High quality content that isn’t a people live in cities map or 2024 calendar??? Thank you so much this is very cool
LSeww on
330 grams of glass sounds like bs
also “plastic” is not a raw material
InvestInHappiness on
That’s a lot of magnesium. Is it used as an alloy or something? Or does it have a specific purpose like the glass for the screen? Seems like too much just for cooling.
BoltzFR on
6,2g of lithium seems low, I suppose the Li-ion battery weight is more “ion” than “Li”, which would be consistent with the low density of lithium.
Also the copper ball being the same size as lithium but a lot heavier can be explained by the fact copper is about 17 times more dense.
Quite surprised by the glass heavy weight.
t0on on
3D visual about the materials found in a laptop! It was inspired by those “cross-section of a ship” books from my childhood, but instead focusing on materials.
Every sphere is based on the mass of the material in the laptop and the density of the material. The laptop is “laptop-sized” so you can imagine what size the spheres would be in your hand. Lithium is the third element in the periodic table, which makes it lighter than oxygen (in reality, it wouldn’t be possible to roll it into a neat little ball like this but I took some artistic license with this one).
I didn’t include materials that contributed less than 1% of the laptop’s mass. To make the visual more comprehensive, I added up different types of glass to create one glass sphere, and I did the same for different types of plastic. Lastly, I decided to “deconstruct” lithium cobalt oxide to visualise the two materials separately.
![[OC] Raw materials in your laptop](https://www.byteseu.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/rnzhbp5jsiee1-1024x1024.jpeg "[OC] Raw materials in your laptop")
8 Comments
High quality content that isn’t a people live in cities map or 2024 calendar??? Thank you so much this is very cool
330 grams of glass sounds like bs
also “plastic” is not a raw material
That’s a lot of magnesium. Is it used as an alloy or something? Or does it have a specific purpose like the glass for the screen? Seems like too much just for cooling.
6,2g of lithium seems low, I suppose the Li-ion battery weight is more “ion” than “Li”, which would be consistent with the low density of lithium.
Also the copper ball being the same size as lithium but a lot heavier can be explained by the fact copper is about 17 times more dense.
Quite surprised by the glass heavy weight.
3D visual about the materials found in a laptop! It was inspired by those “cross-section of a ship” books from my childhood, but instead focusing on materials.
Every sphere is based on the mass of the material in the laptop and the density of the material. The laptop is “laptop-sized” so you can imagine what size the spheres would be in your hand. Lithium is the third element in the periodic table, which makes it lighter than oxygen (in reality, it wouldn’t be possible to roll it into a neat little ball like this but I took some artistic license with this one).
I didn’t include materials that contributed less than 1% of the laptop’s mass. To make the visual more comprehensive, I added up different types of glass to create one glass sphere, and I did the same for different types of plastic. Lastly, I decided to “deconstruct” lithium cobalt oxide to visualise the two materials separately.
Data came from an HP report analysing material content of an average laptop: [https://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/getpdf.aspx/c05117791.pdf](https://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/getpdf.aspx/c05117791.pdf)
I created the scene in Blender and used Adobe Illustrator to bring the different elements together.
The visual was recently published on Visual Capitalist, making it my first 3D visual that was published via an outlet: [https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/visualizing-the-raw-materials-in-a-laptop/](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/visualizing-the-raw-materials-in-a-laptop/) 🙂
Interesting post, but listing the materials with vertical text was a bad choice IMO. I think a mild 30-45deg rotation would’ve worked better.
Are the balls of the right diameter for the mass and density provided?
I’d be curious to know why it contains both iron *and* steel?
The fact that they’re listed separately suggests that there’s 77 grams of pure iron somewhere in that laptop?