Driving them around on sandstone cliffs overlooking a fast flowing river does that. As sad as it is, it's definitely a contender for the Darwin Awards.

Can't see if this is mentioned anywhere, but IBM got out of the desktop business a few years ago if you recall. ThinkPads are made by Lenovo now, who are a completely different company, based in China.
In addition, yes, AIX is moribund. IBM have abandoned that for z/OS on mainframes and SUSE everywhere else. I worked on a migration to an IBM datacentre a few years ago where, despite the original intention of virtualising SUSE on a z-Series mainframe, we ended with a bunch of p-Series servers running AIX. IBM couldn't even schedule a permanent member of staff to build the machines and had to get a contractor in to install their own OS on their own machines.
Having said that, I knew someone at the time who had a PowerPC ThinkPad, which was a peculiar beast indeed. It ran AIX with CDE but even in 2004 it seemed like an anachronism with very few of the things you needed to make a desktop machine useful: I think OpenOffice 1 had been ported.