Intel Wants Interchangeable Notebook Components
 

Intel wants to make laptops more accessible to users and would like to make devices more akin to their desktop counterparts. With the company's new Interchangeability Initiative, components including the optical drive, LCD screen, battery, power adapter and keyboard would all be upgradeable and can be swapped between notebooks. Hard drives are already for the most part interchangeable as long as you decide on PATA or SATA.

I really don't see the Keyboard and Screen to make any sense to be changed.

About time!. We have lived in a " manufacturer's Lock-In" for too long on the notebook world. Some more flexibility cannot hurt in this area. Only Disk drive and perhaps SODIMMS are common, the rest are just plain mechanically propreitary.

Take a look at the Intel 915IGP machine. That 950 video adapter is a lousy excuse for a video card by standards 2 years ago. Let alone today. Bring in the MObility Radeon X1600 ATI. Let the graphics dance nicely on the 15inch screen.
Oh that IGP Intel card crashed the machine when plugged in a Projector. I also had the notebook tossed out of the window!.

Keyboard and screen actually make sense. Everybody likes other types of keyboards, I for example am not to keen on the low profile keys that are to be found on notebooks, while other would die to have such keys on their desktop computer. There are lots of things that make keyboards different, keysize, keyresponsivity/noise, keyplacement (eg. ergonomic designs) ...

Same for the screen, some people prefer large screen and high resolutions, while other prefer large screens with lower resolutions (because they can't read such tiny words). Ow, and of course not to forget quality (speed, brightness, contrast, mirrorratio (?), ...)

It got about time, now let's hope we can build our own laptops just like we do with our computers (I know it's already possible, but it's not easy to find a bare laptop, anybody got an adress???)

The two commonly go wrong items; and cost a bundle (keyboard with mouse from spills; crack screens)