Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 The Carbon line dates back to 2012 and now in its twelfth incarnation, the laptop has reached a level of maturity that few other brands can boast. Today X1 carbon has been refined to perfection, yet it would still be legitimately difficult to distinguish it from the original. I would know, because I reviewed it for WIRED a long time ago.
Photo: Lenovo
The large number remains the same as always. This is Lenovo’s ultralight flagship, the business laptop designed to kill all others. It still has the same 14-inch LCD screen (with a 16:10 aspect ratio, now with 2,880 x 1,800 pixels) that it has always had, weighing in at 2.2 pounds now – which means a healthy and steady weight loss through shows over the years.
I measured the thickness at 21 millimeters, largely thanks to a good-sized rubber foot that runs along the back of the base to hold the keyboard up a bit. The current chassis is, in Lenovo’s words, made from “recycled aluminum, magnesium, aerospace-grade carbon fiber, as well as post-consumer materials used during construction.”
Many other innovations here are incremental at best. I mean, when the brand starts talking about “new tactile markings” on the keyboard (those little bumps on the F and J keys), you know we’re getting close to an innovation endpoint. There’s also a small bezel protruding from the top of the screen where the webcam (with a manual shutter) appears, plus a relocated fingerprint reader, but other cosmetic changes are hard to pick out.
Photo: Lenovo
The big news lies under the hood, with the addition of the new Intel Core Ultra CPU, this model features an Ultra 7 155H chip running at 1.4 GHz. A small brigade of manufacturers is dropping machines with Ultra chips this month, with a big focus on artificial intelligence performance, better power efficiency and improved integrated graphics. AI-driven benchmarks are still a new thing, so until I have a decent base of results to draw from, I’ll report on my standard set of tests that combine various business apps and graphics benchmarks.