Soldered memory against the trend: Dell has still not implemented Concept Luna in its Pro laptops

Back in 2021, Dell showed of a then new proof of concept called "Concept Luna" for the first time. It was a radically different approach to building a laptop from existing Dell laptops like the Dell XPS, making it very easy to repair, with a modular construction.

Five years later, sadly, it seems that Dell has not really embraced the ideas of the concept fully. The Dell Pro 14 Plus we recently reviewed is a great example for this: While the Dell laptop with AMD Ryzen CPUs does use recycled materials and a plastic free packaging, following the Concept Lunar idea in terms of sustainability, modularity is, sadly, lacking greatly.

The first thing we noticed is that the Wi-Fi card is soldered. Nowadays, this is sadly often the case, but it would be easy to fix for the manufacturers, as M.2 solutions are available as an alternative. Systems from competitors, like Lenovo, have the same problem.

Secondly, the keyboard is bottom loaded, fused into the palmrest. This makes the design more seamless, but it means that the keyboard is very hard to replace. For business systems that will be used for up to five years and beyond, having a user replaceable keyboard would be greatly beneficial, as keyboards are one of the parts most likely to break. This is a feature that comparable Lenovo ThinkPads, like the ThinkPad T14 or ThinkPad L14, offer.

Last but most certainly not least: The RAM of the Dell Pro 14 Plus (available on Amazon) is soldered. Both the competition from Lenovo and HP has socketed RAM, with SO-DIMM slots. This oversight makes the Dell Pro 14 Plus clearly the least modular out of the major brands among the business laptops.

Concept Luna was and is a great vision - but Dell still has some distance to go in implementing it, even after five years.