about it the more I kinda just want a motherboard and a handful of those dingledangledongles. Looks like it would be very easy to make an HTPC chassis with how it’s arranged.
There is even a smaller format I use on robots : Pico-ITX
Those are 100 x 72 mm… very small. A common trait of those industrial boards is also that they run on 12 V DC, so it’s very easy to power them. They normally come with a heatsink / fan combo but it’s always removable so you can install a custom solution.
Pico-ITX tends to be a bit expensive, though… not a lot of demand, I guess. Also it’s harder to find any with PCIe expansion, and that always comes in the form of non-standard connectors. Sometimes they don’t have any audio capability other than through HDMI. But if you’re only going to use it as a media player it should be fine.
It’s USB 4 and Nirav Patel has alluded to multiple times that they are undergoing Thunderbolt certification with this model, but can’t officially say it has thunderbolt until then.
