The CRAZY Upgradeable Laptop - Panasonic TOUGHBOOK 55 Showcase

there's no denying that the trend in mobile devices is towards making them thinner and lighter even if it means sacrificing features that we used to take for granted like user-swappable batteries extensive i o options or even something as basic as a headphone jack well as for panasonic their fz 55 takes that trend and friend chokes lands it i mean almost literally look at look at this freaking thing so panasonic sponsored this video and sent over not just the toughbook 55 but also this box of upgrade modules fingerprint reader rfid reader blu-ray drive is that a graphics card and all of these can be user upgraded if you have the inclination and the crazy part it's not even that thick [Music] oh my god it has a sim slot i love this thing now first and foremost the toughbook 55 is of course a laptop so it comes equipped with intel's eighth generation codename whiskey lake processors up to 64 gigs of ram check this out as a touch screen model with stylus support and then it has some other stuff that most people might not really think of so one is backwards compatibility with both panasonic's previous generation desk docks and car docks you know just in case you need to dock your laptop in the car it's got a quad array microphone and get this they claim 92 decibel peak loudness speakers so i gotta hear these [Music] so it's all right the idea behind that is that it can both hear you and be heard even under challenging conditions like and get this this is right from their literature a police cruiser going down the highway with the windows down and the sirens on very specific so each of these like little modular pieces right here can be removed from the laptop and then have additional components swapped into them and here's a really crazy one there's a quick release latch for the storage because you never know when you're gonna need to rip the ssd out of your drive put it in a paper shredder and like freaking hard bail right like what i don't know how much i'm like supposed to pick and prod at this thing um but i'm i'm like super curious what's under here too it's funny there's always like really cool technology in the consumer space and then there's really cool technology in the enterprise space and the kinds of solutions that they build are just things that you would have never considered that anybody needed and actually on that note it can be configured with raid 1 so that you have real time data mirroring with the optional ssd upgrade so it's just a standard m.2 drive and it's just got a little carrier pcb that adapts it to this hot pluggable interface here i actually don't know that it is strictly speaking hot plugable in fact it it probably isn't um hopefully this thing boots back up mercifully i was at least in sleep when i unplugged that so i'm gonna put it back in and see if this thing fires back up immediately okay we're in the bios i guess that's the perfect opportunity to bring up that this thing has a ton of security features including trusted platform module 2.0 v pro nist bios protection 256-bit aes wi-fi encryption optional opal encrypted drives and a variety of options for 2fa oh there we go okay rebooting got the ssd to pick back up again that was pretty dumb so that brings us perfectly into our first upgrade ability adventure so right over here on this side is a smart card reader and if you don't work in the enterprise space you might probably think that it's sort of pointless to have like you know smart card readers in your laptop but actually a lot of enterprises use these as a second factor for things like accessing confidential information like say a client's medical records that's not the only option though so let's go ahead and have a look at what else we've got here this is a fingerprint reader module okay pretty straightforward so from the bottom here wait nope [Music] there we go we go ahead and pop that out pop that in and there we go now we have a fingerprint sensor picked up just like that so let's go ahead and try it boom logged in i like this thing but let's say our organization doesn't like fingerprint readers for second factors now we've got oh an rfid reader so there it is right there flip this puppy over and now we have an rfid reader there then if you're not into rfid there's also the windows hello infrared facial scanner so basically the idea here is that even though this is clearly not the most space efficient way to add something as simple as an rfid scanner to a laptop you're not stuck with any biometric security options that you don't want and you have only the ones that you do need now not everybody needs that stuff and that's where the modularity comes into play so this second bay here is actually identical there we go to the battery bay that's on the other side so this 6300 milliamp hour battery nets the toughbook 55 20 hours in mobilemark's office productivity suite but this is where things get really cool you can actually chuck a second one into the other side now i will say this does increase the weight of the unit fairly substantially for a whopping 40 hours and if for whatever reason your application doesn't allow you to power down at all you can even hot swap the batteries if you have spare ones on the side so you just never have to power the thing down don't remove both of them though that would that would cause it to turn off but as you guys can see we have only just scratched the surface of all of our upgrade modules here so why don't we go ahead and see what we can put in this slot so once again panasonic has adapted the standard interface on this thing which is presumably sata to their own interface that i don't know what that would be it must be pci express in some form or another at any rate that just pops in like that wow this is like really easy it's almost too easy uh one thing that they did mention is that if you're like an administrator and you don't want your users just like accidentally popping their ssds out um there are locking screws that you can put in so that's the locking screw for the ssd if i recall correctly and i think this one is the locking screw so people don't accidentally like rip their optical drive out of the laptop so this is a blu-ray drive this is basically the same as the dvd drive except uh more blue so i don't really need to show you guys that i think what you guys want to see is the graphics card you want to see the graphics card i want to see the graphics card so this is the gpu pack and this is why i said that panasonic's modular interface here must be some sort of pci express because otherwise how on earth would you put what appears to be a gt551 gt550 i guess i don't know we're going to find out what kind of graphics card it is in just a moment but the module looks pretty similar to our optical drive except of course there's a cooling fan that happens to correspond with the ventilation holes on the bottom of the laptop just like that it's a radeon pro wx4150 i've never even heard of that graphics card but we're gonna fire up some rocket league on it nonetheless anyway this update was downloading really slow so uh i thought hey wouldn't it be great if we had an ethernet jack now's a good time to have a look at the i o of this thing so we've got a usb 3 type a usb 3 type c there it is we've got an ethernet jack over here we've got micro sdxc headphone microphone combo jack of course these have splash resistant covers just in case you you know get water on your laptop it is ip53 rated although panasonic was very clear to me that i was not to leave it out in the rain i'm very clear about that and the modularity continues doesn't it my friends there is of course the io pack if you'd like to add some additional i o to your laptop uh unfortunately this pack looks oh wait where does this pack go oh no way it goes at the back okay so at the back we've got another usb 3 type a hdmi 2.0 and then this that brings our total number of bays up to 1 two three four five six seven wait a minute even this back usb 3 has screws in it what even is that this is like an access hatch to the cpu cooling heatsink there it is another freaking upload slot so what do we have here vga and serial just in case you need that or like not if you don't and then whatever the hell that is okay it's kind of a clever approach the whole dual battery pack because it gives you that hot swap ability and it means you can take the thing on a plane even though it has more capacity than you would be allowed to bring on if it was a single battery okay i'm still waiting for my game to download and i'm just curious like everything on this thing goes together with screws which is so weird in this day and age when everything is done with like clips and stuff so i was just wondering what this is so that's the antenna that's the main antenna it just has oh that makes sense as a plastic cover because otherwise how would it work but you want as much of this thing as possible to be made out of this uh magnesium alloy that actually it contributes to it being quite a lot lighter than you'd expect i mean it's got two batteries in it now so it's a little on the heavy side now but with just one in it's it's deceivingly light now i remember having that same experience the first time i saw a tough book actually back in the early 2000s it blew me away because it was like this tiny i forget it was like an 11 or a 12 inch model which was really small at the time and i was like whoa this thing weighs like nothing this is so cool how much is it and the sales guy at london drugs is like oh it's like 3 500 i was like oh cool i'm a high school student yeah oh actually now's a good time to look at the privacy mode for the keyboard you know you don't need to rip your ssd out but you don't want anybody looking at your screen it's actually still on but the brightness is so low that no one could conceivably actually see what's on it and then they've also got a night color shift thing that you can set up to either manually enable or you can set a timer or you can use the light sensor or whatever the case may be and you can apply different screen effects like you know a reading mode or can configure your night mode maybe you prefer this for your night mode most people probably won't use that green night mode oh oh actually oh right i could see never mind i could see someone using like the green or the red one depending on what environment they're in this is another cool thing so the keyboard actually feels pretty darn good to me but if you didn't like it or more realistically if the layout wasn't ideal for what you're doing or you know your language or you have a specialized application it's also modular three screws right here and you can pop off the keyboard all right well i'm not saying that this is gonna be like you know your primary gaming device anytime soon but 60fps all high quality in rocket league 1080p it's not unusable that's for sure boom that sucked no stop so that was the craziest one now i've just got a couple more things so first is the smart card reader and you guys might be a little confused because you thought we already saw the smart card reader this is the smart card reader that goes in the other side hold on a second we haven't even looked under this door oh oh it's just like a ram door okay well that's that's fairly straightforward and then finally the ssd pack so this goes where the graphics card went and inside it is presumably a similar model of ssd to the one that goes in the more ssd specific uh door over here now i want to know what's under the security torx of this one now too oh okay so this is upgradable components but not necessarily panasonic's you know modular ones so in here we've got our wi-fi so you could swap that out for like a wi-fi six ax module if you wanted and then i'm actually not it's hard to say because this has like a thermal pad on it i'm not 100 sure what this is but it's also wireless oh you know what this laptop has cellular so it's probably something to do with that there's just a couple more things i'm curious about there was another security torx covering this door so i want to know what it does what do we got oh so that's the connector for the display now panasonic says that the display is not a user upgradable modular thing but like you can clearly see how it's assembled so my guess is that if you could get your hands on one you could probably do it even if that's not something that they support and i also wanted to pop the keyboard off and see how that works it's not something that i would do for switch quality these are fine okay so that's glued down i wonder if panasonic had intended for me to do this i'm kind of guessing no well they should have known what they were getting themselves into oh okay so there you go it's just some adhesive strips and then like a pretty standard ribbon interface down here so you guys can check out the toughbook 55 at the link in the video description but i want to hear from you guys in the comments what would your loadout be personally i would go with two battery packs because i am really careless sometimes and i forget to recharge my battery and that would be really really nice for me when i'm traveling i would i think i'd throw in the gpu just because that way i don't have to carry around any gpu if i just want to play some you know filthy casual games i'd definitely throw the extra i o pack on there i didn't need any of the other stuff but having vga would be really nice when that comes up and then i'd probably throw in another stick of ram and then stick with the regular standard ssd and then upgrade my wi-fi to wi-fi six it's mind-blowing to me that i even have those kinds of options i think this thing is really cool so like i said again thanks to panasonic for sponsoring this video and if you guys want to check this thing out it's going to be linked in the video description

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 4,095,159

Keywords: Panasonic, Laptop, Rugged, Upgradeable, Video Card, Finger Print, Durable, Swap, Modular, Upgrades, Variety, Gaming, Notebook, Government, B2B, Battery Life

Id: x7rt6BZYscs

Length: 16min 26sec (986 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 10 2019