Whatever your stance on environmental conservation as a whole, you have to agree that generating millions of tons of e-waste due to obsolescent hardware is sub-optimal. There are a lot of reasons to want to reduce this number, both ecological and economical. Intel has an idea to help, and interestingly, it aligns with right-to-repair advocates’ goals.
Three Intel personnel—Gurpreet Sandhu and Reshma PP from Intel’s Platform Engineering Group, as well as Sustainability Product Strategy Manager Roberta Zouain—crafted a big post titled “Modular PC Design: A Sustainable Approach for Enhanced Repairability and Reduced E-Waste.” The title pretty much gives it away, but the gist is that Intel is advocating for a new approach to building devices to reduce the need for premature disposal.
Intel notes that modularity can be addressed at three different levels: factory, field, and user. Basically, the idea is that devices can be made so that users can easily swap components for convenience, so that technicians can easily replace parts for repairs, and such that the manufacturer can re-use components and designs. Intel’s goal is for all three to be more commonplace.
To that end, the company has crafted three “Modular PC” proposals for different market segments: premium laptops, entry or mainstream laptops, and then desktops. Intel makes specific recommendations for each category, but to be honest, many of them are either a bit vague (“standardized core boards”) or things that system builders are already doing (“standardized M.2 SSD modules”.)
For premium laptops, Intel wants to see scalable designs with reduced engineering efforts put toward proprietary parts. The company emphasizes ease of upgrades and simplified repairs in this class, and advocates the use of universal I/O boards similar to what Framework is already doing. Lenovo, too, has gotten into this, by putting its USB Type-C connectors on daughterboards in some systems, which will greatly ease replacement of those parts.
For mainstream laptops, Intel emphasizes “multi-generation silicon to achieve cost neutrality.” Essentially what the company seems to be saying is that it wants to see machines that are capable of accepting different processors in the same fundamental design—amusing to hear coming from Intel, specifically given the company’s history of cycling through motherboard platforms relatively rapidly. Still, we approve of what Intel’s saying here.
Finally, in desktop systems, Intel is advising the proliferation of more modular industrial designs. The company presents a render of a “125W CPU + 23W dGPU Mini Desktop formfactor with <5L volume” and that’s pretty cool, but the standardized nature of the ATX form factor certainly has its advantages. Of course, Intel is hoping to create a whole new standard here, and it wants to see easy upgrades and simplified repairs—a far cry from SFF machines today.
Even if you actively hate the environment, making devices last longer through upgradeability and repairability is a great goal. Computers have long since reached the point where even a cheap PC is “fast enough” for most use cases, and it’s a shame to toss out a laptop because it’s a few years old and a proprietary component in it failed.
While Intel’s post seems more like a “wouldn’t this be great” type of blog entry than a formal proposal for new form factors, it’s still fascinating to see a company like Intel coming out in support of right to repair in such an affirmative way. Kudos to the company for its efforts, and hopefully system manufacturers take these goals to heart.