Back in, say, 2001, business travelers would hop on an international flight not just with their laptop, but with three or four spare batteries also tucked into their attaché case. The extra batteries could add roughly 6 pounds to your load, but it was a necessary evil—each of those batteries would probably only offer about three or four hours of run time, barely enough to update your Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet. Coming up with novel ways to keep track of which batteries were charged and which were spent was a popular hobby among business travelers.
Good news, folks: There’s no need to be wistful for the good old days any longer. Thanks to Dynabook, battery swapping is back, baby! If you’re not familiar with Dynabook, you’ll surely remember its predecessor. Dynabook is the remains of Toshiba’s PC arm, which was sold to Sharp in 2020 after years of decline. The Dynabook branding, which had previously been used in Japan, got a reboot. The Portégé model name remains intact, complete with the accents.
Durable Dynabook
Photograph: Chris Null
A big selling point of the relaunched Dynabook has been around durability and serviceability. The new Portégé Z40L-N has a lightweight but tough magnesium alloy shell that meets MIL-STD-810H standards, and sports a battery that can be swapped by the user. This isn’t quite like the batteries of 2001, which slid out with the flip of a switch. Rather, the Portégé's battery must be removed by taking out two screws on the underside of the laptop, which allows you to remove a flap that exposes the battery underneath. The battery must be pried out with a tool like a screwdriver. In other words, it’s hardly something most users are going to do in-flight.
That’s not the point of the Dynabook, as today’s batteries last much longer—this one hitting nearly 16 hours in my full-screen YouTube playback test—so the need for on-the-fly battery swapping is virtually nil. Rather, Dynabook’s goal is to extend the operating life of the laptop, so IT departments can replace what the company refers to as “the only consumable item in the system” in just a few minutes, rather than having to buy a user a new machine or send it out for repair once its capacity starts to make the machine unusable. (None of the other components on the device are user-serviceable.) Spare batteries are expected to be available in the fourth quarter of this year for $99.
That’s a long-winded preface to get to the point that if a computer is designed to be user-serviceable, you should probably make sure it’s user-desirable first. Unfortunately, the Portégé Z40L-N isn’t.