this laptop came out in 2022 and it's
packed full of Modern Hardware but just about everything else about it looks
like it came straight out of 2002 and
I'm not even exaggerating from its matte screen to its delightful round trackpad
Panasonic has used nearly the same design on its let's note lineup for the
past 20 years but for their customers
that's a feature not a bug and honestly
I can kind of see their point I mean sure it's a little on the thick side but
on top of the usual suspects usba HDMI
Thunderbolt 4 we've got Ethernet VGA an
SD card reader and do my eyes deceive me
a DVD drive wait a user swappable
battery this raises so many questions
for me I mean what did happen to laptops
that actually have port on them why are
these ones exclusive to Japan and with all these features does it have a place
for me to plug in this message from our
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docomo into a police cruiser can probably probably tell you Panasonic
makes laptops and much like Epson they
offer a far more varied selection in Japan compared to the West the let's
note line began production in 1996 and it would continue to receive
periodic updates over the years in 97 it
got its first optical drive in 98 it got a mobile phone that's kind of weird in
'99 it got Wi-Fi and in 2000 it got its
signature circular trackpad more on that a little bit later first by 2002 2003
the let's note looked nearly identical to what's in my hands today speaking of
what do we have here today we've got a 12in IPS display with the more
traditional 16 by10 aspect ratio love to
see it an 11th gen Core i5 processor 16 gigs of ddr4 memory and a 512 gig PCIe
Gen 4 Samsung NVMe Drive our machine
could be configured at the time of ordering but there were only a handful
of options for CPU RAM and storage the
keyboard has minimal Flex to it and nice
long travel on the key switches but the layout is kind of cramped and the keys
are a touch on the mushy feeling side I'd describe it as pretty okay for touch
typing that is at least ignoring the unfamiliar Japanese layout for me uh but
if you're henpecking it's probably a great experience and if the Target
demographic is on the older side that makes a a lot of sense and it is more on
that later first did I mention that the battery is not the only thing you can
replace on this thing you can also swap out the entire keyboard with a US
Standard lip I mean can this thing get any cooler believe it or not like many
of the other advantages of the sv2 this
sort of thing used to be common entire companies existed to import Japanese
laptops and then replace the keyboards with localized l outs but then with the
wide breadth of choice in the laptop Market these days it seems like these
Services have failed the test of time
what hasn't is this trackpad for
whatever reason Panasonic decided 20 years ago that their trackpad theirs was
going to be circular and that's a decision that they have stuck with to
this day while it does have modern features like support for multitouch it
doesn't really have a lot of room on it for multiple fingers but then it turns
out that that's barely an issue the left and the right click are both physical
buttons so you just use it two-handed
and scrolling can be done with a single Finger by just spinning around the
outside like you're a DJ scratching a record w w w okay this is actually
pretty cool and as an extra bonus you
don't have to worry about Palm rejection since it sits comfortably right in
between your hands on the wrist rest I would wouldn't personally trade away my
larger more modern design though I mean
you can't even move the cursor all the way across the screen without lifting your finger so given the obviously ample
internal room they have to work with why is Panasonic still putting these archaic
designs out specifically in Japan well
there are a couple of reasons for that but the main one is that for one reason
or another Japanese companies tend to devote a lot of development resources to
the domestic market and the population of domestic Japan is old how old are
they so old that according to the world
economic Forum they have the oldest population of any country on Earth as
you'd imagine then this permeates many aspects of modern culture including the
decisions of it departments for large
companies you see when it's time to replace all your laptops companywide it
is much easier in terms of training to
transition over to something that is familiar for your users and this is
especially true for older users similarly if you're making decisions for
an IT department in an older company with lots of withering technology you're
going to need machines that still work with those older devices hence the VGA
ports for example and this is not an issue that's exclusive to Japan as we
saw not that long ago when we discovered NX
a company that manufactures brand new Windows 98 PCS that is a little
different though in that scenario it's assumed that those systems are going to
be used for controlling industrial Machinery that depends on Legacy Isa
cards or ancient software with the Panasonic it's much more about the
day-to-day use I can roll into a meeting room and whether it's HDMI thunderbold
or even VGA I can output to the projector and if I need to transfer a
file from someone I can use usba USBC an
SD card or even yeah the included DVD
drive with no dongles required and it's
all on a shockingly lightweight package thanks to the magnesium alloy
chassis I got to say having gotten used
to modern laptop designs it does feel a bit more like a novelty at this point to
me but I still can't help feeling a bit sad about some of the things that we've
lost along the way I mean sure I can
open up my modern machine and replace the battery if it fails but what I can't
do is swap in a new one to get me
through the rest of the day or put an extended capacity one in if I don't mind
having a bit of a caboose on my machine and I mean even the optical drive kind
of hits me in the feels this 11th gen model is likely to be the last laptop
that Panasonic makes that is widely available with this feature they've
actually already sold this one out through their own website and when we
attempted to purchase one at a retail Tor we were told they wouldn't be
getting any more in stock so we nabbed this one new inbox from Yahoo auctions
which means the only manufacturer still offering Optical is
Vio now a machine with so many features for usability that's also targeted at
corporate it departments should have easy maintenance and upgradeability
right well that's not entirely incorrect
but it is certainly not the full story H
part of the story is that we might have a Precision screwdriver coming with
in-handle bit storage and a super cool
bearing sorry anyway uh the point is while the battery is obviously swappable
and this is really cool there's a handy little access panel here that allows you
to blow out the heat sink there are some bigger issues that we would be remiss to
not mention the M2 Drive is only
accessible once the bottom cover has been removed an Endeavor that requires
removing 21 screws and right
it's soldered to the motherboard guys
you were so close to killing my framework investment Panasonic so close
so then as long as framework keeps selling serviceable laptops with user
upgradable RAM something that you can find a link to down below by the way
Panasonic won't be showing up to eat their lunch anytime soon if you enjoyed
this video check out the one on the Epson Endeavor a tank of a desktop PC
from a company that usually makes printers and project vectors