Note, my HP laptop has an accelerometer feature for the HD protection which can be enabled/disabled in the advanced HP tools. I wonder if the music is just tripping such a protection feature in these laptops.
I think this is it. The video in Adam's video @1:33 shows the laptop powering off completely. If the HDD crashed, you might expect a lock up of the system or a BSOD, not a power down. I know that the accelerometer protection on my older Lenovo laptop powered the whole system down. Not sure why - maybe to provide more consistency for the user after a drop (a hung system is worse than a powered-off one?)
I'd suggest this is poor design, or something was wrong. Laptops are designed to be portable, moved, tilted, picked up or otherwise shoved about. I'd be pretty pissed if my laptop powered off every time I moved it. It would be going right back to the shop for a full refund.
Hard disk interfaces (and operating systems) have for decades been designed in such a way that if there is a delay in accessing media, then the system will cope with that and simply wait.
I completely agree. I saw a youtube video illustrating the bug on a Toshiba laptop. What was illustrated that the windows HD file access was paused a few times while playing the song. However, this just may have been just a slow laptop, or swap-file access.
You do know that free-fall mems accelerometers cannot sense gravity. All they can can do is measure acceleration in 3 axis. Their measured acceleration needs to go through a complex formula to determine if there is a true drop. Calculation on the older mems units, like the .pdf I linked to, which has an illustration of the waveform as a free fall begins, continuously performs this calculation built into the mems IC and there are a set of controls to set the filter's 'window' frequency rolloff, response time and threshold sensitivity. When set high enough, looking at the waveform provided in the .pdf, it is something which can be easily tricked even with a very low volume, but particular sound which mimics that window's opening of an object beginning to accelerate exactly 9.8m/s
2. All other signals are rejected by the 'free-fall' detector's formula. This means no solid tone. No impact. No closing laptop lid. No lifting up, or lowering down of the laptop. You need the effect of Earth specific gravity drop. Note that other mem accelerometers, like those from NXP, had to use a MCU to run the calculation to detect the free-fall pattern and again, there are online papers on how to do this while rejecting all other forms of acceleration.