The passive diaphragm was 12 inches, though. The actual woofer was 8 inches, which is huge by today’s standards.
It’s not the size, it’s what you do with it. 8in is about the max that most people can handle.
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#What, then, is the innocent excuse for there being a deceptive faux-speaker divot in the DVD drive?
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What divot?
I thought that was just the end of a bolt holding the drive together (it certainly seems to be in about the right place). Yes, it does sorta line up with the speaker hole, but that doesn’t mean anything.
I am not trying to defend Lenovo here; it’s just that we don’t know anything about the provenance of this video, Was the DVD drive originally in that space, or a speaker module? Did the drive work after it was inserted? (the Ebay listings suggest it would not) Who made the video? Why?
there are just too many unanswered questions for my tastes.
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Yeah the divot in the drive looks normal. Like it is normally there. I don’t know why it lines up perfectly with the hole - either a happy accident, or someone figured out that if they put the speaker hole there, it would look more like a speaker.
Your suggestion another device could fit there, and another user who suggested it was a passive cone sounds plausible too. I dunno. It seems like someone would notice pretty quick or not if a subwoofer put out no actual sound, thus why even put it there?
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If you scroll up to the beginning of this comment section you will find that Rob linked to an Ebay search for Lenovo laptop subwoofer components.
So maybe sound really did come out of that hole.
If that was an actual sub woofer, the hard drive better have good vibration protection. 
[Imagines the effect of the hard drive auto-parking everytime a game plays an explosion sound-effect.]
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Funny, yes, but aren’t SSDs just as common know as HDs?
I think it’s always been there (my thinkpad dvd drives are in boxes waiting to be unpacked, so I can’t check).
The real question is “Why does it line up with the subwoofer hole?”
Thank you. 
Hmm. Because you got me wondering, too, that system seems to be more recent than I thought from the video (and the naff plastic chrome around the ‘woofer’ hole) but the default load-out is still apparently HHD (2014-ish). Specifications - Lenovo Y50 review - Page 2 | TechRadar
(And relevantly, according to that review, noise absolutely came out of that hole, albeit at the cost of the loss of the expected ultradrive bay to the design, which independently confirms both your ‘it’s a joke’ find, and @beschizza’s eBay results. Nice one.)
Of course, any gaming rig worth its weight would have been refitted with an SSD eventually, but as you say, that’s not as funny.
I honestly thought most laptop HDDs had at at least some kind of ‘I’m being jostled, better park’ protection by that point, but I’m relying on squishy human memory there, and I’m happy to be wrong, claiming ‘I couldn’t resist the gag’ as my only defence.
Though now you’ve got me wondering whether it would have had APS…
One of the many reasons why I prefer Apple hardware was the lack of greebles on it.
This looks like a prank, meant to provoke arguments about the merits of the referenced brand. The hole in the outer case is pretty rough, and the swappable drive bay is a feature of business-oriented Thinkpad models whereas you’d expect any (real or fake) sub-woofer to be a feature of a consumer model.
Also the FCC ID label identifies an Intel WiFi Link 5100, which Lenovo used in their 2008 Thinkpad models. Nothing to see here, move along.
There is one thing about having the actual ‘sub’ woofer in the base of the unit. Having professionally helped lots of laptop users who (oh okay, whose systems were chock-full-o-malware), but we also killing their laptops by running them on cushions, pillows, quilts, in fact anything that blocked the airflow through the bottom vents, anything that encourages them to not do that has to be good:
“Hey, the laptop’s running really hot” (no response)
“Hey the processor’s running really slowly” (no response)
“Oh, the laptop’s shutting off after 30 mins, then every 10 mins thereafter” (no response) (well, maaaaybe looks for help with an anti-virus check)
“Hey, the music’s muffled” (lifts laptop off cushion, processor gulps down cool air)
(Maybe I worked with students too long 
)
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