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This should've been possible with the Thinkpad HDAPS accelerometer back in the day. (If it detected the laptop was falling, it would park the HDD heads in anticipation of impact.) Shame nobody thought of it then!

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Were a lot of people rawdogging their Thinkpads while driving back in the day? Plugged into an inverter into the cigarette lighter to trickle charge? :-)

Passengers already existed back then, which this intended for. The motion cues are not meant to decrease motion sickness for a driver doom scrolling on their phone while operating their vehicle.

I've had 12-volt-input power supplies for every laptop I've ever owned. Lind makes the most reliable ones, but they're expensive, and there's a thriving aftermarket of alternatives too.

Also, Lind is the brand you're likely to find sold alongside an ex-public-safety Toughbook. Since these were my first serious car computers, that's just how the majority of my mobile computing looked for a decade or more.

However, Toughbooks encased their HDD's in gel, and had been doing so since long before the advent of MEMS accelerometers, so they didn't jump on the HDAPS innovation along with IBM.

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