He Said it was INDESTRUCTIBLE... I Disagree!

Linus is going to squeeze every last bit of content out of that computer shop stock he bought, and I am all for it

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

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 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.

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 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

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!

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.

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.

Veteran here. I’ve seen these used as tire chocks for fuel trucks in a pinch. Regularly dropped off aircraft wings. Like daily. They’re also a pain to fix so thank god they’re indestructible.

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.

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.

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.

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)

A side by side test with a standard notebook doing the same tests with would have been interesting 😮

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.

If anyone can break something, it's the Drop-King, Linus.

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.

14:16 Props to that screen for not completely getting disfunctional from the rifle shot but only failing where the bullet actually hit!

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.