When we pick up a laptop, we barely ever look beyond the specs to see what goes behind making the machine. Recently, a group of journalists were invited to Lenovo’s Yamato Labs in Yokohama, Japan on the 25th anniversary of the ThinkPad.

We walked into one of the lab rooms, causing much distraction to the engineers busy at work. In smaller rooms within - some sealed from ambient noise so our claps don’t resound, some keeping magnetic waves away - the engineers showed us a couple of tests that they put each ThinkPad through.

ThinkPads are laid down and heavy clamps bend the screen to an extent that’ll make any gadget enthusiast queasy. Metal bars, much taller than most in the room, hoist the devices up before dropping them right on to the concrete below. A similar machine repeatedly pounds one edge of a ThinkPad, scarily close to where the hard drive rests, to calculate how long the laptop lasts before malfunctioning.

Considering the harshest conditions my laptop might be subject to is leftover cookie crumbs and house keys in a backpack, I wonder if these tests are really necessary. Turns out, conditions in space are way harsher and there’s probably good reason why ThinkPads are still the only laptops certified for use on the International Space Station (ISS).

Since the ISS Assembly Mission 2A in 1998, more than 50 ThinkPads have been launched into space. Some of these devices have been up in space for almost eight years. “And to have a device up there for so long, NASA subjects it to stringent tests lasting almost a year before it gives the go-ahead,” says Kevin Beck, senior worldwide competitive analyst, Lenovo. Everything that they send into space matters as they end up spending more than US $10,000 for every kilogram of matter they lift in to orbit, he adds.

For the rest of us who will be using it mostly around sea level, it turns out that it’s the little things that pile up to damage a laptop. While building a laptop, the engineers not only have to keep in mind attributes such good industrial design, wireless performance and light-weight construct but also factor in seemingly ridiculous incidents such as worker anger!

In a research that Lenovo shared with its designers, spilled food/liquids, accidental drops, inadequate protection during travel followed by employee rage were listed as the main reasons why laptops get damaged.

In the sealed chambers, then, the ThinkPads are subject to intense climatic conditions – about 91-98 per cent of relative humidity at 20-60 degree centigrade for any time between 72 hours to a week. The laptop is blasted with very fine silica dust for six hour cycles and subjected to mechanical shock and repeated shock pulses over 18 times.

Design details

Arimasa Naitoh, the Father of the ThinkPad – a title he light-heartedly brushes off as a marketing gimmick – says, “A good design is usually hard to implement”. Having worked first with IBM, then with Lenovo, Naitoh-san believes that over the decades the basic philosophy of a good business hasn’t changed. It’s still customer satisfaction that keeps any company running.

In order to keep that running, the engineers also pay a lot of attention to complaints about ThinkPads malfunctioning in order to find out what they are doing wrong. A couple of years ago, the researchers on board spent five months collecting conked off machines from six countries just to analyse how dust affects personal computers. The grime they found in machines ranged from human hair, dead skin, clothing fibre, acrylic cotton to pet hair. This led to improve their inbuilt fan design and have it produce less static so little dust sticks to the machine.

It was Naitoh-san who had roped in a bio-mechanics professor who showed a high-speed slow motion video of a cat jumping to the designers at Yamato Lab. This led to integrating a two-stage shock absorbing process to the ThinkPad.

At a time when the entire market – the manufacturer as well as the consumer – is more than ready to be wooed at size-zero profile, are the ThinkPads an aberration? Beck is of the opinion that, “The ‘z’ dimension is a meaningless tech spec. It doesn’t buy you anything. It’s just another marketing gimmick.”

For one of the companies that have been in the personal computing business for so long, one might be given to thinking that resting on their laurels comes easy. Naitoh-san however says, “For the last 20 years, we have focused on how to retain legacy, in the next 20 years we’ll focus on what’s the absolute best we can deliver to the consumers.”

mahananda.bohidar@thehindu.co.in

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