Panasonic Toughbook 40 Review | PCMag

Ordinary notebooks may face a bit of turbulence in the overhead bin, but rugged laptops are carried into harm's way by first responders and combat troops. They're designed to be dropped onto rocks and used in freezing rain, to shrug off abuse that would pulverize your average MacBook or ThinkPad. They're bulky, heavy, and expensive. And they have a new champion: the Panasonic Toughbook 40 (starts at $4,899), an almost indestructible, ultra-customizable 14-inch armored data carrier that replaces the 13.3-inch Getac B360 as our Editors' Choice winner among fully rugged laptops.

The Design: Civilians Need Not Apply 

The phrase “fully rugged” is significant, because it puts the Toughbook 40 in a class above semi-rugged systems like its 14-inch peers the Dell Latitude 5430 Rugged and Panasonic's own Toughbook 55 Mk2. Machines in the latter group can withstand drops of three or four feet; they often have ingress protection ratings like IP53, meaning they're dust-resistant and impervious to rain and narrow sprays of water.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

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. 

Such components also cost a lot. Toughbooks are custom-configured by specialized resellers, not bought off the shelf from Best Buy or Amazon, so the MSRP of $4,899 with an Intel Core i5 processor and 1,920-by-1,080-pixel touch screen is just a starting point. 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.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

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.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

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.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

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.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

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. 

Making Yourself Heard 

The 5-megapixel webcam has a sliding privacy shutter and face recognition for Windows Hello logins. It captures impressively bright and sharp images up to 2,560 by 1,920 pixels, with vivid color and virtually no noise or static, and is accompanied by quad microphones for teleconferencing in hectic environments.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

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.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

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.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

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. 

A software utility optimizes the 1080p touch screen for use with fingers, gloves, the 4.5-inch stylus, or in wet conditions. The display is extra-bright, with high contrast and pristine white rather than grayish backgrounds. Viewing angles are wide, though the glass overlay can show reflected lights, and fine details are reasonably sharp. Colors are punchy and well saturated, though fine gradients or subtle pastels don't stand out.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

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.

Testing the Toughbook 40: Sufficient Speed, Bountiful Battery 

The only other fully rugged laptop to complete our new benchmark test suite is the Durabook Z14I, though I found three semi-rugged 14-inch units to fill out the charts: the aforementioned Panasonic Toughbook 55 Mk2 and Dell Latitude 5430 Rugged, plus a relatively low-priced consumer model, the Acer Enduro Urban N3. You can see their basic specs in the table below.

Productivity Tests 

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage. 

Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). 

Our last productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension (not compatible with M1 Macs at present) that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The Toughbook 40 was the fastest in our Photoshop exercise, probably because of its generous 64GB of RAM, and solidly in the middle of the pack in other tests, clearing the 4,000 points that indicate excellent productivity in PCMark 10. Rugged laptops aren't asked to tackle workstation-style graphics rendering or video editing apps, so all these systems are more than powerful enough for their intended uses. 

Graphics Tests 

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). 

We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

Those intended uses we mentioned emphatically don't include playing games, though it's pleasant to think of our troops enjoying a little Minecraft or Fortnite back at the barracks. For streaming media and occasional charts and graphs, these machines are just fine. 

Battery and Display Tests 

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window)) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100% until the system quits. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

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).

Though bright enough for use outside, the Toughbook 40's touch screen fell short of its advertised 1,200 nits when tested indoors, and its color reproduction is terrible by the standards of photo or video editing apps. No matter—as we said, rugged laptops aren't visual workstations. Far more important is its exceptional battery life with the optional second cell, blowing away even the nearly 15-hour runtime of the Latitude.

The Verdict: A New Hero Reports for Hazardous Duty

There are scores of desktop replacement and digital content creation laptops that are lighter, faster, have prettier screens, and cost less than the Toughbook 40, but they wouldn't last an hour on the Panasonic's playing 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.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

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.