Asus "Bamboo" EcoBook laptop now just slightly laminated on the inside

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Remember this thing? That was the mock-up. The dream. The reality, as ever, is much more disappointing than the original crazed fantasy. The final Asus U6 now just comes with a small strip of wood surrounding the keyboard and screen, no doubt to stop warping and to help it pass stringent modern fire regulations.

So it’s not really an “eco-friendly” laptop any more. It’s now just a regular notebook with a bit of wood stuck on the front of it. It’s more of a design statement than a planet-saving option…

The ASUS Ecobook will match your kitchen's cheap laminate flooring

Good god. We often fantasise about a revival in woodgrain-covered technology, but the reality is… pretty nasty. No wonder this sort of thing was outlawed by Brussels in the mid-1980s.

This new bamboo-laminated beast is the Asus Ecobook – an environmentally-friendly machine that’s apparently better than everything else because 50% of its components can be recycled. Frankly, the last thing we think about when buying a laptop is what’s going to happen to it when it breaks and we have to throw it away, but if you want something that’s hypothetically slightly better for the world after it stops working and cost more to fix than to replace, this sort of does the job.

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