Plastic should be the most widely used material for laptops since their inception, but the term "plastic" sounds too low-end and cheap, so the industry has also given them a more academic name - "PC+ABS engineering plastic".

ABS engineering plastic, also known as PC+ABS, has the excellent heat resistance and impact resistance of PC resin, as well as the excellent processability of ABS resin. It has obvious advantages, strong plasticity, rich colors, simple processing, and low cost.

Give plastic a texture
The advantage of PC+ABS engineering plastics is that they are relatively low-cost and easy to shape, allowing for the creation of various angular, streamlined, and three-dimensional exterior shapes at will. However, plastic is plastic, and no matter how much it is tossed around, it is difficult to conceal its cheapness in texture and touch.

Therefore, in order to enhance their appearance, notebook manufacturers usually perform secondary "decoration" on the surface of engineering plastics.

The favorite decoration technique for early plastic laptops was to coat the surface with a layer of "piano baking paint" (some brands also refer to it as "crystal diamond color"), allowing the notebook to obtain a purer and brighter color, with a ceramic like touch.

Subsequently, the laptop's favorite decoration technology was changed to "IMR (in mold transfer printing) process", which not only provides a ceramic like touch, but also brings personalized textures such as metal wire drawing, concentric circles, frosting, and patterns to the surface of the laptop shell, making it "what you want".

Nowadays, many game books seem to use metal brushed shells, but in reality, the shells are still made of engineering plastic, only achieving the texture and luster of metal through the surface brushed texture and coating process, which is the charm of plastic materials.

Misunderstandings about plastics
Compared to metal materials, the texture and strength of engineering plastics are at a disadvantage, but their toughness and wear resistance performance are superior: they do not deform when slightly squeezed and bumped, and the marks when scratched by foreign objects are also relatively light (the risk comes from the possibility of fracture under high stress). Leaving aside these issues, many users have a misconception about engineering plastics, believing that they do not have as good a heat dissipation effect as metal materials.

In fact, 95% of the heat dissipation of laptops relies on a "set" of heat dissipation fins, heat pipes, fans, and fins covering the surface of CPU/GPU chips. Only a very small portion (mainly used in ultra-thin ultrabooks and PC tablet devices) may be guided onto a metal shell with graphite patches to increase the heat dissipation area.

For the overall heat output of the laptop, the heat generated by this part can be almost negligible, and it is not as effective as directly raising the back end of the laptop with a book to improve the air circulation rate of the bottom heat dissipation hole.