Comment by cosmic_cheese
4 days ago
I believe that impression comes from the laptop feeling “hollow” more than it does from it being light.
This could probably be engineered around by doing things like holding the battery up against the laptop’s palm rest with a rim of TPU or similar between the battery and the case to deaden vibrations and make it feel more “solid”.
Haven’t some products been found to have weights inside just to make them feel more premium?
Yup. The most prominent I can remember are the Beats By Dre headphones, where about a third of the weight is from metal parts that are either purely decorative, or whose functionality does not at all depend on being made of metal, based on a 2020 teardown [0,1].
[0]: https://beneinstein.medium.com/how-it-s-made-series-beats-by... [1]: https://beneinstein.com/how-it-s-made-series-yup-our-beats-w...
Yeah. Dense = quality (and thus expense) is something people think.
I don’t know if it’s innate or learned, but I would certainly like to.
My theory is that this is a sense that people picked up on thanks to the outpouring of various cheap electronics from China from the 90s onward. They tended to be enclosed in thin plastic shells that were sometimes larger than necessary in attempt to increase visible differentiation from competitors sharing the same internals. This made them feel hollow, and people associated that feeling with cheapness.
By contrast, high end electronics brands like Sony used thicker enclosures that were made with a thicker, less resonant plastic or even metal and focused on miniaturization which naturally lent itself to more dense products. People then associated that denseness with quality.
1 reply →
In cases where there’s no component that would naturally add weight in the right place, yes.
I asked the kids not to unwrap their xmas presents.