ASUS creates a substance: Ceraluminum, which fuses aluminum and a ceramic ASUS has given the world what it claims is a new substance, and it's got a catchy name: Ceraluminum. Announced yesterday at an event staged alongside the Computex conference in Taiwan, Ceraluminum was described as the result of four years' effort to "transform aluminum into high-tech ceramic." Ceraluminum has been baked into a …
Why this obsession with 'thin'? Aiming for light I'd entirely agree with, but so many potential problems accompany extreme thinness (heat management, resistance to flexing, impact protection etc.) that it seems a rather strange to aim for it as a primary design (or indeed marketing) goal.
Couldnt agree more - I prefer the heft of a smartphone with a 1000 mAh battery and in a ruggedised case. Similarly I'd prefer a laptop with plenty of ports for convenience and expandability over a bendy fragile under-powered fashion-accessory laptop/tablet
You've got a point, but it pretty much emphasises that the obsession with extreme thinness *is* marketing-driven "willy-waving" and that- as I said previously- even though there were (and still are in some cases) portability and other functional benefits to reducing the thickness of bulkier laptops, these ultra-thins have long crossed the point there's much benefit to the trade-offs (e.g. with respect to battery, port availability, keyboard, etc.)
At this point, the footprint is now arguably the limiting factor in portability and usability, not some impressively-engineered but pointless reduction of another millimetre of thinness.
Personally, I don't even want "light". I want a laptop with a decent screen size and keyboard, and having decent battery life is occasionally nice too. I want it to not overheat. I want the screen to be bright enough to use outside and have a good anti-glare coating (and I don't want a fucking touchscreen, though at least that's easy enough to disable). I want a backlit keyboard. I want enough ports, defined as "however many of whatever sort I end up wanting to plug things into". I want it to tolerate being dropped onto a hard floor and other sorts of abuse.
Light is irrelevant to me — I used to routinely carry around two business-class laptops, plus their chargers and a few other peripherals, and various books and papers — and thin is just an annoyance.
Agreed, but it also sounds like the ceramic coating that was applied to high end aluminium bike wheels a few years ago, to prolong their braking life, before disk brakes became the norm. (i.e. the end material isn't necessarily very novel, but the process to apply it sounds like it might be.)
'Ceramic' bicycle rims are PVD - Physical Vapour Deposition, a process in a vacuum which condenses molecules onto the work piece.
This ASUS princess sounds more akin to Hard Anodisation, which you might have seen on some bicycle chainsets back in the day. However, there might be some extra chemistry going on, I can't tell from their vague description.
From the Asus website:
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Security
Trusted Platform Module (Firmware TPM)
Microsoft Pluton security processor # WTF?
IR webcam with Windows Hello support
Disclaimer
This product has only been tested for compatibility with the Windows 11 operating system, and may encounter compatibility issues if Windows 10 or older OS versions are installed.
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That is enough to stop reading.
And what about the battery? Is it replaceable?
Very light and blingy (there's another new word for you) with a very heavy price tag.
There's probably a market for this among boardroom/CEO/AH-PHB types and chaps with more cash than common sense.
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I saw some in the 1990's. It had a similar opacity to an average used UK milk bottle. Good enough to see through, but I probably wouldn't make a windscreen from it.
One would imagine that given another 30 years of research, it is almost transparent by now.
The problem is that Marketing departments drive new product releases and they are all fixated on the same old faster/lighter/thinner/prettier paradigms. They are incapable of thinking of new ways of marketing a product because "fit for purpose" or "sturdy" or "efficient" just aren't sexy enough for your average image obsessed consumer. Personally I have never bought anything based on how it looks. I buy based on how well it works, how well it suits me and my intended use for it, and how well-made/reliable it is. Just because something looks a certain way is no indication of how good/bad it is.
By definition half the world is below average on lots of measures, including resistance to bullshit marketing (I work with some). But they still have money to spend and are a valuable part of society. The rest of us (ahem) may make different choices, but we are in the minority and we probably spend less on consumer goods anyway.
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ASUS decided to not honor ANY motherboard warranty in the US, EU and UK, and has taken the position of "sue us if you're not happy"
Can you IMAGINE if they're ignoring basic consumer law, how hard they will fight if this substance turns out to be a dangerous carcinogen?
Or catches fire when its a few months old, and burns your house to the ground?
AVOID AVOID AVOID
In light of the title, I wonder if this stuff is more or less prone to tiny chips and microscopic dents that they will demand payment to fix after you send it in under the free warranty fix program for completely unrelated issues that are actually problems.
Edit: just as an aside, it occurs to me, frying pans exist. Are some of them not already aluminium with ceramic coating fused to them? Are they intending to let you fry eggs on these?
Edit 2: ah I see I was beaten to then idea by another comment.
"demand" seems a little strong in my experience. I had a laptop from them that had a power problem shortly after purchase. I sent it back and yes they did mention a scratch that I could have fixed for me at the bargain price of £100 for a new case, but I said no so they fixed the real problem and sent it back. No charge.
Said laptop is still going strong 7 or 8 years later.
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"new"? ceramic + metal variations have existed for years, some of the ceramic aluminium variants are even transparent >80% in the visible spectrum and some are even better than glass for infrared or UV wavelengths.
From the summary description, what ASUS seems to be doing is to use deposition of a very thin ceramic compound to a sheet of aluminium, bake it in an oven then probably rinse and repeat, to add another layer of ceramic.
Other industries have been using relatively similar processes for years with ceramic-based compounds...
e.g. https://patents.google.com/patent/US3928668A/en
Electrostatic deposition of dry ceramic powders
patent filed: 1974,
patent expired: 1992
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