During the Discover Lenovo Aura Event in Yokohama, we talked to Kevin Beck, Senior Story Technologist at Lenovo’s Intelligent Devices Group, who answered questions from the media. Kevin is in charge of innovation, distilling the inner workings and behind-the-scenes details of technology and engineering into compelling stories that amplify the Lenovo brand.
Lenovo: Prioritizing Innovation
Kevin has championed innovation ever since, but not just for the sake of it. Changes through product generations may not always be transformative, but they should always serve the user.
Innovation and challenges often go hand in hand. With Kevin at the helm of thinking up ways to qualify ideas, there’s always a struggle to qualify them as being “enough” to count as an actual difference that pushes the device to be innovative enough in this space. The Lenovo ThinkPad X9 was one such example, and by trying just about any form of technology to improve its human presence detection, sometimes, even the smallest changes are enough to provide users the right experience.
“If you go back to like the ThinkPad X1 Titanium a few years ago, it was, I think, a LIDAR-based system, more of a radar wave. We’ve done computer vision, but it requires a separate chip. We’ve done ultrasonic, which is power efficient and inexpensive to a point, but it’s pretty limited in what it can do.”
“The advantages being that when I walk away from the laptop, it goes to sleep immediately, and when I come back, it instantly wakes up. So, I’m saving a lot of battery life. There’s also a function that if I turn away for more than a couple of seconds, it will rapidly dim the screen, anticipate my head turning back, and bring the brightness back.“
In the latest Lenovo ThinkPad X9, Kevin has implemented a new sensor that is much more power-efficient but with an inherently narrower field of view. A lot of training had to be done, and while it is not purely AI in the sense that it actively uses the NPU, it is certainly AI-assisted to help distinguish items like parts of the face, the edges and borders, etc.
Another example of innovation is that it needs to serve the users while providing benefits to the machine. In this case, the team had to think of ways to improve the cooling, but many challenges arose because they would have needed to change the entire design to draw the heat out properly.
“I believe the hinge diameter was five and a half millimeters. We had to get it down to 3 and a half millimeters to get the clearance we needed to get the air flow right and the acoustics and heat balance right. It’s never one thing. It’s this huge stack of related things that are so complicated, and it’s absolutely fascinating to me.”
“I’ve been doing this for 27 years and it stuff fascinates me every day.”
Things like these are at the crossroads between hardware and software. While that’s the case with some devices, one of the most impressive innovations comes from the 13th Gen ThinkPad X1 Carbon. This engineering masterpiece finally broke the 1 kg barrier, weighing only 986 grams. The solution? Simply going back to the drawing board.
“We’ve started thirteenth generation of X one carbon, so we’ve been doing it for a long time. I honestly don’t know if we had ever considered changing the orientation of the carbon fiber strands before; it’s a little more difficult to manufacture it that way, but by changing it, we got more strength across that side.”
The bottom line is passing the ThinkPad reliability and durability tests, which involve drop testing, weight and pressure testing, and other forms of punishment.
“Could we have made something below that weight in the past? Sure, but it wouldn’t have passed our tests.”
For more information about Lenovo and its products, click here.
Source: Gadget Pilipinas
0 Comments