As someone who actually used these in Air Force aircraft maintenance, I can attest to their real-world durability. We've had them fall 15ft off the back of a plane onto pavement, left out in the Florida rain, survive heat and sand in Afghanistan. Never the fastest or most responsive PC, but they got the job done. This is one of the few products where I would trust the "military grade" label to actually mean something
We mourned the loss of our Toughbooks when my unit went to Getac tablets. The Toughbook was perfectly responsive for TO's, had a reasonable boot time, and was easy to replace the batteries while out on the line. The Getac tablets are everything that the Toughbooks weren't. Slow, unresponsive piles of dogshit with a total battery life that precludes anything approaching real work.
@@DangerB0ne We got those tablets too and they were the most useless pieces of shit. Like you said, by the time you signed on it was already halfway through the battery
As a repair technician for one of the major manufacturers of "rugged computers", I absolutely love this video. Can't tell you how much me and my fellow technicians have wanted to stress test them instead of rebuilding them when EMS/ police / military members have already destroyed them. Click read more for funny tech shennanigans! Edit: Thought it would be fun to list a few of the more interesting "problem descriptions" that come in with RMA'd devices. 1. Killed in the line of duty: bullet hole through the LCD (all the way through) 2. Used as traction device to get vehicle out of snow (KB ripped off, device bent in half) 3. Used as a shield to defend woman from dog attack (LCD ripped off hinges) 4. "Total Loss": Literally only sent in the broken stylus, the rubber corners, and a small part of the motherboard they were able to find. We suspect it was dropped out of a helicopter. 5. Slow: shuts down all the time. (filled with metal shavings from a metal factory and kept running for years) 6. "Smells like shit" (from a zoo, it was covered in literal shit and they wanted it refurbished) 7. Need screen protector replaced (nothing tragic, but I love these ones because they come from a perfume manufacturing plant and they smell LOVELY) We in fact do fix these devices. Sometimes they get outright replaced but often we literally replace 20-30 parts in order to repair and send them back. I also want to take a moment to say these are examples of the out of the ordinary. Most come in for damaged USB ports or broken hinges. Normal type repairs.
Ah, typical tech enthusiasts sharing their so-called "shenanigans." I must say, your attempt to glorify the supposed abuse of rugged computers is rather amusing. It's essential to realize that these devices are designed for durability in extreme conditions, not as props for some misguided stress test circus. Let's dissect your list of "interesting" problem descriptions: Bullet hole through the LCD: Please, spare me the theatrics. Rugged computers aren't meant to be bulletproof shields. Maybe consider proper firearm handling instead of turning equipment into Swiss cheese. Used as a traction device: Brilliant engineering strategy - turn a computer into a makeshift snowplow. I'm sure that's precisely what the manufacturer had in mind when designing these devices. Used as a shield: I'm sorry, did I miss the part where rugged computers were marketed as personal defense weapons? Maybe next time, suggest proper self-defense tools rather than sacrificing valuable tech. "Total Loss": A helicopter drop test, you say? How innovative. I'm sure the military is thrilled to know their expensive equipment is being used for impromptu aerial experiments. Slow with metal shavings: Ah, the classic "let's see how much abuse it can take" approach. News flash: filling a computer with metal shavings isn't a legitimate stress test; it's just negligence. "Smells like shit": Lovely, indeed. I'm sure the manufacturer envisioned their rugged computers being used as feces-covered canvases. Bravo on the olfactory adventure. Screen protector from a perfume plant: Because nothing says "rugged" like a device that smells like a mix of industrial chemicals and floral fragrances. I'm sure that enhances its performance significantly. How admirable, the audacity of the self-proclaimed tech rebels, flaunting their disregard for common sense. It's almost endearing how you've managed to turn rugged computers into the unwitting protagonists of a slapstick comedy. Bravo, truly. The sheer genius behind bullet-riddled LCDs and snowplow conversions is undoubtedly a source of inspiration for us all. I can't help but marvel at the innovation - who needs a functioning computer when you can have a makeshift shield or a fragrant screen protector? It's almost poetic how these devices endure such abuse, a true reflection of their overengineered resilience. I suppose we should all be grateful for the unintentional stress tests, providing unintentional entertainment for those with a penchant for tech-related absurdity. So, hats off to the avant-garde technicians pushing the boundaries of reason. Your creativity knows no bounds, and the tech world is undoubtedly richer for it. May the rugged computers continue their unwitting journey into the realms of absurdity, guided by the hands of such visionary custodians. A round of applause for the avant-garde thinkers, proving once again that practicality is a mere inconvenience when you can have a computer functioning as a makeshift shield or boasting the aroma of an industrial perfume factory. Let's not forget the unintentional ode to overengineered resilience as these devices endure abuse that defies the very purpose for which they were crafted.
Funny thing about the Panasonic Toughbooks. The company I used to work for sold them for in cab computer aided dispatching inside police cars and fire trucks. We were trying to sell them to a local fire district and they didn't know if they could trust them. The sales guy took one and jammed it under the front tire of the fire truck and told them to pull it forward. It was closed of course, and after retrieving it from under the truck and powering it on, we fitted every truck and ambulance with one in that district.
i was there when panasonic presented their first toughbook in my country. the countrys general manager himself presented it in front of a camera. he poored 2 liters of water over it and trow it against a wall while running. this was early 90s, about a year or so before its official release . i will always remeber that case is made of magnesium.
I laughed at the part when you drove over it. A rep for Panasonic was selling these to a utility company I worked at in the early 2000s. A lineman asked what would happen if he accidentally drove on one, being a smart ass. The rep put one behind the bucket truck on the concrete garage floor and said to go ahead. Lineman went over it 2x with a 10 ton truck, the laptop didn't even shut down.
I work at a police dept and everyone who has one of these has fought tooth and nail to keep it even as it passes obsolescence. One of the sergeants has one that suffered an accidental discharge from a service weapon, the pulled lodged itself inside the case inside the second hard drive, the computer still works but it only has one working drive. These things are INSANE
@@dylanmerchant8962there are plenty of videos and reports showcasing a firearm discharging without user intent. So given the right circumstances, I don't see why a gun couldn't go off accidentally.
@@dylanmerchant8962 never owned a sig I take it. or even a glock for that matter. Talk to military members who got the new SIG and the lock in case and then ask about accidental discharges they took that pistol out of circulation for almost a year after that.
We used to have plenty of these where I worked. We did have one go aquatic for over 24 hours before it was retrieved. There's really nothing special under the hood. Just needs to have good seals/gaskets. the hard drive encasing did have a foam protection within a thin aluminum case. I don't believe SSD's were an option back then. If you leave the port doors open, it'll easily get inside. While the laptop did work after getting it dry. The backlight and touchscreen was broken, the keyboard only half worked. The motherboard had also started building up corrosion so we did not put it back in service as it was bound to fail. The biggest issues we had with these were a huge amount of touchscreen failures. Our application/use required touchscreen so it was a major headache.
So this was actually my wife's job at Panasonic Toughbooks, she ran the milspec comparative testing on Panasonic and other ruggedized brands. The CF-19 is impressive but you should see what they put the CF-30 through unofficially...throwing it from the tower of an aircraft carrier onto the flight deck, the covered one in meat and gave it to a lion, they rolled a combat-equipped Humvee over it. We used it for years as our young son's laptop, eventually it just couldn't run a contemporary OS and that's what ended it's service. There are no fans because they use a heat pipe system to dissipate operating heat.
At my old job 10+ years ago they had a broken toughbook that needed a new screen. I brought it to the local pc shop, and it was still there when I left the company 6 months later..somehow getting a replacement screen was a big problem. I don't even know how the screen got broken..probably someone said it's indestructible and some jackass had to test it out.
So while I was in the US Military we got reports of those particular designs (Tough Books) would be hit with rounds and it would just keep on trucking. One story in particular is a guy had one in his backpack, got hit with a round in the back and then fell from a single story building roof and all they had to do is swap out the monitor on the PC and it kept working. Nice to see some of the story proven here.
Can we have a follow up on this where you compare the internals/"how it's done" to a normal laptop and/or desktop computer? What makes them different and why? I think it would be really interesting to see how the design for portability and ruggedness works and how/why electronic components struggle with different environments etc. You could even get Luke to pull some of his NASA strings for the "ultimate" ruggedness video! Thanks for the funny and informative video!
@@justabrokeredneck When I used them I found that the display has some gooey liquid between digitizer and screen. So at least some parts had shock distributing liquids/glue.
Well, it's already broke, thanks to this video, so why just open it up, when you could both open it up, AND try and figure out how you broke it, and see how easy it is to actually fix it...
@@justabrokeredneckLikely a beefed up shell with the internals mounted on some sort of shock absorbing material to reduce the effective force going through them.
We used these in the military (Finnish military) and they worked fine. They were archaic and most of the issues I ever encountered was software being unintuitive, the keyboard keys being too tiny to use with gloves in the cold and the whole device in general being bulky. Only mechanical "failure" was getting grime under the keys so you couldn't press them down. But other than that, we used these in the rain, in the snow, in the heat, everywhere really.
They actually had a rubberized keyboard for use outdoors. Finland bought the wrong model! We used them on ambulances/cop cars/fire trucks in my county here in Virginia. They were awful to type on
As a member of a military aerospace maintenance career field, these Toughbooks were awesome and survived so much abuse. So cool to see LTT cover technology I used so often
I wanna see this thing disassembled! I really want to see A) how the motherboard and everything else is packaged for waterproofing and to cushion against drops, and B) what exactly died when Linus gave it the final hammer hit.
@@MichaelCH911my guess is that hard drive died and the computer automatically switches off when it detects a disconnected drive to save any critical data from being corrupted. I'm sure replacing the hard drive would be enough to bring it back to a working order
the drive is an ssd so any physical shock except getting shot at, would still work. i used to work on these, and nearly everything that is considered a vital and vulnerable piece was sealed in a rubber/ silicon basket. and plus these mf'ers weighted as much as a small child😂
A standard notebook would have had a broken hinge on the first drop test, and would've been nonfunctional after the 5-foot, or at most the 6-foot. I've had hinges snap from them falling off a table before.
I mean my macbook still worked perfectly after falling from 1m on concrete but the corner that took the impact is noticably caved in, a 6ft drop would definitely crack the screen at least.
CF-19s was Panasonic's mid-tier, the CF-30/31 were even more indestructible. I've got a picture of one of those with a beanbag round in the bottom of it (still turned on)
@@MeeBacon It's a type of "Less lethal" round often used with shotguns. Literally flings a few small beanbags at people to cause incapacitation via blunt force.
As a former member of the US Air Force and someone who used one of those toughbooks on a daily basis for aircraft maintenance, when you drop them on the concrete on the flightline they can break lol. But I have also seen them survive some pretty impresive falls too. I've seen them run over by tow vehicles that weigh 50k pounds and end up in pieces, but the standards don't cover that kind of scenario I suppose lol.
As a former AF IT guy, the only thing that the maintainers did'nt manage to do to these computers was get them pregnant, which I wouldnt be surprised if they tried.
@@BrianRash The most real statement I have ever heard. Some of the situations that I saw were mind boggling as to how it could have happened. For us the most common thing that broke were the latches/compartment doors and the thin plastic by the screen. Then needing to be intrinsically safe still afterwards made them “unusable”.
The biggest point of failure on these was the original mechanical drives, which went away as soon as they included/upgraded to SSDs. I was always amused by the one officer that had one with a massive sledgehammer style dent next to the trackpad, and it still kept on chugging fine.
Towards the middle of my service with the USAF we switched to the toughbooks, again like others, aircraft electronics maintenance, mainly C130/A-10's for me. We had 3 in shop that replaced equipment that was probably 10 times the toughbook size and 10 times its weight so they were a fairly welcome "new" piece of tech for us that went to the flightline. Even when we received them new they were quite a few years behind current CPU's at the time, but still significantly quicker than the tech we were using from the 60s-70s as many of the aircraft I worked on in the early 2000's were from the 60's. Definitely had a few fall down the cockpit stairs all the way to outside which is probably close to 8-10 ft, fall off the loading ramp doors, fall off of B1 and B5 stands and still worked.
After the recent "shakedown" I find their videos to be more insightful but still manage to retain the goofy air with their silly antics. Really enjoying the slight change so far and I can see the quality has improved a lot as well. I want them to keep it up.
LTT slowly inching their way towards DAILY videos hoping nobody notices, finally the effects of #OverreactGateAugust2023 are fizzling out. Ya love to see it.
We used huge numbers of these on mine sites in australia. Dust, heat, water all dealt with. Bigger issue was the rubber gaskets on the USB covers failing in the 0% humidity/40C temp very quickly, then allowing sulphide dist ingress through the USB ports. Still took a while to get there, but I would absolutely recommend these units as beasts after falling off trucks, driving Toyota Landcruisers over them etc.
Absolutely LOVE my old Toughbook CF-19, which I bought to talk to industrial doodads on oil rigs and now serves to run OBD2 car diagnostics. Best thing about it (aside from the build quality) is that there's no fancy OS-specific drivers/app's which means that, although it's from the XP-era, I can install a newer OS and NOT discover that there's no compatible drivers. In fact, some of the software I run on it is from the DOS/W3.1 era so I just have 3 different SSDs for DOS, 32 bit XP and 64bit W10, fit the appropriate SSD and the machine runs perfectly in each configuration... and even mages to happily run Skyrim with the W10 SSD fitted.
MIL-STD-810 is definitely deficient for testing tough laptops but it is an integral part of the ARP 4754 development process used across the aerospace industry. The beauty of MIL-STD-810 is that if you pass all the requirements of the standard you can pretty much guarantee it will work for all applications. Would be great if you talked more about the use of the standard in aerospace industry! Love the engineering content!
I used one of these with these exact same specs everyday when I worked for a direct wireless ISP. I kind of loved the thing and it was basically indestructible in everyday use up on roofs, ladders and towers. Really the performance was very reasonable for what we used it for. It also had a cellular internet card that worked surprisingly well out in the middle of nowhere, it could get a connection way past where my cellphone could. The screen had a reflective layer behind it so it could be used in bight sunlight. The battery life was pretty great and it had double hot swap batteries. I never dropped it from super high up as it was always strapped to me, but it did fall off of the truck several times and I used it in the rain many times even heavy downpours with no issues. They are basically indestructible in normal use especially with the screen closed, it is kind of incredible to have a computer on the job site that you do not really have to worry about.
@angleisthebest It looked exactly like this one, and had the same specs, I have no idea if it was the same model and don't really care, it was in this same chassis.
These things really are insane. I've seen them fall out of moving vehicles and survive with only a few scuffs, I really don't understand how they're as strong as they are. Hell, Linus even ran over it with a fucking car and it was perfectly fine, I'm pretty sure it's impossible to break without intentionally trying to destroy it.
I’ve witnessed one of these (CF-19) fly out of an open window during a hard turn, skip across the road at 25, and continued to work until we replaced it. We’ve also got a CF-54 that has been ran over by a patrol car that we’re using as a host for a station display. Panasonic has it figured out for the most part.
Used to work at a water department, had 2 notable events with them, 1 lost off the top of a moving van at 60 MPH, just a few knocks to the port covers. The other was corroded by chlorine gas, still worked A-OK, and Panasonic wanted it back to have a look at how it had performed.
When I was deployed from 06-08 in an infantry battalion we had these tough books for mission planning and whatnot while out on missions and they really were no joke. They were impressive then and still impressive with their degree of durability.
I'd imagine the 'ingress protection' (IPxx rating) would be the most important factor in real world scenarios? Soldiers are also not continuously dropping their rifles (like it's a Laurel & Hardy sketch). If it's a primary means of planning / communication for missions, I'd imagine you would treat the laptop with some respect (: A drop from hip height / work surface height seems like the most likely thing to occur (when you run for cover during an attack, or something).. -- "Sorry guys, I used our means of communication as a shield for that flame thrower with the screen and keyboard facing the attacker... Then I dropped it onto concrete from about 8' high... And later I tripped and dropped it into that pool.." . - "You seem to be having a lot of accidents, Sergeant Butterfingers!... Are you a... oh wait. Never mind; I see it now...")
As someone who develops to these standards it’s just used as an indicator. So for example a client will require the MIL spec to be met (more likely the IEC spec due to it testing a more extreme environment) and then they’ll add any other requirements they have in addition. However when you combine standards together you can usually get exactly what you need for your industry.
As an aircrafdt mechanic in the air force, we used and ABUSED the crap out of these things and I've seen them dropped off man lifts (30-40ft), left out in the rain, kicked off a wing they always held up.
We used these as logbooks for our aircraft in the Army for a reason. We recovered one from an aircraft crash so bad that there wasn't much left of the aircraft. The computer casing was melted and the screen wouldn't work due to the high temps it withstood. We plugged in an external power supply and monitor and turned it on. It still worked.
I think a disassemble of the computer to see how they got the drop resistance could be a good video, if it's more than just a beefed up normal computer. It could also show how damaged the insides are, and if its fixable after the damage linus did to it
We used those in Afg and Iraq when deployed. They are legit tough and hold up pretty well. PAIN IN THE BUTT to service as an IT individual, but still good.
I watch basically all LTT videos across channels, this is one of the best videos to come out recently as far as entertainment, it puts a giant smile on my face seeing Linus have fun doing what he loves (put not intended, but it's there).
I had a professor about 4 years ago that worked at Dell, and he invited us to tour the facility. We got to see where they perform some of the tests for their military grade laptops. We got to drop them from specific heights (even on the side) and one test we sprayed it with a pretty high pressure water hose. Crazy what they can withstand.
I wonder though are they self-designed and commissioned from the usuals like Quanta? Because if not, i suspect they might be engineered and built by Mitac, a computer manufacturer that used to build remarkably well-made barebone laptops in the early 2000s and then sort-of quit, but they're also a major server manufacturer. They have a joint venture with General Electric Aerospace marketing the Getac line of durable computers, so that's what their laptop business transformed into when Mitac barebones disappeared.
Linus, I've used these tough books for about 12 hears now, everywhere from Anchorage Alaska, Germany, Afghanistan. For the most part they had held up. I have seen one of been crushed by a c-17 being lowered on one, I've seen a power cart run one over and crushed it. I'd say about 90% of the time they hold up but there are other factors that can kill them
As someone who used these at Minot AFB, I can confirm that when it gets too cold, you just hold it up to the exhaust of any running machinery, and it boots fine 😂
I did help desk support for municipality that used toughbooks in a lot of their trucks. I'm trying to think back now but I don't think I can remember a single one of them ever failing from external damage and these things went through absolute hell all the time.
There are another couple of big advantages of ToughBooks is (was) you could get them with a real RS232 port (rather than one connected via USB) which is important for diagnostics on industrial equipment. The ports are (were) also on a daughter board, so if someone trashed them, only the daughter board needed to be replaced rather than the whole motherboard. I don't know if they are still built to the same standard, as I thankfully don't behave to deal with hardware anymore.
Used those things quite a lot, I wish you would've looked at the modularity if these things also. Multiple batteries, storage options, expandability etc. Compared them to normal laptops and such. There's also tablets which are great. And they come with 4G options, laptops also btw.
"Finally a Linus proof computer we have done it aaaaand he broke it... damnit... its true what they say. if you make something Linus proof they will just build a better Linus..."
I’ve used some of the original ruggedized laptops procured for the military… The ones custom made in green metal chassis and a few milspec connector types not normally found on a PC. They were some hefty suckers. We used them for maintenance purposes in mil-aviation. One was even a custom Linux variant… You needed a security clearance to even touch them. You get to mess with some interesting gear as a service member or as a civilian contractor.
I know this episode wasn't exactly to be taken too seriously, but it's worth noting that it's really a common misconception about what a rugged laptop is and how tough it is. It's not meant to be able to take intentional and repeated abuse, but for the laptop to survive a few knocks or the odd drop from a relatively small height and survive where a regular laptop would break apart and die. If a rugged laptop survived even one drop, where a normal one wouldn't, it's done its job.
Yep, i used these things on the regular in the army for my job. We've dropped them a few times just by moving them from place to place and can honestly say the only thing we broke was the latch made to keep it closed.
We used CF-31s in Air Force aircraft maintenance. Some abuse was accidental, some may or may not have been carelessness, but they almost always pulled through with just the occasional port cover breaking off
@@Unknown_GeniusI’ve seen a few MacBooks survive a pretty hefty fall when closed. Bad enough that the case gets deformed enough that they won’t close fully anymore until filling them down to be flat again. We use them as teachers in our school district and that happened to a fellow teacher. He was carrying his and he turned around fast one day and it flew out of his hands shot across the shop. I gave him a hard time about using it as a frisbee.
I bought one of these updated mk8 models. 16gigs ram, 1tb ssd, 2.7ghz*, all nice and refurbed for about 250. I feel much better putting this in my work bag than anything else of that price.
@@JulianQuinn mine came with windows ten. I would've preferred 7 for saving resources, but it was a straight refurb so no upgrade options. I don't game on it, but for everything I do it seems fine. Definitely a big difference from the older 32bit models. And it's very user serviceable for a laptop/tablet. If you can find the parts (not hard) you can replace them. I do wish it had more USB ports, but mine already had an expansion card. Also kind of wish mine had the fingerprint reader built in. I priced one like mine from a 'refurb PC store' and it was close to a grand, but I got mine off eBay with a 2 year warranty for just under 250. Only had 3k service hours on it before the refurb. Was between this or a new netbook that has way less storage and half the ram.
We had these in the military to make artillery calculations. We used these everywhere and these never broke even though it rained or snowed or dropped from various heights. Our laptop was also buried in snow for many hours and worked as expected. These are amazing.
As someone who's performed drop tests on delicate devices, as well as use these for heavy equipment repair. It's good to see a video explaining standards, as well as being impressed by the performance regardless. Maybe see if the LTT team can retrofit a laptop to meet the standard?
Hey, I used one of these in the LOD! We mounted these in the Officer's seat of all our fire apparatus. They handled Truck-to-CAD (Computer Aided Dispatch) communications with the county and were convenient methods of pulling up maps for out-of-district responses, along with acting as interfaces to print out incident reports for our paperwork. Highly reliable, and would recommend, having only seen 2min of the video so far!
Last week at work, I popped my CF-33 into its dock but didn't get it all the way in, then proceeded to fling the computer down onto the floor and had all confidence that it would be just fine. And it was just fine. ToughBooks are the industry standard for a reason.
I work in land surveying in Australia, and we have these things everywhere. At the moment, my company is in the middle of switching from toughbooks to 7" rugged windows tablets made by Topcon. These things deal with so much dust, dirt, mud, and grime on the jobsite, but they continue to run smooth and work very well for controlling total stations, GNSS units, and graders. The Topcon ones are all fitted with extremely long-range Bluetooth antennas so we can control the equipment from a few hundred metres away reliably. They're very impressive machines. A bit of a stretch probably, but I'd love to see LTT cover surveying equipment at one point. The technology is incredibly interesting, and the precision afforded by robotic total stations and satellite augmented GNSS units is very impressive.
We had a sales rep come in to my work back in the early 2000s and his demonstration was throwing one of these off of a 2nd floor balcony in our shop, we bought a few dozen, carried one on my service truck for the better part of a decade, those things are built like a tank
I got one of these second hand for $150 and I use it for coding. It's brilliant. My favourite laptop I own. Mines only got a core2duo though, but linux doesn't care about that. I've heard stories about these things falling from helicopters and still surviving enough to get the data off. It's also good to put this in perspective with something like an ipad, where if you looked at it a bit too mean it'd break.
To be fair to an iPad, usually the actual computer part of it is durable, the glass screen is just incredibly fragile on them. The aluminum shell on something like a 9th-gen iPad is definitely more than enough to withstand mostly anything, and because there are no moving parts in an iPad nothing short of a puncture or bend will actually damage the internals. They're actually pretty heat-resistant because the shell can't melt (though I have had them power off temporarily when using them in direct sunlight on a hot day).
What do you code? I also code a bunch, and there's almost nothing useful that I could do on just a duocore with no cooling. Like, can the thing even pull repos and shit?
@@sid6645 I have no clue what you are on about... Why would dual core not be able to pull repositories? It might do it little bit slower, but it would still do it, there is nothing challenging for cpu in pulling repos.
@@sid6645 it would be fine for me as well. I think most average devs are probably maintaining or working with legacy products(for example, my current job is working on a project from the early 2000s that is still being used very very widely in a certain industry). Also, prior to this, pulling and building repos was fine on my c2q desktop, which I used until about 2018. Programming is just widely not very demanding. Gaming is way more demanding. Most of programming is working with text. It's rare that I rebuild a whole project as opposed to an individual piece(such as building an individual solution in a c# project) so time to build isn't usually a big issue IME. Also some folks are running builds on far more powerful machines and only pushing changes to the repo from their machine(so only working with text, which a Chromebook with a celeron could do)
@@sid6645 AVR C. The thing can run windows 10, there's no reason it can't do everything else. It is dead slow for a lot of things, but the kind of coding I'm doing takes about 2 seconds to compile on this thing. I also do everything in the tty consoles of linux, not the GUI environment if I can, so battery life is really good doing that. Basically, it does exactly what I need it to do, and it can do more than I need it to do, but I have faster, more modern equipment for that. I just like this. Also, surface Pro's don't agree with serial communication for some stupid reason.
I used to test software with a range of outdoor devices including these and the warranty information used to say that it didn't cover damage due to dropping it or getting it wet, the two things it was designed to protect against
Oilfield electronics technician here. Toughbooks are awesome. My company started handing out Z books instead and they suck. We need high brightness displays with serial, rj45, lots of usb and video output. Now with my Z book i have to use a dongle.
We used these bad boys in FDF for anti aircraft c&c and battlefield tactical information consoles. I've always wanted one for myself, literally dragged them in mud and snow. Perfectly capable machines still if you slap a Linux on it.
Linus... Based on this video, maybe it's a Techquickie but it'd be cool to know about processors that are "hardened" against EMI. Like those that go in spacecraft and possibly battlefield equipment from EM Pulses. It'd also be interesting to know if there are plans from companies to handle a situation if we ever get smashed by a big a solar flare here on earth.
Electronic devices are not affected by magnetic pulses enough to cause issues. The myth of EMP damage dates back to when everything still used magnetic storage, which is not an issue any longer. Also, the Earth is constantly being hit with solar flares. There was a huge one last week. You didn't even notice.
@@TehButterflyEffect that's like arguing a 4 on the Richter scale isn't bad and then also a 9 isn't bad. Look up CMEs. Earth hasn't been hit by one of those in a while... The last one disrupted power grids. It was pre-internet and connected world. And spacecraft are not afforded the same protection as we are on earth by the magneto sphere. Hardened electronics are a thing. Electronics are also knocked out by EMP blasts... Like those from a nuclear detonation. Contextually its relevant when the military need computers to not die in the battlefield.
I heard of one case where they installed digital CCTV to monitor a high voltage switchyard. At first the cameras were just failing every now and then. Upon closer inspection they discovered that a pulse induced voltage spikes up to 15 kV on the datalines of the cameras. After replacing the cables to EMP protected type and placing the cameras in protective enclosures, the cameras didn't fail anymore.
@@alcorza3567 You pointed out the flaw in your argument while you were arguing. Spacecraft aren't within the magnetosphere and yet the computers (including the early unshielded ones) continue to function.
@@TehButterflyEffect well... They sort of are. The magnetosphere extends beyond the immediate boundary of what is considered "space" and earths atmosphere. It's really how far the orbit is that determines this. In talking like the moon where the effects were likely very low or zero.
I use a panasonic toughbook semi-rugged daily for my work, and have dropped the thing off a ladder onto concrete, drove over it with a fully loaded SUV and used it outside in the rain several times and its still going strong! Good devices especially ones with SSD's instead of the drives. It has heaters built in that warm it up before booting if its in freezing conditions and the carrying handle which is SOOO nice to have on a laptop. Plus its screen is able to be seen well in direct sunlight, looks almost like an e-paper display.
Worked SATCOM for the Army when I was younger. We had one of these in every truck. I've seen them with bullet-holes, thrown out of trucks, IED explosions, doused in water, Run over. Few items in the Army live up to the sheer durability that the Panasonic Toughbooks exemplify. We used to joke we should armor Humvees with them.
My dad has one of these to look at manuals as a on the road equipment mechanic. I think the only problem he’s had with it is the screen broke after falling off an excavator. The thinkpad he had before it couldn’t even hold up in the laptop stand they put in the service truck because the clamps on the stand squeezed it to death.
They really are tough as nails. Source - used one daily in Navy Aviation, and own a hospital hand me down now as well. Great little pcs. Linux Mint works great on them.
I paid about the same for a CF-53 model with Wifi, Bluetooth, GSM, GPS and all the connectors you could wish for, up to classic serial and PCMCIA slots. I've been using it for years on the workfloor now and it is the only laptop our team has that doesn't have missing keys, weird colours or cracks all around. It really can stand a beating and sometimes I get laughed at for lugging around a laptop that is three times as thick as the ones colleagues use, but I wouldn't change it for any newer laptop ever!
Used these during my service in FDF. Didn't put them through much abuse ourselves (aside from using in a rainy forest) but definitely weren't ever concerned for them breaking on us. Would be nice to see a teardown of the now broken laptop though.
I found a toughbook in an abandoned cabinet in a building the company I work for bought. I have used it in whipping rain storms, tossed it into holes in roads, used it in sub zero temperatures, dropped it off my work truck, and it still looks exactly the same as when I discovered it. the battery lasts for literal weeks of use and it has more ports than I know what to do with. I desperately want one with modern hardware for personal use. edit: ran out to the work truck to look and the one I have is a cf-31
Can confirm these work in Minot winters. If it gets too cold it has to warm up before it boots. I’ve had them drop off ladders onto concrete with minimal cosmetic damage. Drove one over with a truck with the screen open dragging it 2 feet and snapped the screen off, probably still worked.
I'm working in the IT Department for our traffic Department here in Germany and we have a few of the toughbook tablet variant (like a roughed surface) shown in the clip with the construction side for our engineers. Lets say those things are hard to break, but they are also hard to love The Touchscreen is bad, the Keyboard attachment is so light the whole thing flips over, if opened beyond 90°, they are really slow for their Hardware and the Docking station for those has barely any ports (i think 2 USB A, 1 Display Port and a VGA) But hey, one of our lumber crew fell a tree on one and it was fine except for a few scratches
Ah FINALLY someone properly tests these things. I'n sort of sad you didn't freeze it solid, but have seen that happen already and it results in probably the rarest error message in windows. Amazing things these. And good work Linus and crew.
This is the design philosophy I want to see more of, and I'm not the only one either. None of this fragile glass garbage certain companies keep pushing year after year at exceedingly high prices, because they think it's artsy.
I've used these Toughbooks in mining (literal gold mining) and as a truck mechanic (Volvo heavy truck technician) and they were great. It falls off the seat of a Volvo FH16 onto the concrete floor of the workshop? No problem. Somebody left it in the tray of the ute at the gold mine when we went and picked up a load of ore samples to x-ray and it went through the on-site flood wash? No problem.
This is a great video that was fun to watch. I've conducted multiple testing to MIL-STD- 810 and many other MIL-STDs. Most of the other MIL-STDs induce even harsher environmental conditions.
I work in a materials lab, test standards are designed to be easily reproduceable and consistent. No use testing parts or materials where the test is also a variable, or having ambiguity in the test method. A lot of older tests are being replaced with newer more real world tests but old industries still run old tests.
I'm a dealership automotive technician, and we use these as scantools. I cant tell you how many times I've seen them take a tumble off a lift from ten feet in the air onto concrete and keep on ticking. Not the most cutting edge tech by any means, but damn durable!
Somehow all the internships I've done from highschool to college have been in environmental testing so I think I can elaborate here. When a customer like the us military wants their products to survive they need to give some specifications because you need something to design for. These standards are either super vague or super specific. When the standards are super vague, it is up to the company producing the product to make the test super specific themselves because at the end of the day a step by step procedure on how the test must be performed has to be made. In this case it is possible that two manufacturers use different tests to try to comply with the same standard. In the super specific case the customer themselves has control of how the test is performed. Using the drop test as an example, if they had only specified from how high the laptop had to be dropped, manufacturers could cheat by dropping their products onto something soft like foam or a pillow. If they specify an impact load for the drop test (good luck because shock is a million times more complex than you think) you could either drop it from a very low hight on a very hard surface or higher on a softer surface. If I was a manufacturer I would love to drop my laptop from a fraction of the hight directly on concrete to get the same "impact" because then less energy is involved and less can go wrong. As a result they have to specify both the hight and the surface. Additionally, if they specified something super complicated the tests become more expensive. Hence, they try to give standards that are easy to do with existing equipment like dropping the laptop from 6ft onto widely available plywood. Lots of tests are also unpowered because powered tests are more expensive.
Considering Linus‘ expertise in dropping and destroying things in the process I‘m quite surprised what level of abuse that laptop resisted. And I wouldn’t even be surprised if it is still not broken beyond repair.
We use the toughbook tablets at work, and my main complaint about them is we still have to put a bag over them in the rain, not because the rain hurts them but because the screen goes absolutely nuts when it gets rained on registering touches in the wrong place or even touches that are not happening and stuff. Other than that they are solid little machines.
Whodathunkit, something that could survive normal Linus. However "military grade" is not a special as you think, because everything made for the military is done by the lowest bidder. A lot of maintenance is required for military equipment, that is why we do weekly PMCS (Preventive Maintenance, Checks, & Service) on all equipment, even when they are not used all the time, but still PMCS the equipment when we check them out to use, even if we just did it an hour ago for the weekly check.
As someone who actually used these in Air Force aircraft maintenance, I can attest to their real-world durability. We've had them fall 15ft off the back of a plane onto pavement, left out in the Florida rain, survive heat and sand in Afghanistan. Never the fastest or most responsive PC, but they got the job done. This is one of the few products where I would trust the "military grade" label to actually mean something
viper go brrrr
We mourned the loss of our Toughbooks when my unit went to Getac tablets. The Toughbook was perfectly responsive for TO's, had a reasonable boot time, and was easy to replace the batteries while out on the line. The Getac tablets are everything that the Toughbooks weren't. Slow, unresponsive piles of dogshit with a total battery life that precludes anything approaching real work.
The amount of repairs I have done where it's an Air Force device is in the thousands. They fall off airplanes SO OFTEN.
@@DangerB0ne We got those tablets too and they were the most useless pieces of shit. Like you said, by the time you signed on it was already halfway through the battery
Yep. Can concur. Source - F18 Avionics. Figured you guys would have roll carts with gaming pcs or something. ;)
Linus is going to squeeze every last bit of content out of that computer shop stock he bought, and I am all for it
eventually hes gonna make more then he spent at that shop from us viewers. lol. not a bad deal at all
@@allenstevenson5986he gets money, we get entratainment, everyone wins
@@allenstevenson5986Not without a lot of videos and work though.
I'll make some popcorn!
I like these 'reviews' of items that aren't trying to sell you anything (other than the advertisers wares).
As a repair technician for one of the major manufacturers of "rugged computers", I absolutely love this video. Can't tell you how much me and my fellow technicians have wanted to stress test them instead of rebuilding them when EMS/ police / military members have already destroyed them. Click read more for funny tech shennanigans!
Edit: Thought it would be fun to list a few of the more interesting "problem descriptions" that come in with RMA'd devices.
1. Killed in the line of duty: bullet hole through the LCD (all the way through)
2. Used as traction device to get vehicle out of snow (KB ripped off, device bent in half)
3. Used as a shield to defend woman from dog attack (LCD ripped off hinges)
4. "Total Loss": Literally only sent in the broken stylus, the rubber corners, and a small part of the motherboard they were able to find. We suspect it was dropped out of a helicopter.
5. Slow: shuts down all the time. (filled with metal shavings from a metal factory and kept running for years)
6. "Smells like shit" (from a zoo, it was covered in literal shit and they wanted it refurbished)
7. Need screen protector replaced (nothing tragic, but I love these ones because they come from a perfume manufacturing plant and they smell LOVELY)
We in fact do fix these devices. Sometimes they get outright replaced but often we literally replace 20-30 parts in order to repair and send them back. I also want to take a moment to say these are examples of the out of the ordinary. Most come in for damaged USB ports or broken hinges. Normal type repairs.
i wouldve gagged at the zoo one man😭😭
I can add “Did not float in 100 gallon tank of crude”
Ah, typical tech enthusiasts sharing their so-called "shenanigans." I must say, your attempt to glorify the supposed abuse of rugged computers is rather amusing. It's essential to realize that these devices are designed for durability in extreme conditions, not as props for some misguided stress test circus.
Let's dissect your list of "interesting" problem descriptions:
Bullet hole through the LCD: Please, spare me the theatrics. Rugged computers aren't meant to be bulletproof shields. Maybe consider proper firearm handling instead of turning equipment into Swiss cheese.
Used as a traction device: Brilliant engineering strategy - turn a computer into a makeshift snowplow. I'm sure that's precisely what the manufacturer had in mind when designing these devices.
Used as a shield: I'm sorry, did I miss the part where rugged computers were marketed as personal defense weapons? Maybe next time, suggest proper self-defense tools rather than sacrificing valuable tech.
"Total Loss": A helicopter drop test, you say? How innovative. I'm sure the military is thrilled to know their expensive equipment is being used for impromptu aerial experiments.
Slow with metal shavings: Ah, the classic "let's see how much abuse it can take" approach. News flash: filling a computer with metal shavings isn't a legitimate stress test; it's just negligence.
"Smells like shit": Lovely, indeed. I'm sure the manufacturer envisioned their rugged computers being used as feces-covered canvases. Bravo on the olfactory adventure.
Screen protector from a perfume plant: Because nothing says "rugged" like a device that smells like a mix of industrial chemicals and floral fragrances. I'm sure that enhances its performance significantly.
How admirable, the audacity of the self-proclaimed tech rebels, flaunting their disregard for common sense. It's almost endearing how you've managed to turn rugged computers into the unwitting protagonists of a slapstick comedy. Bravo, truly. The sheer genius behind bullet-riddled LCDs and snowplow conversions is undoubtedly a source of inspiration for us all. I can't help but marvel at the innovation - who needs a functioning computer when you can have a makeshift shield or a fragrant screen protector? It's almost poetic how these devices endure such abuse, a true reflection of their overengineered resilience. I suppose we should all be grateful for the unintentional stress tests, providing unintentional entertainment for those with a penchant for tech-related absurdity. So, hats off to the avant-garde technicians pushing the boundaries of reason. Your creativity knows no bounds, and the tech world is undoubtedly richer for it. May the rugged computers continue their unwitting journey into the realms of absurdity, guided by the hands of such visionary custodians. A round of applause for the avant-garde thinkers, proving once again that practicality is a mere inconvenience when you can have a computer functioning as a makeshift shield or boasting the aroma of an industrial perfume factory. Let's not forget the unintentional ode to overengineered resilience as these devices endure abuse that defies the very purpose for which they were crafted.
Was the Total loss replaced under warranty?
@@Posh_Quack who ruined your evening to make you type all this are you ok
Funny thing about the Panasonic Toughbooks. The company I used to work for sold them for in cab computer aided dispatching inside police cars and fire trucks. We were trying to sell them to a local fire district and they didn't know if they could trust them. The sales guy took one and jammed it under the front tire of the fire truck and told them to pull it forward. It was closed of course, and after retrieving it from under the truck and powering it on, we fitted every truck and ambulance with one in that district.
Having worked in retail sales, I can say that sales rep knew exactly what he had. Product knowledge is more than half the work
i was there when panasonic presented their first toughbook in my country. the countrys general manager himself presented it in front of a camera.
he poored 2 liters of water over it and trow it against a wall while running.
this was early 90s, about a year or so before its official release . i will always remeber that case is made of magnesium.
Wow. That's some serious confidence
I laughed at the part when you drove over it. A rep for Panasonic was selling these to a utility company I worked at in the early 2000s. A lineman asked what would happen if he accidentally drove on one, being a smart ass. The rep put one behind the bucket truck on the concrete garage floor and said to go ahead. Lineman went over it 2x with a 10 ton truck, the laptop didn't even shut down.
I work at a police dept and everyone who has one of these has fought tooth and nail to keep it even as it passes obsolescence. One of the sergeants has one that suffered an accidental discharge from a service weapon, the pulled lodged itself inside the case inside the second hard drive, the computer still works but it only has one working drive. These things are INSANE
😊😊 5:25 😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊 5:27 5:46 5:49 5:49
Accidental discharges do not exist. Only intentional and negligent (the case you are speaking of) discharges do.
@@dylanmerchant8962there are plenty of videos and reports showcasing a firearm discharging without user intent.
So given the right circumstances, I don't see why a gun couldn't go off accidentally.
13:12
@@dylanmerchant8962 never owned a sig I take it. or even a glock for that matter. Talk to military members who got the new SIG and the lock in case and then ask about accidental discharges they took that pistol out of circulation for almost a year after that.
We need a teardown to show how these things are built internally to hold up so well. E.g. how the keyboard is waterproofed, etc.
Show us the secrets!
yeah id be interested to see the waterproofing too
@@poorlymadeproduction yeah. Although I don't think we would be really surprised. It's not going to be anything we've never seen before. *Probably*
We used to have plenty of these where I worked. We did have one go aquatic for over 24 hours before it was retrieved. There's really nothing special under the hood. Just needs to have good seals/gaskets. the hard drive encasing did have a foam protection within a thin aluminum case. I don't believe SSD's were an option back then. If you leave the port doors open, it'll easily get inside. While the laptop did work after getting it dry. The backlight and touchscreen was broken, the keyboard only half worked. The motherboard had also started building up corrosion so we did not put it back in service as it was bound to fail. The biggest issues we had with these were a huge amount of touchscreen failures. Our application/use required touchscreen so it was a major headache.
I'd have been interested to see how it stays cool without vents.
So this was actually my wife's job at Panasonic Toughbooks, she ran the milspec comparative testing on Panasonic and other ruggedized brands. The CF-19 is impressive but you should see what they put the CF-30 through unofficially...throwing it from the tower of an aircraft carrier onto the flight deck, the covered one in meat and gave it to a lion, they rolled a combat-equipped Humvee over it. We used it for years as our young son's laptop, eventually it just couldn't run a contemporary OS and that's what ended it's service. There are no fans because they use a heat pipe system to dissipate operating heat.
>heat pipes
That’s what he said. “Passive”. But it couldn’t really be heard that cleary
Do lions enjoy using windows?
they prefer Lionex
@@nexuhs.
@@nexuhs. If they said yes they'd be lion
@@nexuhs.
lions use arch linux btw.
At my old job 10+ years ago they had a broken toughbook that needed a new screen. I brought it to the local pc shop, and it was still there when I left the company 6 months later..somehow getting a replacement screen was a big problem. I don't even know how the screen got broken..probably someone said it's indestructible and some jackass had to test it out.
So while I was in the US Military we got reports of those particular designs (Tough Books) would be hit with rounds and it would just keep on trucking.
One story in particular is a guy had one in his backpack, got hit with a round in the back and then fell from a single story building roof and all they had to do is swap out the monitor on the PC and it kept working. Nice to see some of the story proven here.
Can we have a follow up on this where you compare the internals/"how it's done" to a normal laptop and/or desktop computer? What makes them different and why?
I think it would be really interesting to see how the design for portability and ruggedness works and how/why electronic components struggle with different environments etc. You could even get Luke to pull some of his NASA strings for the "ultimate" ruggedness video!
Thanks for the funny and informative video!
pretty sure it’s just a more beefed up shell. not much different internally than a normal laptop
@@justabrokeredneck I mean for one there can't be any fans since there are no vents. The cooling system would be interesting to look at at least
@@justabrokeredneck When I used them I found that the display has some gooey liquid between digitizer and screen. So at least some parts had shock distributing liquids/glue.
Well, it's already broke, thanks to this video, so why just open it up, when you could both open it up, AND try and figure out how you broke it, and see how easy it is to actually fix it...
@@justabrokeredneckLikely a beefed up shell with the internals mounted on some sort of shock absorbing material to reduce the effective force going through them.
We used these in the military (Finnish military) and they worked fine. They were archaic and most of the issues I ever encountered was software being unintuitive, the keyboard keys being too tiny to use with gloves in the cold and the whole device in general being bulky. Only mechanical "failure" was getting grime under the keys so you couldn't press them down. But other than that, we used these in the rain, in the snow, in the heat, everywhere really.
I can attest to this, My laptop had some of the rubber flaps missing, and it sitll didn't mind th snow in Rovajärvi.
Torille!!! 🇫🇮🇫🇮🇫🇮
These can also hold their own submerged in freezing water for hours -Finnish army 1/22
They actually had a rubberized keyboard for use outdoors. Finland bought the wrong model! We used them on ambulances/cop cars/fire trucks in my county here in Virginia. They were awful to type on
As a member of a military aerospace maintenance career field, these Toughbooks were awesome and survived so much abuse. So cool to see LTT cover technology I used so often
As a member of a computer maintenance career field, these Toughbooks are pain in the fucking ass to service.
@@DG_427 I had one when i was a kid, it was a hand me down and the screen still worked when I accidentally turned it into a convertible
@@DG_427 As a member of the community, I chuckled.
@@DG_427 @CST can you re-image this?
@@DG_427 bruhh hahahahaha
I wanna see this thing disassembled!
I really want to see A) how the motherboard and everything else is packaged for waterproofing and to cushion against drops, and B) what exactly died when Linus gave it the final hammer hit.
i think Linus hit the left side of the palmrest, where usually storage drives located
@@MichaelCH911my guess is that hard drive died and the computer automatically switches off when it detects a disconnected drive to save any critical data from being corrupted. I'm sure replacing the hard drive would be enough to bring it back to a working order
the drive is an ssd so any physical shock except getting shot at, would still work. i used to work on these, and nearly everything that is considered a vital and vulnerable piece was sealed in a rubber/ silicon basket. and plus these mf'ers weighted as much as a small child😂
A side by side test with a standard notebook doing the same tests with would have been interesting 😮
A standard notebook would have had a broken hinge on the first drop test, and would've been nonfunctional after the 5-foot, or at most the 6-foot. I've had hinges snap from them falling off a table before.
I mean my macbook still worked perfectly after falling from 1m on concrete but the corner that took the impact is noticably caved in, a 6ft drop would definitely crack the screen at least.
@@danieloberhofer9035 you clearly never had the older gen IBM laptop
@@dutch-nature-history-bydronewith an old school IBM thinkpad, damage to the floor is the real concern. Not the laptop,
@@helloitsme4139 😂
CF-19s was Panasonic's mid-tier, the CF-30/31 were even more indestructible. I've got a picture of one of those with a beanbag round in the bottom of it (still turned on)
please tell me beanbag does not mean inflated lithium battery
Cf-30/31 were awesomee!!. 33s are trash. They have remakes of 30s now. FZ-40s
@@MeeBacon It's a type of "Less lethal" round often used with shotguns. Literally flings a few small beanbags at people to cause incapacitation via blunt force.
@@blunderingfool ok good, thanks for telling me
I have a cf-31 for work, can confirm that it is at least big idiot proof
As a former member of the US Air Force and someone who used one of those toughbooks on a daily basis for aircraft maintenance, when you drop them on the concrete on the flightline they can break lol. But I have also seen them survive some pretty impresive falls too. I've seen them run over by tow vehicles that weigh 50k pounds and end up in pieces, but the standards don't cover that kind of scenario I suppose lol.
Us firefighters and military can break anything. We are good at that lol
As a former AF IT guy, the only thing that the maintainers did'nt manage to do to these computers was get them pregnant, which I wouldnt be surprised if they tried.
So would most laptops now they have no moving parts...
@@BrianRash The most real statement I have ever heard. Some of the situations that I saw were mind boggling as to how it could have happened. For us the most common thing that broke were the latches/compartment doors and the thin plastic by the screen. Then needing to be intrinsically safe still afterwards made them “unusable”.
The biggest point of failure on these was the original mechanical drives, which went away as soon as they included/upgraded to SSDs. I was always amused by the one officer that had one with a massive sledgehammer style dent next to the trackpad, and it still kept on chugging fine.
Towards the middle of my service with the USAF we switched to the toughbooks, again like others, aircraft electronics maintenance, mainly C130/A-10's for me. We had 3 in shop that replaced equipment that was probably 10 times the toughbook size and 10 times its weight so they were a fairly welcome "new" piece of tech for us that went to the flightline. Even when we received them new they were quite a few years behind current CPU's at the time, but still significantly quicker than the tech we were using from the 60s-70s as many of the aircraft I worked on in the early 2000's were from the 60's. Definitely had a few fall down the cockpit stairs all the way to outside which is probably close to 8-10 ft, fall off the loading ramp doors, fall off of B1 and B5 stands and still worked.
14:16 Props to that screen for not _completely_ getting disfunctional from the rifle shot but only failing where the bullet actually hit!
If anyone can break something, it's the Drop-King, Linus.
All I can think of this the poor linx laptop that linus bricked before he even finished the short cruict video
half the drops in this video were accidental
@1metiz much more than half the time
You dropped this, King
Gotta give the Linus Drop Tips guy content to work with!
I love the balance of the channel lately, super nerdy stuff is always great, but I also really enjoy these more silly fun videos.
After the recent "shakedown" I find their videos to be more insightful but still manage to retain the goofy air with their silly antics.
Really enjoying the slight change so far and I can see the quality has improved a lot as well. I want them to keep it up.
LTT slowly inching their way towards DAILY videos hoping nobody notices, finally the effects of #OverreactGateAugust2023 are fizzling out. Ya love to see it.
My dad has about 20 of these lying around the house because he used to fix them back in the 2000’s and I’m glad Linus made a video about it
does your dad sometimes poo on them?
We used huge numbers of these on mine sites in australia. Dust, heat, water all dealt with. Bigger issue was the rubber gaskets on the USB covers failing in the 0% humidity/40C temp very quickly, then allowing sulphide dist ingress through the USB ports. Still took a while to get there, but I would absolutely recommend these units as beasts after falling off trucks, driving Toyota Landcruisers over them etc.
Absolutely LOVE my old Toughbook CF-19, which I bought to talk to industrial doodads on oil rigs and now serves to run OBD2 car diagnostics.
Best thing about it (aside from the build quality) is that there's no fancy OS-specific drivers/app's which means that, although it's from the XP-era, I can install a newer OS and NOT discover that there's no compatible drivers.
In fact, some of the software I run on it is from the DOS/W3.1 era so I just have 3 different SSDs for DOS, 32 bit XP and 64bit W10, fit the appropriate SSD and the machine runs perfectly in each configuration... and even mages to happily run Skyrim with the W10 SSD fitted.
MIL-STD-810 is definitely deficient for testing tough laptops but it is an integral part of the ARP 4754 development process used across the aerospace industry. The beauty of MIL-STD-810 is that if you pass all the requirements of the standard you can pretty much guarantee it will work for all applications. Would be great if you talked more about the use of the standard in aerospace industry! Love the engineering content!
I'd be interested in seeing how that shop looks with its refreshed stock after Linus cleared it out.
I used one of these with these exact same specs everyday when I worked for a direct wireless ISP. I kind of loved the thing and it was basically indestructible in everyday use up on roofs, ladders and towers. Really the performance was very reasonable for what we used it for. It also had a cellular internet card that worked surprisingly well out in the middle of nowhere, it could get a connection way past where my cellphone could. The screen had a reflective layer behind it so it could be used in bight sunlight. The battery life was pretty great and it had double hot swap batteries. I never dropped it from super high up as it was always strapped to me, but it did fall off of the truck several times and I used it in the rain many times even heavy downpours with no issues. They are basically indestructible in normal use especially with the screen closed, it is kind of incredible to have a computer on the job site that you do not really have to worry about.
@angleisthebest It looked exactly like this one, and had the same specs, I have no idea if it was the same model and don't really care, it was in this same chassis.
These things really are insane. I've seen them fall out of moving vehicles and survive with only a few scuffs, I really don't understand how they're as strong as they are.
Hell, Linus even ran over it with a fucking car and it was perfectly fine, I'm pretty sure it's impossible to break without intentionally trying to destroy it.
I’ve witnessed one of these (CF-19) fly out of an open window during a hard turn, skip across the road at 25, and continued to work until we replaced it.
We’ve also got a CF-54 that has been ran over by a patrol car that we’re using as a host for a station display. Panasonic has it figured out for the most part.
Used to work at a water department, had 2 notable events with them, 1 lost off the top of a moving van at 60 MPH, just a few knocks to the port covers. The other was corroded by chlorine gas, still worked A-OK, and Panasonic wanted it back to have a look at how it had performed.
When I was deployed from 06-08 in an infantry battalion we had these tough books for mission planning and whatnot while out on missions and they really were no joke. They were impressive then and still impressive with their degree of durability.
I'd imagine the 'ingress protection' (IPxx rating) would be the most important factor in real world scenarios?
Soldiers are also not continuously dropping their rifles (like it's a Laurel & Hardy sketch).
If it's a primary means of planning / communication for missions, I'd imagine you would treat the laptop with some respect (:
A drop from hip height / work surface height seems like the most likely thing to occur (when you run for cover during an attack, or something)..
--
"Sorry guys, I used our means of communication as a shield for that flame thrower with the screen and keyboard facing the attacker...
Then I dropped it onto concrete from about 8' high...
And later I tripped and dropped it into that pool.."
. - "You seem to be having a lot of accidents, Sergeant Butterfingers!...
Are you a... oh wait.
Never mind; I see it now...")
As someone who develops to these standards it’s just used as an indicator. So for example a client will require the MIL spec to be met (more likely the IEC spec due to it testing a more extreme environment) and then they’ll add any other requirements they have in addition.
However when you combine standards together you can usually get exactly what you need for your industry.
As an aircrafdt mechanic in the air force, we used and ABUSED the crap out of these things and I've seen them dropped off man lifts (30-40ft), left out in the rain, kicked off a wing they always held up.
Only time I broke one was when I left a screwdriver on the keyboard then closed the lid.
We used these as logbooks for our aircraft in the Army for a reason. We recovered one from an aircraft crash so bad that there wasn't much left of the aircraft. The computer casing was melted and the screen wouldn't work due to the high temps it withstood. We plugged in an external power supply and monitor and turned it on. It still worked.
I think a disassemble of the computer to see how they got the drop resistance could be a good video, if it's more than just a beefed up normal computer. It could also show how damaged the insides are, and if its fixable after the damage linus did to it
We used those in Afg and Iraq when deployed. They are legit tough and hold up pretty well. PAIN IN THE BUTT to service as an IT individual, but still good.
I watch basically all LTT videos across channels, this is one of the best videos to come out recently as far as entertainment, it puts a giant smile on my face seeing Linus have fun doing what he loves (put not intended, but it's there).
Agreed this one of the most fun videos for a while
I had a professor about 4 years ago that worked at Dell, and he invited us to tour the facility. We got to see where they perform some of the tests for their military grade laptops. We got to drop them from specific heights (even on the side) and one test we sprayed it with a pretty high pressure water hose. Crazy what they can withstand.
I wonder though are they self-designed and commissioned from the usuals like Quanta? Because if not, i suspect they might be engineered and built by Mitac, a computer manufacturer that used to build remarkably well-made barebone laptops in the early 2000s and then sort-of quit, but they're also a major server manufacturer. They have a joint venture with General Electric Aerospace marketing the Getac line of durable computers, so that's what their laptop business transformed into when Mitac barebones disappeared.
Linus, I've used these tough books for about 12 hears now, everywhere from Anchorage Alaska, Germany, Afghanistan. For the most part they had held up. I have seen one of been crushed by a c-17 being lowered on one, I've seen a power cart run one over and crushed it. I'd say about 90% of the time they hold up but there are other factors that can kill them
can we just mention how @13:29 they managed to log in with 2 hammer strikes. that is skill.
As someone who used these at Minot AFB, I can confirm that when it gets too cold, you just hold it up to the exhaust of any running machinery, and it boots fine 😂
I did help desk support for municipality that used toughbooks in a lot of their trucks. I'm trying to think back now but I don't think I can remember a single one of them ever failing from external damage and these things went through absolute hell all the time.
Guy I knew had this on a jobsite a few years ago. He loved it. And that thing looked like it had been through war.
There are another couple of big advantages of ToughBooks is (was) you could get them with a real RS232 port (rather than one connected via USB) which is important for diagnostics on industrial equipment. The ports are (were) also on a daughter board, so if someone trashed them, only the daughter board needed to be replaced rather than the whole motherboard. I don't know if they are still built to the same standard, as I thankfully don't behave to deal with hardware anymore.
I think they actually talked about a newer toughbook on shortcircuit... I remember Alex smashing the box with a shovel.
It's not at all in the same league but a standard Dell Latitude 7470 gains a proper serial and parallel port when used with the dock.
Used those things quite a lot, I wish you would've looked at the modularity if these things also. Multiple batteries, storage options, expandability etc. Compared them to normal laptops and such. There's also tablets which are great. And they come with 4G options, laptops also btw.
"Finally a Linus proof computer we have done it aaaaand he broke it... damnit... its true what they say. if you make something Linus proof they will just build a better Linus..."
Fancy seeing you here.
I’ve used some of the original ruggedized laptops procured for the military… The ones custom made in green metal chassis and a few milspec connector types not normally found on a PC.
They were some hefty suckers.
We used them for maintenance purposes in mil-aviation. One was even a custom Linux variant… You needed a security clearance to even touch them.
You get to mess with some interesting gear as a service member or as a civilian contractor.
We had one of these in the machinery room of a ship in the Navy. It's insane what situation these things can operate in.
I know this episode wasn't exactly to be taken too seriously, but it's worth noting that it's really a common misconception about what a rugged laptop is and how tough it is. It's not meant to be able to take intentional and repeated abuse, but for the laptop to survive a few knocks or the odd drop from a relatively small height and survive where a regular laptop would break apart and die. If a rugged laptop survived even one drop, where a normal one wouldn't, it's done its job.
Yep, i used these things on the regular in the army for my job. We've dropped them a few times just by moving them from place to place and can honestly say the only thing we broke was the latch made to keep it closed.
It truly takes a lot more to entirely brick a toughbook. A true shame that this model is now discontinued.
They are still available for industry use
CF19 and CF18s were really good, I’ve had several and used them in the Army and when I was doing field IT work.
We used CF-31s in Air Force aircraft maintenance. Some abuse was accidental, some may or may not have been carelessness, but they almost always pulled through with just the occasional port cover breaking off
I think you should've compared this toughbook with a normal bog standard laptop, would've been interesting:)
And macbook would cracked and not turned on after dropped from table height.
@@Unknown_GeniusI’ve seen a few MacBooks survive a pretty hefty fall when closed. Bad enough that the case gets deformed enough that they won’t close fully anymore until filling them down to be flat again. We use them as teachers in our school district and that happened to a fellow teacher. He was carrying his and he turned around fast one day and it flew out of his hands shot across the shop. I gave him a hard time about using it as a frisbee.
I was going to type that
I wanted to see if it could survive just heat and a small drop and maybe some water
Why? It would break after the first drop. What's interesting about that?
I bought one of these updated mk8 models. 16gigs ram, 1tb ssd, 2.7ghz*, all nice and refurbed for about 250. I feel much better putting this in my work bag than anything else of that price.
How does it run with those upgraded specs? And what OS? Win7 as God intended?
@@JulianQuinn mine came with windows ten. I would've preferred 7 for saving resources, but it was a straight refurb so no upgrade options. I don't game on it, but for everything I do it seems fine. Definitely a big difference from the older 32bit models. And it's very user serviceable for a laptop/tablet. If you can find the parts (not hard) you can replace them. I do wish it had more USB ports, but mine already had an expansion card. Also kind of wish mine had the fingerprint reader built in.
I priced one like mine from a 'refurb PC store' and it was close to a grand, but I got mine off eBay with a 2 year warranty for just under 250. Only had 3k service hours on it before the refurb. Was between this or a new netbook that has way less storage and half the ram.
We had these in the military to make artillery calculations. We used these everywhere and these never broke even though it rained or snowed or dropped from various heights. Our laptop was also buried in snow for many hours and worked as expected. These are amazing.
As someone who's performed drop tests on delicate devices, as well as use these for heavy equipment repair. It's good to see a video explaining standards, as well as being impressed by the performance regardless. Maybe see if the LTT team can retrofit a laptop to meet the standard?
Hey, I used one of these in the LOD!
We mounted these in the Officer's seat of all our fire apparatus. They handled Truck-to-CAD (Computer Aided Dispatch) communications with the county and were convenient methods of pulling up maps for out-of-district responses, along with acting as interfaces to print out incident reports for our paperwork. Highly reliable, and would recommend, having only seen 2min of the video so far!
Last week at work, I popped my CF-33 into its dock but didn't get it all the way in, then proceeded to fling the computer down onto the floor and had all confidence that it would be just fine.
And it was just fine.
ToughBooks are the industry standard for a reason.
I work in land surveying in Australia, and we have these things everywhere. At the moment, my company is in the middle of switching from toughbooks to 7" rugged windows tablets made by Topcon. These things deal with so much dust, dirt, mud, and grime on the jobsite, but they continue to run smooth and work very well for controlling total stations, GNSS units, and graders. The Topcon ones are all fitted with extremely long-range Bluetooth antennas so we can control the equipment from a few hundred metres away reliably. They're very impressive machines.
A bit of a stretch probably, but I'd love to see LTT cover surveying equipment at one point. The technology is incredibly interesting, and the precision afforded by robotic total stations and satellite augmented GNSS units is very impressive.
We had a sales rep come in to my work back in the early 2000s and his demonstration was throwing one of these off of a 2nd floor balcony in our shop, we bought a few dozen, carried one on my service truck for the better part of a decade, those things are built like a tank
I got one of these second hand for $150 and I use it for coding. It's brilliant. My favourite laptop I own. Mines only got a core2duo though, but linux doesn't care about that.
I've heard stories about these things falling from helicopters and still surviving enough to get the data off. It's also good to put this in perspective with something like an ipad, where if you looked at it a bit too mean it'd break.
To be fair to an iPad, usually the actual computer part of it is durable, the glass screen is just incredibly fragile on them. The aluminum shell on something like a 9th-gen iPad is definitely more than enough to withstand mostly anything, and because there are no moving parts in an iPad nothing short of a puncture or bend will actually damage the internals. They're actually pretty heat-resistant because the shell can't melt (though I have had them power off temporarily when using them in direct sunlight on a hot day).
What do you code? I also code a bunch, and there's almost nothing useful that I could do on just a duocore with no cooling. Like, can the thing even pull repos and shit?
@@sid6645 I have no clue what you are on about... Why would dual core not be able to pull repositories? It might do it little bit slower, but it would still do it, there is nothing challenging for cpu in pulling repos.
@@sid6645 it would be fine for me as well. I think most average devs are probably maintaining or working with legacy products(for example, my current job is working on a project from the early 2000s that is still being used very very widely in a certain industry).
Also, prior to this, pulling and building repos was fine on my c2q desktop, which I used until about 2018. Programming is just widely not very demanding. Gaming is way more demanding. Most of programming is working with text. It's rare that I rebuild a whole project as opposed to an individual piece(such as building an individual solution in a c# project) so time to build isn't usually a big issue IME.
Also some folks are running builds on far more powerful machines and only pushing changes to the repo from their machine(so only working with text, which a Chromebook with a celeron could do)
@@sid6645 AVR C. The thing can run windows 10, there's no reason it can't do everything else. It is dead slow for a lot of things, but the kind of coding I'm doing takes about 2 seconds to compile on this thing. I also do everything in the tty consoles of linux, not the GUI environment if I can, so battery life is really good doing that.
Basically, it does exactly what I need it to do, and it can do more than I need it to do, but I have faster, more modern equipment for that. I just like this. Also, surface Pro's don't agree with serial communication for some stupid reason.
I propose a better test than the military one:
The Linus test. Basically you just give the product to Linus and hope he doesn’t make it explode.
I used to test software with a range of outdoor devices including these and the warranty information used to say that it didn't cover damage due to dropping it or getting it wet, the two things it was designed to protect against
It's called warranty not insurance. Warranty often only protect from factory defects, not usage.
You know the guys are Canadian, when they didn't even think about shooting at it by themselves.
Oilfield electronics technician here. Toughbooks are awesome. My company started handing out Z books instead and they suck. We need high brightness displays with serial, rj45, lots of usb and video output. Now with my Z book i have to use a dongle.
We used these bad boys in FDF for anti aircraft c&c and battlefield tactical information consoles. I've always wanted one for myself, literally dragged them in mud and snow. Perfectly capable machines still if you slap a Linux on it.
Linus... Based on this video, maybe it's a Techquickie but it'd be cool to know about processors that are "hardened" against EMI. Like those that go in spacecraft and possibly battlefield equipment from EM Pulses. It'd also be interesting to know if there are plans from companies to handle a situation if we ever get smashed by a big a solar flare here on earth.
Electronic devices are not affected by magnetic pulses enough to cause issues. The myth of EMP damage dates back to when everything still used magnetic storage, which is not an issue any longer.
Also, the Earth is constantly being hit with solar flares. There was a huge one last week. You didn't even notice.
@@TehButterflyEffect that's like arguing a 4 on the Richter scale isn't bad and then also a 9 isn't bad. Look up CMEs. Earth hasn't been hit by one of those in a while... The last one disrupted power grids. It was pre-internet and connected world. And spacecraft are not afforded the same protection as we are on earth by the magneto sphere. Hardened electronics are a thing. Electronics are also knocked out by EMP blasts... Like those from a nuclear detonation. Contextually its relevant when the military need computers to not die in the battlefield.
I heard of one case where they installed digital CCTV to monitor a high voltage switchyard. At first the cameras were just failing every now and then.
Upon closer inspection they discovered that a pulse induced voltage spikes up to 15 kV on the datalines of the cameras.
After replacing the cables to EMP protected type and placing the cameras in protective enclosures, the cameras didn't fail anymore.
@@alcorza3567 You pointed out the flaw in your argument while you were arguing. Spacecraft aren't within the magnetosphere and yet the computers (including the early unshielded ones) continue to function.
@@TehButterflyEffect well... They sort of are. The magnetosphere extends beyond the immediate boundary of what is considered "space" and earths atmosphere. It's really how far the orbit is that determines this. In talking like the moon where the effects were likely very low or zero.
I use a panasonic toughbook semi-rugged daily for my work, and have dropped the thing off a ladder onto concrete, drove over it with a fully loaded SUV and used it outside in the rain several times and its still going strong! Good devices especially ones with SSD's instead of the drives. It has heaters built in that warm it up before booting if its in freezing conditions and the carrying handle which is SOOO nice to have on a laptop.
Plus its screen is able to be seen well in direct sunlight, looks almost like an e-paper display.
Worked SATCOM for the Army when I was younger. We had one of these in every truck. I've seen them with bullet-holes, thrown out of trucks, IED explosions, doused in water, Run over. Few items in the Army live up to the sheer durability that the Panasonic Toughbooks exemplify. We used to joke we should armor Humvees with them.
We got one that slid 200m off a cliff - replaced the screen protector and she's as good as new
My dad has one of these to look at manuals as a on the road equipment mechanic. I think the only problem he’s had with it is the screen broke after falling off an excavator. The thinkpad he had before it couldn’t even hold up in the laptop stand they put in the service truck because the clamps on the stand squeezed it to death.
They really are tough as nails. Source - used one daily in Navy Aviation, and own a hospital hand me down now as well. Great little pcs. Linux Mint works great on them.
I paid about the same for a CF-53 model with Wifi, Bluetooth, GSM, GPS and all the connectors you could wish for, up to classic serial and PCMCIA slots. I've been using it for years on the workfloor now and it is the only laptop our team has that doesn't have missing keys, weird colours or cracks all around. It really can stand a beating and sometimes I get laughed at for lugging around a laptop that is three times as thick as the ones colleagues use, but I wouldn't change it for any newer laptop ever!
Used these during my service in FDF. Didn't put them through much abuse ourselves (aside from using in a rainy forest) but definitely weren't ever concerned for them breaking on us.
Would be nice to see a teardown of the now broken laptop though.
I found a toughbook in an abandoned cabinet in a building the company I work for bought. I have used it in whipping rain storms, tossed it into holes in roads, used it in sub zero temperatures, dropped it off my work truck, and it still looks exactly the same as when I discovered it. the battery lasts for literal weeks of use and it has more ports than I know what to do with. I desperately want one with modern hardware for personal use.
edit: ran out to the work truck to look and the one I have is a cf-31
Can confirm these work in Minot winters. If it gets too cold it has to warm up before it boots. I’ve had them drop off ladders onto concrete with minimal cosmetic damage. Drove one over with a truck with the screen open dragging it 2 feet and snapped the screen off, probably still worked.
I was hoping you are also going to disassemble the whole thing. That would be cool!
That should be the next part. See if he can "fix" it. Take it apart, and find what finally failed on it.
I love how Yvonne just stays calm when Linus dropped things, as he normally would.
I'm working in the IT Department for our traffic Department here in Germany and we have a few of the toughbook tablet variant (like a roughed surface) shown in the clip with the construction side for our engineers. Lets say those things are hard to break, but they are also hard to love
The Touchscreen is bad, the Keyboard attachment is so light the whole thing flips over, if opened beyond 90°, they are really slow for their Hardware and the Docking station for those has barely any ports (i think 2 USB A, 1 Display Port and a VGA)
But hey, one of our lumber crew fell a tree on one and it was fine except for a few scratches
Ah FINALLY someone properly tests these things. I'n sort of sad you didn't freeze it solid, but have seen that happen already and it results in probably the rarest error message in windows.
Amazing things these. And good work Linus and crew.
Now I'm curious. What error message?
Warming up battery please wait.
Or something like that. Can't remember the exact message.
lol I am here before this even released?
Yes we are
Somehow yes
Bro what.
Yes
pog@@HisMukuro
This is the design philosophy I want to see more of, and I'm not the only one either. None of this fragile glass garbage certain companies keep pushing year after year at exceedingly high prices, because they think it's artsy.
They're meant for completely different markets and uses. If you want tough but slow machines, go ahead.
I've used these Toughbooks in mining (literal gold mining) and as a truck mechanic (Volvo heavy truck technician) and they were great. It falls off the seat of a Volvo FH16 onto the concrete floor of the workshop? No problem. Somebody left it in the tray of the ute at the gold mine when we went and picked up a load of ore samples to x-ray and it went through the on-site flood wash? No problem.
I think there are a number of laptop that claims MIL-STD certified. Would be interesting to sample a few for validation.
Linus really seemed in his element in this video. He was made for it hahaha.
This is a great video that was fun to watch. I've conducted multiple testing to MIL-STD- 810 and many other MIL-STDs. Most of the other MIL-STDs induce even harsher environmental conditions.
I hope everyone realizes that nothing is indestructible when it's in Linus' hands
5:47 that moment is EPIC and so RIGHT he is so RIGHT °C is RIGHT.
I work in a materials lab, test standards are designed to be easily reproduceable and consistent. No use testing parts or materials where the test is also a variable, or having ambiguity in the test method. A lot of older tests are being replaced with newer more real world tests but old industries still run old tests.
Lol linus is the only man who breaks everything he touches including "indestructible" items 😂
He needs to start testing things that are labeled "child-proof"
@@joshuapowell2675I saw some mention they should have a "Linus proof label" or something like that
That mouth at 0:01 can fit a whole lot of claims in it 😂 had to rewind five times to enjoy it fully 😊 thanks, LMG!
Why did you ruin it by installing Windows 10?!
Windows 10 > windows 11
I'm a dealership automotive technician, and we use these as scantools. I cant tell you how many times I've seen them take a tumble off a lift from ten feet in the air onto concrete and keep on ticking. Not the most cutting edge tech by any means, but damn durable!
Somehow all the internships I've done from highschool to college have been in environmental testing so I think I can elaborate here. When a customer like the us military wants their products to survive they need to give some specifications because you need something to design for. These standards are either super vague or super specific. When the standards are super vague, it is up to the company producing the product to make the test super specific themselves because at the end of the day a step by step procedure on how the test must be performed has to be made. In this case it is possible that two manufacturers use different tests to try to comply with the same standard. In the super specific case the customer themselves has control of how the test is performed.
Using the drop test as an example, if they had only specified from how high the laptop had to be dropped, manufacturers could cheat by dropping their products onto something soft like foam or a pillow. If they specify an impact load for the drop test (good luck because shock is a million times more complex than you think) you could either drop it from a very low hight on a very hard surface or higher on a softer surface. If I was a manufacturer I would love to drop my laptop from a fraction of the hight directly on concrete to get the same "impact" because then less energy is involved and less can go wrong. As a result they have to specify both the hight and the surface. Additionally, if they specified something super complicated the tests become more expensive. Hence, they try to give standards that are easy to do with existing equipment like dropping the laptop from 6ft onto widely available plywood. Lots of tests are also unpowered because powered tests are more expensive.
Considering Linus‘ expertise in dropping and destroying things in the process I‘m quite surprised what level of abuse that laptop resisted. And I wouldn’t even be surprised if it is still not broken beyond repair.
This was thoroughly entertaining, great video idea!
Just keep in mind when they're this old, the rubber seals can dry out and they're often not water resistant anymore!
I showed my dad this video and he laugh at the mud and car bits and then CRACKED UP when he said "Tough? I don't think so."
We use the toughbook tablets at work, and my main complaint about them is we still have to put a bag over them in the rain, not because the rain hurts them but because the screen goes absolutely nuts when it gets rained on registering touches in the wrong place or even touches that are not happening and stuff. Other than that they are solid little machines.
Whodathunkit, something that could survive normal Linus. However "military grade" is not a special as you think, because everything made for the military is done by the lowest bidder. A lot of maintenance is required for military equipment, that is why we do weekly PMCS (Preventive Maintenance, Checks, & Service) on all equipment, even when they are not used all the time, but still PMCS the equipment when we check them out to use, even if we just did it an hour ago for the weekly check.