ZeDestructor PS: resonance chambers are primarily used to improve sound quality of the speakers (particularly bass response), not to make them fit a chassis. The fact it lets you mount your driver away from the sound outlet is just a side benefit, really.

ZeDestructor Because ultimately no matter how good your engineers are, physics says no. To get good, high-quality audio over the entirety of the human audible range, you need a driver (and often enclosure too) that's large enough for your intended space and loudness. Low-frequencies in open air in particular demand a large driver unless you get a super-sealed enclosure like headphones of some sort.

ZeDestructor The cheap, portable way to get compact studio monitor quality audio is to get a decent pair of headphones. Or just plugging in studio monitors when in your usual workspace.

ZeDestructor Overall it costs more: every extra cable, connector and daughter board adds a cost. Not just the cost of the parts, but also the cost of engineering, and the cost of a higher failure rate from having more connectors. If you use daughterboards, it costs more than just a single board. Flex cables? even more!

ZeDestructor Depends on where exactly you put the speaker: most speakers are less than 20mm diameter and round, so they can be centred, or they can be put at the extreme edges.

ZeDestructor Between the edge of the laptop and the keyboard, there is a finstack and heatpipe array (see picture 3). Putting a speaker or resonance chamber outlet there would easily cut 5mm of finstack height, and that matters when you're trying to cool >300W of heat.

ZeDestructor As a sidenote, the whole speaker + resonance chamber assembly of my phone is about 4mm thick. The one in my laptop is even thicker. On that note, have you considered that they are using resonance techniques extensively already? Both of those speaker and that "subwoofer" have resonance chambers behind em, and being bottom-mounted, will take advantage of hard surfaces to reflect sounds upwards to the listener.

Well, this throwaway comment turned into a whole thing. Oh well. Let's see.Have I said anything even remotely suggesting otherwise? That resonance chambers both improve audio quality (when designed right)make it easier to "move" sound from a well-placed speaker to an outlet port is exactly what makes them great. Not one or the other, but both.Sure, to a certain point. The only issue is that you can still getaudio fromdevices such as the iPad Pro or MacBook Pros. Is it lacking in the low ranges? Sure. Adding a "sub", even a small one, would help tremendously, although the best you can hope for there without a very large driver is "okay for a small room". My comment comes from the fact that the vast majority of audio setups even on behemoth laptops like this doesn't reach the bar of "okay" across any part of the audio spectrum, let alone low-end only.Again: there are times and places where you don't have headphones with you or don't have access to large speakers. Are you saying that in those cases, it's okay for makers of >$2000 laptops to say "Oh well, sucks to be you!"? 'Cause to me, that's idiotic, borderline hostile to customers, and a sign of a generally bad attitude.I/O daughterboards can be used across models. Smart design saves by making parts interchangeable. The savings from this canoutstrip the extra cost from the design over time. Flex cables cost a few cents in bulk, as do their connectors. Otherwise, it's the same hardware just on another, small PCB, and the motherboard becomes slightly cheaper and less complex to boot.The extreme edges are likely taken up by the hinge assembly. Moving parts holding a lot of weight need space. So that likely won't work. Also, the extreme edges would be beihind the LCD :PThere's visibly open space beneath the lower heatpipes on both sides, and plenty of open space between the USB ports and keyboard edges. No need to interfere with or shrink anything, just pack stuff more densely. Or they could integrate the resonance chamber into the structure of the wrist rest. Shouldn't be too hard, and would have the added benefit of some more structural rigidity.You see resonance chambers, I see the bog-standard "we glued a driver to part of the plastic inner frame" design approach. I might be wrong, but I'm doubtful. I've seen too many utter-crap laptop speaker designs to assume otherwise. As for bouncing sound off surfaces, that's theoretically an okay idea, it's just that the case is still blocking the sound from reaching your ears directly (unless you're seated leaning really far back), dramatically lowering volume and potentially distorting the audio.Tl;dr: they really could have made more of an effort on this. That's really all I'm saying.