A Shuttle initiative geared at saving small laptop OEMs from extinction by banding them together with increased interchangeability of parts may one day allow users to build their own laptops as they now do with desktops. The new Shuttle PCB Assembly (SPA) and MicroSPA motherboards can be changed out with a few screws, and are compatible with a wide variety of laptop chassis.

Shuttle's booth display at CES was low-key; a variety of motherboards adorned the wall with the Menlow, Pine Trail, Montevina, Calpella, and various other laptop platforms on-board. A number of differently-styled laptops with transparent bottoms showed identically laid-out components. But for Shuttle, it's a life-and-death battle to save the small laptop OEMs.

A row of interchangable SPA motherboards designed for different laptop platforms from Intel and AMD.

"If you look at the collective market share for everyone but the big guys," a Shuttle rep told Ars, "since 2008 it's fallen from twenty percent to six percent." By "the big guys" Shuttle means HP, Dell, Acer, Toshiba, Apple, and the other large OEMs, the companies whose small competitors SPA will save from extinction by offering them a large marketplace of high-volume interchangeable components.

We overheard an OEM representative asking about Firewire support on a Calpella SPA board. Shuttle said, "no problem; it's an easy add-in board." When I asked whether OEMs were climbing on board, Shuttle told me it's already received an order for 15,000 units from an unspecified purchaser, and that more orders are coming in from the USA and Europe for launch later this quarter.

"In fact, if this works," the Shuttle rep continued, "it could spark a revolution in laptop upgradability. You drop $2000 on a high-end laptop, and it doesn't matter, because in a year the new laptop platform comes out, and you take it to a shop to upgrade for a few hundred bucks." "Wait," I interjected. "What's stopping the user from doing it himself?" "Absolutely nothing. The motherboard is as easy to replace as the motherboard in a desktop PC."

To embellish his point, the Shuttle rep pointed to the seven screws on the back of the netbook chassis he was holding that would take the entire back cover off. He pointed to the screws holding the motherboard down, to the cables linking it to other components, and to the Core 2 Duo motherboard that could replace the Atom one inside.

Two SPA laptops with identical internals, with transparent bottoms showing the internals arranged identically.

"In a laptop from a major OEM you'd have to take it all apart in order to even access this board, and when you got there it would be split into three or four pieces, and those pieces would all be proprietary," he enthused. "Here, it's all standard."

Of course, such programs have been tried before, and there are reasons why they haven't succeeded. Laptop thermal management is difficult, and custom engineering can squeeze extra millimeters, ounces, and clock cycles out of a design that a standard unit could never achieve. Shuttle assures me that they've ironed out these problems, and that their designs are competitive with the latest from the main players in size, weight, cost, and hardware diversity.

The same two laptops, looking completely different on the outside.

If this kind of initiative succeeds, in the long run Ars-reading geeks may build their laptops on Newegg in much the same way they currently build desktops, by choosing a chassis design including trackpad, a keyboard, LCD panel including webcam, motherboard/CPU/GPU unit, RAM, optical drive, and hard disk or SSD. Putting it together would be comparable to building a desktop.

Shuttle isn't looking to press forward with that vision just yet; it's happy to bring about inter-brand compatibility and gear up to the scaling economies needed to keep the small brands alive and competing with Dell. But in the long run, commoditizing laptop internals can only take us in the build-your-own direction. And that's something worth celebrating.