The engineering behind ThinkPad's legendary reliability

ThinkPad laptops have a reputation for ruggedness. As I discovered this week, it's not by accident but the result of near-fanatical engineering.

Here's what I witnessed at the Yamato Lab and learned speaking with senior Lenovo executives in charge of ThinkPads.

Tough love

Laptops being put through torture tests are not new. However, the team behind the ThinkPad has taken it to the next level with unusual tests that competitors don't do.

Here are a couple of them:

• Vibration test with weight: To simulate ThinkPads being crammed into a bag packed with textbooks, a 5kg weight is added to the standard vibration test. Some competitors' laptops don't survive this.
• Flex test: This is where one corner of the screen is pushed by a machine to mimic the abuse laptops go through.

In my 2012 review of the first ThinkPad X1 Carbon, I described how I held it by pinching one corner of the screen with the lid fully open. I finally understood it's tested for this.

When I made this observation to Yasumichi Tsukamoto earlier today, he shared how some colleagues hold their ThinkPad by the screen when moving around the office - so confident are they of its robustness.

No internal damage

A CT scanner is used to detect microscopic damage or breaks hidden from visual inspection. This was added to the repertoire with the ThinkPad X1 Fold, which has a foldable screen.

And oh, the X1 Fold is subjected to the same tests as your typical ThinkPad. This means its foldable display is rated to at least 30K folds - though the testing regime itself goes far beyond that.

Unusual features

What are some unusual features of the ThinkPad?

• DIY battery replacement: Repairability is important to the ThinkPad team. Both the new ThinkPad X1 and X9 have easy-to-access batteries that users can replace themselves if they so wish.
• Anti-tampering switch: IT managers or paranoid cybersecurity professionals will love the impossible-to-avoid anti-tamper switch. Removing the back cover triggers it; this is configured via BIOS.

I wrote about the new ThinkPad X1 Gen 13 yesterday.