Review: Dynabook Portégé Z40L-N

Back in, say, 2001, business travelers would hop on an international flight not just with their laptop, but with three or four spare batteries also tucked into their attaché case. The extra batteries could add roughly 6 pounds to your load, but it was a necessary evil—each of those batteries would probably only offer about three or four hours of run time, barely enough to update your Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet. Coming up with novel ways to keep track of which batteries were charged and which were spent was a popular hobby among business travelers.

Good news, folks: There’s no need to be wistful for the good old days any longer. Thanks to Dynabook, battery swapping is back, baby! If you’re not familiar with Dynabook, you’ll surely remember its predecessor. Dynabook is the remains of Toshiba’s PC arm, which was sold to Sharp in 2020 after years of decline. The Dynabook branding, which had previously been used in Japan, got a reboot. The Portégé model name remains intact, complete with the accents.

Durable Dynabook

Photograph: Chris Null

A big selling point of the relaunched Dynabook has been around durability and serviceability. The new Portégé Z40L-N has a lightweight but tough magnesium alloy shell that meets MIL-STD-810H standards, and sports a battery that can be swapped by the user. This isn’t quite like the batteries of 2001, which slid out with the flip of a switch. Rather, the Portégé's battery must be removed by taking out two screws on the underside of the laptop, which allows you to remove a flap that exposes the battery underneath. The battery must be pried out with a tool like a screwdriver. In other words, it’s hardly something most users are going to do in-flight.

That’s not the point of the Dynabook, as today’s batteries last much longer—this one hitting nearly 16 hours in my full-screen YouTube playback test—so the need for on-the-fly battery swapping is virtually nil. Rather, Dynabook’s goal is to extend the operating life of the laptop, so IT departments can replace what the company refers to as “the only consumable item in the system” in just a few minutes, rather than having to buy a user a new machine or send it out for repair once its capacity starts to make the machine unusable. (None of the other components on the device are user-serviceable.) Spare batteries are expected to be available in the fourth quarter of this year for $99.

That’s a long-winded preface to get to the point that if a computer is designed to be user-serviceable, you should probably make sure it’s user-desirable first. Unfortunately, the Portégé Z40L-N isn’t.

Photograph: Chris Null

Let’s start with the design. Decked out with a navy blue chassis and a black keyboard, the color palette feels like it was pulled from the 1990s, and I also found it attracted fingerprints and smudges. You needn’t worry about getting those prints on the screen, at least, because the 14-inch display (with a dated 1,920 x 1,200-pixel resolution) isn’t a touchscreen.

The keyboard offers decent action but looks smaller than it is, probably due to its tiny arrow keys and even tinier page up/page down buttons, which may well be the smallest keys I’ve ever seen on a laptop keyboard. The touchpad is smallish in size, in part because it features two discrete, physical buttons beneath it. Buttons! I was semi-enamored of the wildly retro design until I felt how mushy and flimsy those buttons felt, which made me sad.

The primary specs are midrange, featuring an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V CPU, 32 GB of RAM, and a 1-terabyte solid-state drive. Port selection, however, is very good for a corporate machine, sporting two USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 4 support (one needed for charging), two USB-A ports, a full-size HDMI port, Ethernet, and a microSD card slot—split evenly across the left and right sides of the device.

Photograph: Chris Null

Unfortunately, all of that didn’t add up to much on the performance front, with the Portégé turning in some of the worst benchmark scores I’ve seen from an Intel-based machine in the Core Ultra era. Across business apps, graphics-centric tasks, and AI work, the Portégé could barely lift its head off the pillow, dragging 10 to 15 percent behind the average score across the board. That’s not enough of a slowdown to make a visible difference in simple tasks like web browsing and light productivity app work, but anyone pushing their machines with more complex tasks like photo editing and AI image creation will likely notice.

The good news is that I didn’t have any trouble getting the system’s AI features, like live captions with translation, to work without stuttering—and I was pleased that the beta version of Microsoft’s Recall was working very well on the device. (That’s a story for another time, but it’s shockingly powerful.)

The screen isn’t particularly bright, though it’s short of what I would describe as “dim,” and the speakers are good enough considering the audience, though the fan is on the loud side. Fortunately, it rarely ran during my testing, kicking in only under heavy graphics-centric loads.

High Price

Photograph: Chris Null

How about some bright spots? While corporate machines have a reputation for being big and heavy, the Portégé is extremely trim, weighing just 2.1 pounds, though its 22-millimeter thickness isn’t as impressive. The 2.1-pound mark is a tie for the lightest I’ve seen in a 14-inch laptop to date—though the lack of a touchscreen helps cheat a few ounces off the device. The aforementioned battery life score of almost 16 hours is also amazing, hitting one of the highest marks I’ve ever measured on Intel hardware. (That’s a double-edged sword for the Portégé—with such great battery life, it’s unlikely you’ll need that replacement cell any time soon.)

Corporate laptop buyers know that business-focused machines always come with a not-so-subtle tax that can quickly raise the cost well above their consumer-friendly brethren, but the $2,199 price for the Dynabook Portégé is particularly tough to swallow. The replaceable battery option and MIL-STD certification are all nice features, but they aren’t enough to merit an upcharge of what feels like hundreds of dollars over where the price should be, based on the features and performance of the rest of the package.

Call me back, though, when the machine gets outfitted with a trackball.