At the cost of complexity, should they have had platform diversity, and so e.g. a small iPad or an Android tablet?

Or .. a spare? I guess the "spare" here was "use somebody else's"

I hope they selected diverse production runs. I have been exposed to "yea, that generation of thinkpad had bad PSU, sorry" problems in the past.

not to mention that "the outlook failure" seems to have been a layer 8 problem?

(think i picked up some line about not being aware how to use it in offline mode / calling this out as an "error" while it was the expected configuration at the time)

and the toilet problem being as banal as "well, you need to wait for the green ready light to turn on..." (and this just taking a bit longer than expected on the first go)