And that’s just considering regular wear and tear. Accidents happen, too. Even your most careful employees might drop their laptop or spill some coffee onto its keyboard. One survey of workers found that over half damaged their work-issued laptop or smartphone during the pandemic. When your company equips employees with laptops durable enough to take a hit and keep on working, you make sure that a healthy percentage of these accidents don’t require an immediate replacement.

To give you the confidence that your business’s next set of laptops have what it takes to deliver years of performance, it’s common for laptop manufacturers to submit their products to an extensive series of durability tests to demonstrate the quality of their products.

But who sets the standard for what qualifies as a durable laptop? Typically, it’s the United States military. MIL-STD-810 lays out a series of procedures for assessing how much punishment a laptop can withstand from a wide variety of accidents and environmental hazards. For peace of mind, uninterrupted worker productivity, reduced IT expenses, and an optimized total cost of ownership, your business should consider MIL-STD-810 standards when you’re purchasing your next set of laptops.

Perhaps an image of thick and bulky hardware is coming to your mind as you envision a military-grade laptop. That’s far from the case. While a laptop that meets MIL-STD-810 standards might be built like a tank, it’s by no means as big and heavy as one. Many of today’s business laptops offer exceptional durability in ultraportable, sophisticated designs that won’t weigh your workers down.

Why should business laptops be tested for durability?
Many people have personal laptops at home that don’t meet MIL-STD 810 reliability standards. You might well wonder why these tests are so important for business laptops. There are three key reasons why businesses insist on products that have been validated according to these strict procedures.

• Accidents happen. On a typical day, your personal laptop might not travel any farther than the distance between your home office and your living room. But business laptops routinely get a lot more mileage. Between daily commutes to and from the office and meetings with clients and coworkers, a business laptop has to endure many more moments where it might get bumped or dropped. And when it travels abroad, it has to handle the stresses of different environmental hazards like temperature, humidity, and air pressure, just to name a few possible factors.

• Longer product life cycles. People are often content to upgrade their personal laptops regularly, especially if they have a passion for cutting-edge tech. Most companies don’t refresh their devices nearly so often. To get years of reliable performance from their laptops, they look for products with proven durability.

• Stability is crucial. Broken or damaged laptops can cause problems for any user, but they can be especially problematic for businesses. Lost data due to a laptop failure can cause expensive delays or lead to lost business opportunities.

MIL-STD-810 tests make laptops prove their worth
The MIL-STD 810 standard lays out procedures for a wide variety of durability tests. When your business is looking for a new laptop, research options carefully to make sure that the product you choose has been validated to pass the tests that matter to you most.

In a perfect world, your business laptops would never get dropped, bumped, or jostled — but accidents happen in the best of circumstances. A laptop that passes the drop test has survived 26 drops from a height of 48 inches inside its packaging. A laptop that meets the MIL-STD-810 vibration test withstood 10-500Hz physical vibration in all directions for one hour, demonstrating the resilience it’ll show should it ever get bounced around on a turbulent flight or used on an especially bumpy train ride, or even if the luggage it’s stowed in should get roughly treated by a careless airline baggage handler.

Are your company’s laptops likely to be used in extreme temperatures? The high-temperature test laid out by MIL-STD-810 requires that tested laptops endure temperatures ranging between 90° and 120° Fahrenheit for three full days — with the power on. Similarly, the low temperature test submits laptops to temperatures between -6° and -25° Fahrenheit. There’s even a test for assessing a laptop’s ability to withstand sudden changes in temperature from one extreme to another.

These tests are just the start of what a laptop might go through in its MIL-STD-810 validation process. To give peace of mind to frequent flyers, the altitude test ensures that a laptop can survive flights up to 15,000 feet at a range of temperatures. The sand and dust test ensures that a laptop can keep it cool for a 12-hour period, even with significant dust density in its environment. The humidity test simulates a climate with 95% humidity and temperatures between 86° and 140° Fahrenheit — and requires that laptops endure these conditions for 10 full days.

ASUS goes above and beyond with the ExpertBook series
Across the laptop industry, it’s common for manufacturers to validate their products through a variety of MIL-STD-810 tests. Yet some manufacturers choose to go above and beyond those tests to demonstrate how their products stand out from the crowd. ASUS engineers its parts, materials, and finishes ensuring that they’re ready for a lifetime of use, even in challenging environments.

ASUS subjects its ExpertBook business laptops to a grueling series of tests that simulate the rigours and stresses of full lifespan of use. The company’s specially designed robots test the durability of individual keys with millions of keystrokes. Touchscreen panels are tested by having a ball dropped on them repeatedly to ensure that they can endure unexpected bumps and pressures. To mimic the wear-and-tear of being hauled with one hand to meeting rooms, stuffed into overhead storage bins, and accidentally dropped from an unzipped laptop bag, ExpertBooks are engineered to survive twist tests, transportation tests, and free-falls from 120 cm. Their display hinges are subjected to 20,000 open-and-close cycles — and top-tier models are tested for 50,000 such cycles.

Some manufacturers add bulk and weight to their laptops to increase their durability. ASUS pursues advanced materials and engineering techniques instead. High-end options in the ExpertBook lineup feature a magnesium-lithium alloy chassis. This extremely durable, yet exceptionally light material lets ASUS construct business laptops that meet stringent military standards for reliability in designs that are supremely thin and portable — even as light as 1.92 lb (870 g).

These tests go above and beyond the requirements of MIL-STD-810, and they ensure that ASUS ExpertBook laptops are truly military grade. As you’re planning out your company’s next laptop deployment, don’t settle for a product that merely meets the minimum — carefully consider your expected use cases and look for products that have been validated to survive all the worst-case scenarios that your laptops might encounter in their expected lifespan.

Durable and reliable performance is just the start of what the ExpertBook series of business laptops has to offer. They’re portable and light enough to carry around all day, and they have the battery life to match. Their spill-resistant backlit keyboards are comfortable to use thanks to the ErgoLift hinge, and their rich selection of ports keep your employees productive. They’re available in a wide range of form factors so that you can tailor your company’s devices to the exact needs of your workers. Reach out to ASUS today to find the right ExpertBook laptops for your business.