This Man Electrocutes Laptops For A Living


A lot of laptop design focuses on the aesthetic, but there’s also still a place for wrenching, cooking and just plain all-out-zapping as part of the process. I’m now wondering where I sign up for notebook zapping duties. Gizmodo AU reports from China…

Sadly for me, that job is taken — in this case by HP’s Scott Love – and his team of stress testing personnel — along with robots. Many, many robots.

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I wonder where you go to buy a hinge testing robot? The claim from HP’s Wayne Chen is that the hinges on their design models are tested some 25,000 times to make sure they’re solid. Likewise the opening latches are tested 25,000 times; the claim is that (cumulatively) a new design undergoes a total of 115,000 hours of testing.

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I want my own static gun (left) — this thing can deliver up to 15,000V. On second thoughts, it’s probably a good thing that I don’t have one.

Then there’s cooking and freezing a laptop (right) — although I don’t entirely agree with HP that 35 degree day is actually “cooking” a laptop. It’s more like… last Thursday.

Also, I suspect the icecream isn’t always in the freezing chamber, although it totally should be.

Alex Kidman travelled to Shanghai as a guest of HP. Send coffee now.


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