Building the Perfect Laptop

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September through October: testing of complete prototype and components. November: final prototype. Early December: pre-production testing. In December a review board comprising a half- dozen quality managers was scheduled to meet in Yamato to decide if Kodachi was ready to go into test production. That would be the final hurdle.

GO ON, DROP IT

Throughout the development process, Kinoshita's team subjected the prototypes to a series of stress tests. The most extreme was the "free-drop, torture-drop test." The laptop, which was wide open and turned on, was held in a contraption that looked like a guillotine about five feet up from a stone slab. A beep sounded. The laptop was released and hit the stone floor with a loud smack. Engineers rushed over to see the results: Kodachi had survived intact.

On Oct. 1, however, a problem emerged that threatened to knock the team off schedule. Andy Kozak, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who was coordinating Kodachi development from Morrisville, opened a cardboard box containing a prototype that had been hand-built in Yamato. Inside was a crude hinged aluminum box containing Kodachi's electronics that had little resemblance to a finished notebook computer. When Kozak lifted the machine out of the package, he noticed that an important piece was missing: "I explored with my fingers, and I realized there was no solid-state drive. I said: Oh, s---!" The problem, he discovered, was that the solid-state drives they had ordered from two Asian suppliers had not passed quality-control tests. As a result, they had been left out of that machine altogether.

Usually, such setbacks would be dealt with in a few weeks. But the suppliers couldn't resolve their problems before Kozak faced the Lenovo quality review board in Yamato in early December. The session felt like a trial. Kozak sat at a conference table opposite five stone-faced Japanese reviewers and made his case for Kodachi proceeding to the next development stage in spite of the problems. The verdict came down the next day: "Not ready."

Kozak was beside himself. Back in his hotel room in Tokyo, he sent an instant message with the bad news to Mark Cohen, head of ThinkPad operations. Cohen, the powerful right-hand man to laptop chief Hortensius, decided on a risky course: Test manufacturing would go ahead without the solid-state drives, despite the panel's verdict. The drives would be added later, after they passed the tests. Kodachi would keep moving forward.

The ThinkPad factory in Shenzhen occupies a six-story concrete building in a free-trade zone. On Dec. 10, a Monday, a crew of young people—mostly women in blue Lenovo smocks with lighter-blue caps—began assembling the first 25 Kodachi test units. There was no haste. Working under banners exhorting them to "Eliminate Idle Time" and "Meet Customer Requirements," their job was to spot any problems and to develop step-by-step instruction sheets for the assembly line crews that would begin to handle high-volume production, starting on Jan. 25.

"WOW, THAT'S LIGHT"

One day in early January, Kozak was sitting at his desk in Morrisville eating his customary egg salad sandwich for lunch when Cohen walked over and told him Hortensius wanted to see one of the new Kodachi models that were coming off the line in China. Kozak called around until he found one of the precious samples, which had just been shipped to product testers in Morrisville. The machine was everything he had hoped for: extremely thin and light with an elegant matte-black surface. It was also the first ThinkPad with Lenovo's logo on the top. The IBM logo had been removed a few months earlier. He took it to Hortensius' conference room and laid it before his bosses.

It was the first time Hortensius and Cohen had seen the final prototype. Hortensius lifted the machine. "I love this," he said. Early on, he had told the engineers in Yamato he wanted it made lighter, and they had found ways. Kodachi was originally specified at 3.4 pounds. It came in at 3.1. The version without a DVD drive weighed just 2.9 pounds. "This tells people we can do better," Hortensius said later. "It tells me we haven't reached the end of innovation in notebooks."

The Apple Air scare came a few days later. The Lenovo people had heard rumors that Apple had an ultraslim notebook in the works, but they weren't sure whether the speculation was true. By then, Kodachi was in "launch phase," on a relentless march to completion. The main supplier of the solid-state drive had not been able to fix its problems in time, so Lenovo had switched at the last minute to the backup supplier, which came through in the pinch. On Jan. 25, manufacturing started in Shenzhen. Lenovo plans on officially unveiling the X300 on Feb. 26.

One evening in late January, Hill put an X300 in his bag at the office and drove to his home in nearby Cary, N.C. He had been talking for months about the project to his wife, Jena, and now he wanted her to see the finished product. She was in the kitchen when he arrived. "I want to show you Kodachi," he told her. He slipped the machine out of his bag and handed it to her. "Wow, that's light," she said, passing it back to him. She asked how much it would cost. When Hill told her, she said: "Oh, my." It seemed a bit pricey. Then she asked to hold it again.

Hill has strong emotions about the product he still calls Kodachi. The designers and engineers had accomplished a lot of what he had dreamed of back in June, 2006. His only real disappointment is that the bottom is still more cluttered with labels than he would like. But that gives him challenges for a new generation of ThinkPads that will come out next year. "It's a continuous search for perfection," he says. It has to be for Hill and his team. Rivals around the globe are racing for the same goal.

With David Rocks in Shenzhen, China