I'm curious as to a second implication for using aluminum. Since the G4 aluminum casing, I've heard that apple is using aluminum also to act as an overall heatsink as well as a casing. I can see that working, and not working (aka burning my lap like when i first got the MBA)... Anyone know for certain if the aluminum design was also intended purposefully as a heatsink mechanism?
Makes perfect sense.
One of the many problems with the titanium PB G4 was that you could fry eggs on it, Apple were so hell bent on making it thin that the cooling wasn't given due attention.
One could suspect that the use of aluminium was born out of that, or out of desperately trying to get a mobile version of the G5 into a PowerBook while still keeping it cool and even thinner than the last one (as always). So maybe they figured hey, let's turn the whole body into one giant heatsink while also making it lighter, killing two birds with one stone, and the alu G4 was born.
Funny metal, that... apparently it's the third most common element in the earth's crust, after oxygen and silicon. I used to think it was relatively rare, compared to iron or copper, but the stuff is everywhere.
sushi said:
I would never view the Apple line up as tough computers. Built better than some, but not laptops that you can bang around a lot and have them survive.
They're well built and rigid, but the drawback of the enclosures being so thin, with the components so tightly packed, is that there's no room for stuff like the shock mounted hard drives you'll find in some PC notebooks.
I remember another torture test video from a few years ago where they subjected a Dell Latitude to various stress tests -- this wasn't one of the rugged models like the XFR, just a standard Latitude, and the point of the test wasn't to see how much the machine could take before the enclosure cracked (it did), but to see how much it could take and still run. So they dropped it on carpets, then wooden floors, then marble floors (from various heights), they spilled coffee on it, had a go at it with a hammer, etc. It looked like garbage, but it would still boot just fine -- they didn't manage to kill it completely. Not sure what would happen to a UMBP subjected to a similar test... the body would probably be a little banged up and bent, maybe some cracks on the screen and the trackpad, possibly a dead hard drive.