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I just coudn’t resist posting this, ThinkPad blog or not! Forbes.com writer Brian Caulfield recently took a Panasonic Toughbook CF-30 out for review, and ended up feeding it to a tiger, letting an elephant play catch with it, then took it to the shooting range…as a target.
You heard me right. Panasonic certainly was confident sending this machine out to Brian, and it would appear rightfully so. The Toughbook survived being tossed, flipped, doused in Diet Coke, used as a dart board, chewed on by a tiger, stepped on by an elephant, and shot with a .22 pistol. Everything still worked, the system stayed on for most of the tests, and it took a .45 handgun to shut the Toughbook down for good.
Having seen these machines almost exclusively used in emergency services vehicles, at some level I took that market penetration to just be buying into the hype of the product. Sure, it was tough, but not THAT tough. Wow.
I highly recommend you hit the link and check out the article, video, and photos. Kudos Panasonic.
Source: [Forbes.com]
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Great read, and a great find! I’m glad that’s it’s not my ThinkPad that’s being chewed on…ha..ha..ha..
Those things cost over $3K! At least 4x a comparable thinkpad. Their prices have not changed in a few years while everything else has dropped like a rock. 5 years ago an A-series Thinkpad was $3k or so. These days a comparable (in terms of size/positioning) T500 or W500 is less than half that.
There’s no doubt, it’s not for the average user. But I can see why public safety and military use these, after seeing this. As the article mentions, they do a lot of in-house manufacturing and of course the designs are 100% custom. They also likely use parts and techniques that cost 2-3x as much as “normal” parts/techniques, but only offer maybe 1-2x improvement. This is the nature of the beast when you’re at the bleeding edge of a technology.
I think Toughbooks serve a large niche market very well. In terms of pricing I think they are actually quite fairly priced. For all the reasons John already cited, and the fact that much like ThinkPads, Panasonic is very good about maintaining a certain form factor and case style as they continue to refine and improve them over the years. There is a lot to be said for refinement and evolution as opposed to tossing out a model and starting over. Panasonic has developed a great user base for these here in the US and we are better of because of it.
[...] they were quite impressed with the machine. While they didn’t have a tiger chew it up or shoot it with a pistol, the folks at NBR did leave it running in a freezer, splash water on it, and throw it to the ground [...]