The Future of Tech February 14, 2008, 5:00PM EST

Building the Perfect Laptop

(page 3 of 4)

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Davies+Starr

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At Lenovo, designer Hill is called keeper of the ThinkPad tradition Kelly Culpepper

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Jobs beat the Lenovo team to market with the MacBook Air Jeff Chiu/AP Photo

During a meeting at Sapper's modernistic, V-shaped home on Italy's Lake Como, the 75-year-old design legend urged Hill to make the fold-out keyboard deploy automatically, rather than requiring the owner to snap it into place. By midsummer, Hill handed his ideas over to the Yamato engineers to see what would really work.

FORGET THE SUPERREALITY

The man in charge of product development in Yamato was Arimasa Naitoh, known in his home country as the "father of the ThinkPad." His team in the early 1990s established the ThinkPad's reputation for quality and advanced technology. Naitoh believes there should be creative tension between designers and engineers. "We encourage [the creatives] to design something that's not too real," he says. "If they stick to superreality, nothing will be fun, nothing will be new."

Once Hill's early design concepts were in the hands of the Yamato engineers, they put them to the test. Every day or so, Hill would receive drawings from Yamato showing how the components and electrical parts might fit together. By late September the engineers began to question some of Hill's most radical ideas. Thirteen-inch screens were becoming popular because they're good for watching movies, so the engineers didn't want to use Hill's 10-inch version. Hill gave in. That meant there was no need for the fold-out keyboard. They also concluded that the metal shell in which he wanted to hide the plugs would add too much weight. Hill didn't protest. "You start with wide nets. You gather a bunch of ideas. And you finally settle on the elements that are most promising," he says.

Lenovo's product development managers were focusing on a new high-end laptop that would include three important emerging technologies. The first was solid-state storage, which doesn't break when people drop their laptops the way the mechanical disk drives in most computers sometimes do. The second technology was LED backlighting on computer displays, which would improve movie viewing. The third was a DVD drive just seven millimeters thick. In October, 2006, the managers decided to combine these technologies with Hill's design concepts. The machine was given the code name Kodachi, after a small samurai sword.

The project was approved to enter the "plan phase" in January, 2007. The Kodachi team went to work in earnest on all the mechanical and design elements. They opened discussions with suppliers about their newest technologies. Hill was in near-daily touch with the Japanese team by phone and e-mail.

At the same time, the marketers began exploring Kodachi's sales potential. The original estimate was that Lenovo would be able to sell 130,000 units of Kodachi and a follow-on version, due out in August, over 12 months. But the sales force came back with a stunningly low estimate: just 60,000.

Hortensius swallowed hard and approved the project anyway. The 17-year IBM veteran has a gruff, no-nonsense style, but he often backs designers and engineers in their wilder ideas. With Kodachi, he figured the salespeople were being conservative about a high-end product the likes of which they had not sold before.

Kodachi moved into the "development phase" in April, 2007, and from that time on, Lenovo's designers and engineers lived in a state of dread that a competitor would beat them to market with a laptop just as thin and light. Laptops range in price from $500 to $3,000, and they weigh anywhere between three and eight pounds. Since Kodachi would be loaded with cutting-edge features, it was going to be priced at the high end—perhaps as much as $3,000.

Over the coming months, the bulk of the work would be done in Yamato. A product development team there, headed by Hiroyuki M. Kinoshita, would take the requirements laid out in the plan and try to fulfill them. It was also in charge of formulating a kind of rubberized paint for the exterior of the machine that would look like leather and have a satiny feel. For years, Kinoshita had been a serious sailor in his free time. But as the Kodachi project ramped up, he had less and less time for sailing. He typically worked from 9 a.m. till 10 or 11 p.m.

He and his colleagues faced a tight schedule, with a steady drumbeat of deadlines and reviews. Early September: mechanical prototype.

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