Summary
Discover the latest features and improvements of the newly redesigned 2024 ThinkPad X1 Carbon. Our review covers performance, design, and more.
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The 2024 ThinkPad X1 Carbon Generation 12 is a complete redesign. It has a smaller, lighter chassis, a bright, vibrant OLED display, many changes throughout, and Intel's new Core Ultra processor. That means you should get more performance and significantly better graphics. The 2024 X1 Carbon is a significant improvement for the users it's designed for: those using it for lightweight business tasks like PowerPoint presentations, writing documents, etc. For light users, this laptop is even more portable, and its screen is significantly better. But there are two massive issues with this laptop:
1. You can buy other laptops that do 90% of what this one does for a third of the price.
2. Programmers have been abandoned. Even though this laptop was never designed for them, programmers love ThinkPads. The performance of the redesigned X1 Carbon is woeful, and this is definitely not a good laptop for programmers to buy in 2024.
Look and Feel
The X1 Carbon's newly redesigned chassis is smaller and lighter than prior years. You definitely notice that the older model is thicker than the new one when you place the laptops on top of each other. The new lip above the display makes it easy to open the laptop, and the hinge allows the display to go all the way back.
The laptop continues to look professional and understated. The smaller bezels around the screen and the redesigned ThinkPad logo make the device look more modern. The device has a luxuriously soft feel to it, and the material used is quite fingerprint-resistant. The screen and keyboard do have some flex, but overall, it's a well-built laptop.
Regarding weight, last year's X1 Carbon was already one of the lightest 14-inch laptops out there at 2.6 pounds. This year's smaller model is even lighter at 2.4 pounds, making it super portable.
Speakers
Another redesign aspect includes removing the speaker grills to the left and right sides of the keyboard deck. While this seems like it would negatively affect sound quality, the speakers in this year's models are actually night-and-day better. They are much louder, clearer, and have higher fidelity. These are some of the best speakers available in a small laptop.
Display
When it comes to the display, Lenovo has upgraded the default panel. For the last several years, Thinkpad X1 Carbons have either come with FHD panels, which are too low resolution for a 14-inch premium laptop, or 4K panels that were stunning to look at but chewed through battery life. Lenovo has offered an upgrade to an OLED panel for a while now, but this year, the default panel is a 14-inch OLED. It is bright at over 400 nits and has a wide color gamut. It has a high resolution of 2880x1800 pixels and a 120Hz refresh rate. This laptop's OLED panel is much brighter than the new Spectre 14 and Zenbook 14.
However, like many OLED panels we've recently tested, PWM is used at all brightness levels, including 100%. Even though this display is not a touch screen, we still noticed the screen door effect when staring at a white background. You can see a lot of tiny, colored dots if you really stare at it. While we wouldn't say these issues make the laptop unusable, people sensitive to these display flaws may want to purchase a different laptop.
Keyboard
The keyboard layout has been updated this year, and it is definitely for the better. ThinkPads have traditionally had the Function and Control keys swapped from a standard keyboard's layout. This year, they have done away with that and have gone with a regular layout. We like this a lot, but if you're a purist ThinkPad keyboard lover, you can always open Lenovo's Vantage software to swap those keys back to the old layout.
There are other layout changes, too. The power button has been moved from above the keyboard deck to the laptop's right side. Usually, this isn't ideal as you may miss press it when you hold the laptop, but this power button is a little indented, so it shouldn't be an issue.
The fingerprint reader, which used to be in the power button, is now its own button. It replaces the dedicated Print Screen button at the bottom of the keyboard. We like having the fingerprint reader here as it's more convenient. The laptop has Windows Hello facial recognition, but we found the fingerprint reader faster.
Regarding keyboard comfort, ThinkPads have a reputation for being the best, but this one could be better. For example, you will notice the keys bottoming out when you press them, and they do slightly wiggle. However, when you press them, the keys no longer sink below the keyboard deck. On last year's ThinkPad, you could feel the edge of the deck as you pressed the keys down. This year's is a good keyboard, but there are better ones out there for a premium laptop, like HP's new Spectre 14.
Unfortunately, the keyboard's backlight doesn't appear to shine through the key's characters well, so it's hard to tell which key is which in a darker environment. In fact, we only knew the backlight was on after seeing the light shining from around the bottom of the keys. This was not an issue with last year's model.
Trackpad
The trackpad is a full centimeter wider and a couple of millimeters taller than last year. Lenovo made the buttons on the top of the trackpad that the red TrackPoint uses smaller to make room for this. ThinkPads have always had smaller trackpads than comparable laptops because of these buttons, so the additional space is welcome.
That being said, it's still a smaller trackpad, and we found it a little annoying because my finger kept hitting the buttons at the top of the trackpad. This trackpad is very accurate and has no palm rejection issues.
Ports
The port selection and speeds haven't changed this year. You get 2 fast Thunderbolt 4 ports that both support charging, an HDMI 2.1 port, 2 USB-A 5GB ports, a headphone-mic combo jack, and an optional SIM card slot. The port layout has changed slightly, with the HDMI port now being placed on the back right side of the laptop. We like this as it's more out of the way. However, we don't like that both ports capable of charging are on the left side. If your outlet is on the right, you'll need to run a cable around the back, which could get in your way.
Webcam
Even though the lip where the webcam sits has changed, it appears this laptop has the same 1080 webcam from the previous model, which gets the job done.
However, as a business-focused laptop with many people sitting on Zoom calls all day, we would've liked to see a better webcam this year. Especially given all the space now available on this new, larger lip. The webcam also features a privacy shutter you can physically toggle on and off.
Upgradeability
The laptop's internals have been completely redesigned and appear to have a more robust cooling solution despite being a small laptop with tiny fans. The SSD is replaceable, and it seems there is a spare short form m.2 slot available for adding a second SSD. This laptop also comes with Wi-Fi 6e rather than the latest Wi-Fi 7, which is a bit disappointing.
Performance
The performance of this laptop is not its strong suit. The main issue lies in the laptop's default Balanced mode. It isn't snappy, and we couldn't even play a League of Legends game because it was too stuttery.
We can see why when we look at benchmarks like Geekbench and Cinebench. In Balanced mode, this laptop only feeds its processor 17 watts of sustained power.
This means you have two options. First, you can run the laptop on Balanced mode and enjoy how cool and quietly it runs, but you will get little in the way of performance.
Second, you can run the laptop in its Performance mode and get decent performance, but it will feel hot, and you will hear fan noise. Even then, it does not have the performance of HP's Spectre 14, which has the same processor.
Battery Life
Unfortunately, this laptop does have a performance drop when running on battery power. If you run this laptop at full performance when on battery, which we don't recommend as it will degrade your battery, you'll eat through it very fast.
For a more realistic battery test, we played a movie on Netflix on repeat over Wi-Fi for 4 hours. At the end of the test, we had 66% remaining, indicating about 12 hours of battery life for this use case. This is a massive improvement from last year's model, which didn't have the best battery life.
Linux
We tested the laptop's compatibility with Linux using Ubuntu 22.04 and 23.10. It was rough. We couldn't change the display brightness as it didn't even appear as an option in Settings. Sound and Wi-Fi also did not work. The latter surprised me, as this laptop has an Intel Wi-Fi card, which is usually compatible with Linux out of the box. Expect a decent amount of tinkering if you plan to run Linux on this laptop.
Pricing
Pricing is a disgrace. The model we bought with the Core Ultra 7 155H Processor, OLED panel, 16g of memory, and 512GB of storage has an MSRP of over $2.3K. The model with 32GB of memory is around $2.7k.
Conclusion
The redesigned 2024 ThinkPad X1 Carbon is a solid step forward for people doing light tasks like office work. It is more portable since it's smaller and lighter. It also has a better display, longer battery life, and better speakers. We really enjoyed using this laptop in this capacity, but it's not powerful enough for programming or other performance tasks, and its current pricing is ridiculous. You can buy the Asus Zenbook 14 from 2023 for a fraction of the price and get 80 to 90% of this laptop. However, Lenovo is notorious for pricing their laptops at a high MSRP and dropping them massively on sales. So, if you want this laptop, wait for it to drop to around $1,300 to $1,600, depending on the configuration. This would be a fair price, making it competitive with other premium 14-inch laptops. But if you're looking to do programming, you'd be better off with HP's new Spectre 14 or the MacBook Pro 14, which is priced similarly to this one.
