Homemade laptop looks almost as good as a commercial product

We’ve seen our fair share of DIY laptops and designs, most of which are made for fun or simply for achievement. Many end up looking like functional cyberpunk props, but a few do come out as decent laptops or palmtops, at least until you open them up to take a peek inside. There you’ll be greeted with a jungle of cables and an odd assortment of circuit boards necessary to make the computer boot up at all.

Designing a laptop isn’t easy, and assembling one by hand is even harder. Coming across a DIY homemade laptop that actually looks like it could have been made by a manufacturer is a rare treat, and that’s exactly what we have here. It’s by no means an easy task, but the end result definitely makes the arduous journey well worth it.

Designer: Byran Huang

Unlike their larger desktop cousins, laptops don’t exactly have a modular and uniform design that would allow you to easily build your own. While some components like RAM and SSDs are definitely replaceable, others like the motherboard are often custom-made, not to mention have parts that are soldered down on them. Then you have to consider the most efficient arrangement of components and cables while taking into account thermal management and airflow.

That said, laptops do have a standard set of components as mentioned, so at least it’s a matter of putting the pieces together. Unlike most DIY laptop projects, however, anyon_e aimed high in terms of specs, including a 13.3-inch 4K AMOLED screen and support for up to 32GB of RAM. That said, the bigger part of the design challenge was designing as many components from scratch as possible, like the custom motherboard and what is claimed to be the thinnest wireless mechanical QWERTY keyboard around.

What’s really striking is how polished and professional the end result looked, especially with the anodized aluminum chassis in handsome matte black. Even the internals look relatively tidy, at least for something that was all done by hand. The overall user experience seems to be quite decent as well, at least for people familiar with using a Linux operating system.

Unfortunately, anyon_e isn’t something that anyone can follow, ironic as that may sound. While some of the parts are available for purchase from some vendors, they aren’t exactly accessible to most people. The custom boards and chassis are even harder to pull off unless you have access to printers or services that make these. The project does highlight the need for the laptop industry to finally adopt a modular design, though that will probably take years or even decades.

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