Over 600,000 laptops in the United States were stolen in 2004 (34,000 in the UK), resulting in an estimated loss of $720 million in hardware and $5.4 billion in proprietary information and according to the FBI, 97% of stolen PCs are never recovered.

As a conceptual exploration of how laptops may function within the next 10 years, the ‘Aegis’ laptop was born out of a need to safely and securely prevent or hinder any theft of data and hardware present in a laptop. It stood to reason that physical separation of data from the hardware presented the most effective preventative measure for stolen laptops and became central to the ‘Aegis’ laptop‘s functionality.

Laptops are devices that will, in one form or another, remain in use for many years to come and although laptop prices are on the whole becoming more affordable, they are often stolen for their value in the stolen goods market and increasingly, exclusively for the valuable data they contain. The decision to separate the data and hardware presents the most secure solution to the user for the least effort.