While ordinary notebooks might encounter a little turbulence when they are placed in an overhead container, rugged laptops can be carried by combat troops and first responders into danger. These laptops are designed to be dropped on rocks or used in freezing rain to withstand abuse that could pulverize an average MacBook. These devices are heavy and bulky.
They have a champion in the form of the Panasonic Toughbook 40, which starts at $4,899. This 14-inch, armored, highly customizable data carrier replaces the Getac B360 13.3 inches. It is our Editors Choice winner for fully rugged laptops.
The Design: No Civilians Required
It is important to use the phrase "fully rugged", because this puts the Toughbook40 in a higher class than semi-rugged systems such as its peers, the Dell Latitude 55430 Rugged and Panasonic Toughbook 55Mk2. The machines in this group are able to withstand drops up to three-four feet. They often come with ingress protection ratings of IP53 which means they can resist dust and water sprays.
The Toughbook 40 can take a six-foot fall and carries MIL-STD 810H, MIL-STD 461G, and IP66 ratings—it's dustproof (no dust can penetrate it) and immune to splashes and strong jets of water, though it can't survive actual immersion underwater as some smartphones can.
Of course, the magnesium alloy chassis, corner bumpers, and latched port covers required for such strength make the Panasonic a bruiser, measuring 2.1 by 13.9 by 11.9 inches (with a hefty carrying handle on the front edge) and weighing 7.4 pounds. That's even larger though slightly lighter than the fully rugged, IP65-rated Durabook Z14I, let alone the 4.4-pound Latitude 5430.
These components are also expensive. The MSRP for Toughbooks is $4,899 and includes an Intel Core i5 processor, 1,920-by-1.080-pixel touch screen, and a Core i5 Core i5 CPU. Our Windows 11 Pro test unit stepped up to a Core i7-1185G7 vPro CPU and 1TB solid-state drive, raising its price on Panasonic's online configurator to $6,606—and that's with 32GB of RAM, though our system has the maximum 64GB plus a second battery and other options.
As for other options, Panasonic says the Toughbook 40 can be configured no fewer than 6,048 ways, largely thanks to four slots—left, right, rear, and palm rest—for what it calls xPAK modular accessories. These range from a second SSD (the storage ceiling is 2TB plus 1TB) to DVD and Blu-ray drives, several SmartCard and fingerprint readers, and a variety of USB, Ethernet, HDMI, VGA, and serial ports. There are also four other modular or swappable components: the battery, memory, storage, and keyboard.
In addition to a second battery in the right-side slot, our system has a bar code reader in the left bay; a fingerprint reader in the palm rest; and VGA, serial, and a second Ethernet port at rear. Standard (non-xPAK) connectors include an audio jack, microSD card slot, USB 3.2 Type-A, USB-C Thunderbolt 4, and Ethernet ports on the right and HDMI and USB-A ports and a SIM card slot around back.
Our Toughbook comes with 4G LTE mobile broadband and support for first responders' exclusive FirstNet network. Panasonic says a 5G option is coming soon, as is an AMD GPU for users who want quicker visuals than integrated graphics provide.
The Panasonic is designed not only to take a licking and keep on ticking but to keep data out of enemy hands—a BIOS Secure Wipe function uses a voltage spike to erase the contents of the SSD in less than 10 seconds. As for the laptop's survivability overall, let's just say it was more than a match for my clumsy hands: I dropped the laptop, both closed and open, several times onto a carpeted floor and grassy lawn from about five feet. Except for the stylus popping out of its niche in the carrying handle, it was unfazed. I put it in the kitchen sink and soaked it with the sprayer; it didn't notice.
Make Yourself heard
This 5-megapixel webcam features a sliding privacy shutter, face recognition and Windows Hello logins. The webcam captures sharp, vivid images of up to 2,560 x 1,920 pixels. It also has quad microphones that can be used for teleconferencing in chaotic environments.
Speaking of noise, sound from the Toughbook's speakers isn't audiophile quality—it's hollow and echo-prone, seeming to flutter or fluctuate from moment to moment—but loud enough to hear with heavy equipment or sirens nearby (Panasonic claims a maximum of 95dB). There's no bass, but you can make out overlapping tracks, not that you'll likely spend much time listening to your music MP3s.
The keyboard offers four levels of color-selectable backlight brightness and four programmable shortcut keys for launching things like a settings utility or a "concealed mode" that blanks the display and all LEDs. There's also a red F11 key that works with law enforcement software to signal dispatch that an officer is in trouble. It lacks a numeric keypad or dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys—as with many laptops, those combine the Fn key and cursor arrows—but has a pretty comfortable typing feel. It's shallow and firm, and you definitely feel each keystroke rather than gliding through speed runs, but the overall experience isn't as clunky or rubbery as you might expect.
Along the same lines, rugged laptops have pressure-sensitive resistive touchpads rather than the electrostatic-sensing capacitive touchpads of most notebooks. This lets them work with gloved hands, but means they're clumsier or less responsive to bare fingers. That said, the Panasonic's touchpad, though small, is friendlier to ungloved hands than other rugged laptops' we've tried—it still takes a deliberate touch but is closer to the feel of a civilian pad. Two buttons below it provide easy left and right clicks.
Software utility optimises 1080p touch screen to use in wet and dry conditions. High contrast, pristine white backgrounds and extra brightness make the display stand out. Although the overlay glass can reflect light, viewing angles are broad and sharp. The colors are vibrant and saturated. However, subtle pastels or gradients won't make a big impact.
The system is free of bloatware (Windows' Disney+ app seems out of place). Panasonic preinstalls a handful of work-related utilities, such as bar code and asset tag entry apps, and a GPS viewer. The company backs the Toughbook with a three-year warranty.
Toughbook 40 Test: Good Speed and a Great Battery
Durabook Z14I is the only fully rugged notebook that we have tested. However, I did find three other 14-inch models to be able to finish our benchmark tests: the Durabook Z14I and the Dell Latitude 5430 Rugged. Acer Enduro Urban N3 was a more affordable consumer model. The table below shows their specifications.
Productivity tests
PCMark 10, the main benchmark, simulates a range of content-creation and productivity workflows in real life to assess overall performance on office-centric tasks like word processing, spreadsheeting and web browsing. PCMark 10's Full System Drive is also used to evaluate the storage's load and throughput.
To rate the suitability of a computer for processing-intensive tasks, three benchmarks examine its CPU. They use all cores and threads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 renders complex scenes using Cinema 4D, and Primate Labs Geekbench Pro simulates popular applications such as PDF rendering, speech recognition, machine learning and more. We use HandBrake, an open-source video converter to transform a 12 minute video clip from 4K resolution to 1080p (lower speeds are better).
Puget Systems' PugetBench Photoshop is our last productivity test. It uses Adobe Creative Cloud 22 to evaluate a computer's ability to create content and multi-media applications. This is an automatic extension that's not compatible with M1 Macs. It executes various general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks, including opening, rotating and resizing an image, saving it, applying filters, gradient fills and masks.
Toughbook 40 performed the Photoshop test fastest, likely due to its 64GB RAM. It also did well in other tests and cleared the 4,000 PCMark 10 points which indicate high productivity. The Toughbook 40 is not required to handle workstation-style video editing or graphics rendering, and all of these laptops have enough power for the intended purpose.
Graphics Testing
Two DirectX 12 simulations are used to test the graphics of Windows PCs. Night Raid is a more modest option for those with integrated graphics, while Time Spy, which requires more effort, can be used for gamers with discrete GPUs.
Two tests were also performed using the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5. This test focuses on both low-level tasks like texturing as well as high-level image rendering. To accommodate different resolutions, the Aztec Ruins 1440p and Car Chase 1080p tests were rendered offscreen. They include exercise graphics, compute shaders with OpenGL programming and hardware tessellation, respectively. More frames per second (fps) is better.
The intended uses that we have mentioned do not include gaming, although it is nice to imagine our soldiers playing Fortnite or Minecraft back at their barracks. These machines can be used for streaming media or occasional graphs and charts.
Testing of the Battery and Display
To test the battery life of laptops, we play a local 720p video file (the Blender movie Tears of Steel) in HD. The display brightness is set at 50%. Audio volume at 100%. Before testing, we make sure that the battery has been fully charged. We also turn off Wi-Fi backlighting and keyboard backlighting.
We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
Although bright enough to be used outdoors, the Toughbook's touch screen failed to reach its 1,200 nit advertised brightness indoors. It also produced terrible color reproduction by photo and video editing software standards. No matter—as we said, rugged laptops aren't visual workstations. Its exceptional battery life, which includes an optional second cell that can be added to the Latitude's almost 15-hour runtime, is far more significant.
The verdict: Hazardous Duty is a New Hero
While there are many desktop replacement or digital content creation laptops, they are smaller, lighter and faster than the Toughbook40, with prettier screens and a lower price, they won't be able to last more than an hour on Panasonic's field. We don't have the guts of a soldier or a first responder—or a nurse or kindergarten teacher, for that matter—but if we had their job, we'd want the Toughbook in our corner.
You can find smaller and larger rugged laptops, but we think the 14-inch Toughbook 40 is the right size and has the right stuff to claim our highest award. For something easier to carry in the field, we'd recommend a tablet with detachable keyboard like the 12-inch Toughbook 33 or 11.6-inch Dell Latitude 7220 Rugged Extreme Tablet, another Editors' Choice winner.