Gossip suggests carbon fibre as a feature in future machines.
Sweet.

How "green" is carbon fibre? Can it be recycled easily?

If it can, then it may well make an appearance in some form. Otherwise, I doubt it. Apple's done well to make their hardware as recyclable and green as possible in the past couple of years.

Heat dissipation could be an issue too.

Isn't it the case that carbon fibre is only strong along the fibre not across it? They always say about the bits of F1 cars that are made from it that they're incredibly strong & light along the paths they're designed to take stress on but otherwise if you lean on them the wrong way they snap like balsa wood. Doesn't really seem a very appropriate material for a laptop case to me.

Jon

Re. the recycling - I have no idea. It's carbon. Seems pretty innocuous doesn't it?
It's probably hugely expensive to return it to another useable form though. I really have no idea though.

Heat dissipation - another good point, it's not very conductive. It's used in heat shielding for that reason.

Strength - By layering the sheets, creating a cross ply, you can greatly strengthen the shapes. I'd imagine that in F1, they're built for such specific roles that anything outside of that would cause grief.
There's more common uses of CF, such as in camera tripods, where rigidity and lateral strength are a factor and it seems to do the job. Of course, here it's rolled in to tubes, so the form has an integral strength to it as well.

IIRC F1 components such as suspension struts are like that to save weight Jon. They design them only to be rigid in the direction they are loaded. However other components constructed of carbon fibre are strong in all directions, such as gearbox casings etc. They just layer the weaves in alternating directions. So it is possible. I bet it would look

Sony Vaio anyone?

Carbon fibre, super-light and 7 hours battery. What was that, over 3 years ago?

There have been many higher-end light-weight laptops built from carbon fibre.

*Wonders if high end 13" laptops exist*

It's interesting, reading the design interview on the Sony site (clicky), they talk a lot about the aluminium body and extrusion (and how they wanted it to look like it was carved from an aluminium ingot) but not at all about the CF finish.

CC; even by today's standards that is not a bad specification. Performance wise, it was certainly in the upper quartile of units sold in it's day. Let's face it, for over £3000 you'd expect it to be good.

If you look at the current specification you'll see it's more powerful than the Macbook Air for example. It is 100g heavier, but then it does include a BluRay drive:

VGN Z 35X
Carbon fibre Ultimate performance

• 2.93 GHz Intel® Core™2 Duo
  
• Genuine Windows Vista® Business
  
• 256 GB SSD flash drive
  
• 4 GB memory
  
• Blu-ray disc™ drive
  
• WXGA++ X-black LCD (1600x900)
  
• Carbon fibre
  
  Starting from
  £ 3,251.00 inc. VAT

The CF finish is black. They mention it twice in that interview They don't talk about it at great length because it's not interesting. Most people wouldn't care that the black plastic had carbon in, but they do like the shiny designer palm rest. If you look on the Sony home page for the current model, it does say:

Why would you want to buy a Mac made out of carbon? It will be a complete rip-off.

I could make my own out of charcoal briquettes.

But does it run OS X?

*cough*.

Jon

PS. Is it just me, or is the sonystyle site phenomenally broken?

Sorry JJ,

I am just smarting from a roasting I was being given in this thread

viewtopic.php?f=19&t=241

It seems that even if a laptop has nothing faster in it's class it can't be considered high end. There are apparently high end 17" laptops (as long as Apple don't make them) and no high end 15" laptops. So my comment about 13" laptops was somewhat tongue in cheek.

CC

CC, show me a 15" MacBook with quad core extreme processor and SLi configured dual graphic chips...