Unibodys are stronger.

http://i.gizmodo.com/5215296/unibody-construction-helps-macbook-air-survive-plane-crash



That's to the people that say they are not any stronger.

 

I'm sorry, but that's blind luck. Electronics are not designed to bend that much, and they did here. The fact he gets anywhere is a miracle.
Pretty cool nonetheless...

 

I'd like to see a plastic notebook survive a plane crash. If it were a plastic white macbook or a plastic dell it would have smashed up to pieces.

 

I'd like to see another unibody survive the crash too.

 

Eventhough the body maybe strong, but the internal component are not designed to be bend like that

 

That's pretty impressive! What happened to the MBA had to have had the same effect to his neck.. I'm glad he was ok, and glad the MBA was ok also!

 

Most dells have a magnesium casing. And the 1640 has an aluminum frame

 

There's no such thing as "luck" and you can say what you want to say but the fact of the matter is the Air and it's construction survived the plane crash.

 

Right, the construction is why the electronics are still working after being bent and twisted. Apple designed it that way, they're just that good.

 

Yup because the construction stopped the from snapping. If the casing had failed so would of the electronics.

 

i think the point of the OP is that if it can "survive" a plane crash, it will probably resist a lot of wear and tear of daily use..

 

I could hit it in the right place and it would die lol. If something when 1mm that way or the other it might have been a much different story.

Eitherway as long as the hard drive is intact id be happy as a sob. Data's more important then the mangled remains booting up. But if he doesnt plan on trashing it maybe it will work as a desktop on an external monitor now?

 

I agree.

But that's an impressive display of the unibody's excellent build quality (and maybe a lot of good luck )

 

I don't know about you guys, but if I was in a plane crash, the last thing I would worry about is my macbook.

Of course, that's just me.

 

Not to be a grammar Nazi, but isn't it "Unibodies" if you really, really, really want to use the plural form of the word?

 

Ok, I just noticed that also. Seshan also used "Haveing" instead of "Having" in his other thread... That was not a derogatory statement, just clearing it up. Beware, I was not good in English either...

 

Hope that guy recovery soon.

 

Bahh I fail at spelling and my brain is fried from all the math work I have been doing the last couple days.

 

Put a latitude or thinkpad in the same situation and we can see what true durability is all about.

 

Whats surprising is that the crash killed the owner of the MBA while the MBA is still functional. Human beings are more fragile than a unibody!!

 

I think a latitude or a thinkpad wouldnt even make it into the headlines since it would break into many pieces.

They dont make thinkpads like they used to ever since lenovo took over. They dont even use the same metal to make the thinkpads anymore. I remember there was a thread that earlier models were actually more robust and harder in the t series from the thinkpads before lenovo took manufacture of the newer t series.

And it was true I had one of the older t series I think it was a T41 and it was much heavier and was built like a tank. But the last t series I remembered (sorry cant remember it was years ago which model it was I believe it was like a T43p) it was branded lenovo on the bottom and it wasnt nearly as solid or heavy.

I used to be a thinkpad lover before I switched to macs. Well actually before I gave apple a chance.

Believe it or not for the past 15+ years I've been one of the ignorant fools that always said, " I f*cking hate Apple computers, their so slow and cant game."

Little did I know that the really old school small beige little macintosh computers at school that barely only ran organ trail that we used to print papers in the boring a$$ computer or english classes in elementary to jr. high schools that kept showing the color wheel of eternity was my only impression.

Until I finally tried one in 2005 (a 17" powerbook) I was blown away of how futuristic it was and so many softwares that were available and how much easier it was to use as well and never looked back.

I guess you can easily hate things that are "different" and before you give it a chance to try new things.

I deeply believe that everyone who puts down Macs has never really used OSX more than 5-30 minutes (probably just tinkered with one at the Apple store on a sunday after eating from the food court and the whole time on the back of their minds they are thinking, its nice but you cant play games huh...).

But as far as PC notebooks goes, I think a panasonic "toughbook" would survive easily.

 

Math is fun when its simple or basic stuff but when it starts flying out of control with equations on equations + memorizations of signs to use with the equations and then word problems comes into factor... you just want to punch the wall..

 

I think your reasoning is based on theories and not based on experiments.

So instead of conclusions based on theories, lets get some conclusions based on empirical data.

And I don't recall anyone putting down the Mac.....

Anyone care to quote cause maybe I missed someone's anit-Mac statement???

 

No laptop is designed to withstand an airplane crash.

 

I'm totally still surprised about the mba still being functional and in one piece. I would never imagined that it would even be in one piece.

 

What's up with all the PC bashing? Kind of strange.

 

It's an Apple forum. What do you expect

 

Nobody really bashed Windows PC, it wasn't even mentioned in the original post.

He even mentioned panasonic

Sometimes it's just some windows users feeling the need to challenge anything mac related

 

It's sarcasm. What do you expect?

Next post, I'll even define it.

 

Oh my bad, I was going to quote the reply before yours

 

Whoosh...............

 

Thing is... all the unibodies are so tighly packed inside to make them small, that a good case bend should hurt the components. Aluminium is soft... even a light frame would be helpful.

 

I think soft is an inaccurate adjective to use. In fact Aluminium alloys are very strong IMO. I think the adjective you want to use is flexible.

The downside of aluminium is that it has no definite stress point. Or I think it is called fatigue strength. Basically you can hit it constantly and it will eventually give, no matter how thick the material is. Unlike steel. There comes a point in the thickness of steel where you can hit it constantly, forever, and it will never give. It has a defined stress point where engineers can start saying it will last, literally, forever.

Edit:
I am not an engineer by any definition. I know this explanation sucks, but it is the best I could do with my one high school class of physics.

 

Every metal has a yield point. But you are somewhat correct in saying that aluminum doesn't handle fatigue as well.

With steel, as long as you're under a certain stress (which depends on the type of steel and it's ultimate and yield strengths), you estimate that if it will last to 10^6 cycles without permanent deformation then it is designed for infinite life. Aluminum, however, doesn't work the same since it's a more ductile material.

As per the Latitude and Thinkpad argument, there are two sides to the story. Firstly, in general usage a Thinkpad or Latitude would probably provide more toughness than a MacBook. They have a magnesium chassis with a plastic shell that's very durable and produces little flex or wear. However, with the impact that the MacBook Air in this story took, they would likely shatter. Plastic is a much more brittle substance than aluminum. The aluminum of this MacBook Air simply reached its yield point but not its rupture point. Really brittle substances like plastic on laptops either don't have a yield point at all (at which point they just rupture and break suddenly) or the yield point is very close to the rupture point. The rupture point is much lower than that of aluminum but higher than that of aluminum's yield point. Therefore, you'd either have a laptop with no breaking at all, a few cracks, or a completely busted laptop. My guess would be the latter.

 

Paul, a ThinkPad chassis is there to survive what the plastic will not. The insides will survive when the plastic will crack. The Macbooks do not have any support apart from the body - so the full force of impact is taken by it.

Also, consider that there are (if memory serves) 40,000 commercial aluminium alloys. And these can have different strengths. As far as we know, the one used for Macbooks is quite weak.

 

The story says he survived.

Couldn't read that properly in Safari because the page didn't completely load or something?

 

Wow, this post makes me sound like I'm still in high school. WTH is ductile.

I'm with EnterKnight. If the plastic shatters big whoop. As long as I still have my data, I'm good. I could care less if it boots up or not cause I am NOT carrying around some bent up laptop when I could just exercise the accidental plan.

 

Seem a little irrelevant considering 9 PEOPLE DIED!

 

Ductile is a property of metals meaning the ability to be stretched out, or drawn into wires.
Similar to malleable, the ability to be flattened and shaped.

Huh weird. I remember that from high school.

 

for all the carbon-fiber reinforced plastic/roll cage haters...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw78gcU713g

 

Actually soft is a very accurately term to use. With materials, hardness typically refers to what it takes to scratch/cut another material. In order to scratch/cut a material, you need to have another material that is if equal or greater hardness. Hardness != strength and typically hard objects are actually very brittle. For example, drilling through aluminum is very easy as aluminum is very soft. Drill bits are usually made out of hardened steal/ carbide (due to the material's hardness). However, I wouldn't really call these materials strong. For example, its quite easy to break a carbide tap in half when threading an aluminum block. On the other hand it's quite a **** to remove that piece of carbide now as it is about impossible to drill it out.

If you want a hard laptop, make it out of cast iron, however the first time you drop it, it will shatter into a thousand pieces. On the other hand I'll take an aluminum construction.

 

which dents beyond repair the first time you drop it...no...and i'd rather have carbon-fiber reinforced plastic which is resistant to cracking and doesn't dent. (check out all the threads here and on macrumors with people complaining about thier dented umb's and umbp's)

 

Yay for selectively quoting posts and taking them completely out of context! My point was that hardness != strength. No where did I claim that aluminum was the best material in the world for every purpose.

 

I've got a full set of cast iron cookware. They seem to take plenty of abuse. I wonder how thin this cast iron has to be to shatter?

 

No, the graphical glitches in his 9600 rendered the display useless and he just guessed.

 

LOL. That was obviously placed there.
Also that's a TOUGH BOOK, It's meant to take hard hits, everyone is saying that all these note books that are designed to take major abuse could with stand more then a Macbook, Well know duh! They are meant to! Do you see Apple advertising that they can take major abuse?
My Original post I never said they could, but I was saying they are stronger because there have been people saying that if they get knocked they break, or that they are not any stronger then previous models.

 

Just compare Apples to Apples. That's easy.

I do think it is sorta unfair to drop military spec laptops into the thread. Other laptops are fair game as they are often used to compare for durability rating purposes.

 

I have some personal experience to relate regarding the solidity of a macbook air. Shortly after purchasing my laptop I was going through airport security and my laptop ended up dropping from chest high onto the solid tile floor. It hit the floor with it's bottom right corner.

I was horrified and thought that my laptop was destroyed but it was actually fine! The corner that hit ended up crumpling a bit. Since the laptop was closed, the LCD enclosure was also affected, but the LCD itself was ok. I am convinced that the aluminum construction of the laptop saved it: in a way the aluminum case acted as a crumple zone and absorbed all the energy of the impact, leaving the important components unafected.

A couple of weeks later, I dropped the laptop again in a parking lot. The laptop this time hit the back right corner but this time I didn't drop it from as high. This corner is now also a bit dented (the lid catches slightly when I open/close it), but the laptop itself is fine.

I then bought a nice sleeve to protect my laptop...

 

Thanks for testing all these for us. This is quite amazing

 

poor thing...