ThinkPad X1 Carbon review: A fine heir to the ThinkPad name

I think it was 2002 that I got my first-ever laptop: a ThinkPad. Still made by IBM in those days, my ThinkPad A30p was a monster. Coming in a hair under 8lbs, it had all the bells and whistles: a 1.2GHz Pentium III-M, a full 1GB of RAM, 48GB hard disk, a 15-inch 1600×1200 display paired with a 32MB ATI GPU, integrated CD-RW, 56K modem, 10/100 Ethernet.

For me, the ThinkPad came to represent the ideal laptop. The sleek elegance of the all-black body, the rich features, the fine keyboard with its TrackPoint red nipple; it was everything I wanted from a computer.

It wasn’t cheap, of course. As the consummate business laptops, the ThinkPads were never cheap. But it was always a good value, with the build quality and extensive warranty options making it an eminently dependable workhorse.

Though I dabbled briefly with a MacBook Pro, it didn’t last; I went back to ThinkPads—an X300, a Helix—because they were just better. Apple’s fans wax lyrical about the touchpads on Apple systems, for example, and while I don’t disagree that they’re good touchpads, a good touchpad just isn’t that great compared to the sublime elegance and efficiency of the TrackPoint. Precise, accurate pointer control without even having to move my hands from the home row: there is no better mobile pointing device.

But over the last few years I have felt that Lenovo had to some extent lost sight of this ThinkPad heritage. There is, for example, a trend toward eliminating buttons, both on the pointer and the keyboard. Lenovo shipped ThinkPads where the TrackPoint’s buttons were merely portions of the upper part of the touchpad, rather than the discrete, dedicated buttons that had gone before. This made the machine look in some sense “cleaner,” but it also made it harder to use; the invisible buttons could not be hit as accurately or consistently as the old ones.

Similarly, the keyboard shed its top row of function keys, replacing them with a software-controlled touchable strip, and used a peculiar arrangement for buttons including home, insert, backspace, and delete. The result wasn’t better; it was awkward. It meant that typing on the new keyboard required different finger memory to typing on any other machine and that picking up a new generation ThinkPad meant learning how to type on it.

It was bitterly disappointing. The second generation X1 Carbon was a machine I would have gladly bought, were it not for the unwelcome changes it made to these essential components.

When Lenovo showed the new, third generation X1 Carbon at CES this year, I couldn’t have been happier. With the third generation X1, Lenovo has gone back: the TrackPoint’s physical buttons are back, and the keyboard layout is altogether more conventional, with six rows of keys instead of five.

Even as Lenovo experimented with the input devices, one aspect of the ThinkPad never changed: the look of the thing. ThinkPads are black, they’re square, they’re a mix of carbon and glass-fiber reinforced plastic (lid) and magnesium-aluminum alloy (bottom). The third generation X1 does nothing to buck this trend. If you like ThinkPads, as I do, you’ll think they look like serious, uncompromising working machines. If you don’t, you’ll probably think they look a bit boring and plasticky compared to the silvery aluminum look that’s so common.

What a delight physical buttons are.

Credit: Peter Bright

In much the same way that the Dell XPS 13 can claim to have a 13-inch screen in the body of an 11-inch laptop, the X1 Carbon offers a 14-inch screen in the body of a 13-inch laptop. Its width and depth are nearly identical to those of the Yoga 3 Pro, for example, with the X1 being only slightly thicker.

Open it up and the most important change from my perspective is the inclusion of dedicated buttons for the TrackPoint and the more conventional layout for the keyboard. Together, these make for an unparalleled input experience. The TrackPoint feels as good as it ever did, offering precise, effortless mousing, and thanks to the new (or old, depending on how you look at it) buttons, there’s none of the misclicking that plagues the buttonless TrackPoint.

The touchpad sticks with the currently fashionable integrated buttons. Its glass surface is pleasantly smooth, and for a touchpad it has both accurate pointing and two-finger scrolling. Lenovo has opted to use the Synaptics driver, rather than use Microsoft’s precision touchpad facility. The Synaptics driver includes a range of additional two, three, and four finger gestures and some scrolling options not included in Windows’ standard precision touchpad support. Our understanding is that Synaptics’ current controller and touchpad hardware all fundamentally support the precision touchpad, but that OEMs can decide which mode to support—either the new precision touchpad mode or the legacy Synaptics mode.

Although I have no real complaint about the motion or tracking of the touchpad, its buttons were a little mushy and indistinct. This is in marked contrast to the precise and crisp feel of the TrackPoint’s buttons. And honestly, while things like gestures for switching tasks and pinch zooming are nice enough, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where I’d ever use the touchpad when the TrackPoint is available.

The backlit keyboard is a fine example of the chiclet keyboard that is so fashionable these days. The key action is precise and assertive, the travel is sufficient for comfort, there’s an ample wrist rest area, and extended typing sessions are a pleasure. As laptop keyboards go, it doesn’t get better than this.

The layout is, broadly speaking, conventional for a ThinkPad. This means that it retains the ThinkPad peculiarity of putting the Fn key on the bottom left, with the Ctrl key to its right. This is a longstanding ThinkPadism that is beloved of ThinkPad users and infuriating to everyone else. For those who cannot stand this unconventional arrangement, modern Lenovo systems offer a toggle in firmware to switch the function of the two keys.

The keyboard layout is reasonably conventional, for a ThinkPad.

Peter Bright

The keyboard layout is reasonably conventional, for a ThinkPad. Peter Bright

As with all true ThinkPads, the X1 Carbon doesn’t have much in the way of detailing or embellishment.

Peter Bright

As with all true ThinkPads, the X1 Carbon doesn’t have much in the way of detailing or embellishment. Peter Bright

The keyboard layout is reasonably conventional, for a ThinkPad. Peter Bright

As with all true ThinkPads, the X1 Carbon doesn’t have much in the way of detailing or embellishment. Peter Bright

Peter Bright

Peter Bright

From left to right:Top: power, HDMI, mini-DisplayPort, USB3, headsetBottom: USB3, gigabit Ethernet.

Lenovo

From left to right:Top: power, HDMI, mini-DisplayPort, USB3, headsetBottom: USB3, gigabit Ethernet. Lenovo

Peter Bright

From left to right:Top: power, HDMI, mini-DisplayPort, USB3, headsetBottom: USB3, gigabit Ethernet. Lenovo

As welcome as this keyboard layout is, and as glad as I am to see that the changes in the second generation X1 have been reverted, I do almost wish that Lenovo had gone further still. In the past, ThinkPad keyboards have put the page navigation keys (insert/delete/home/end/page up/page down) in a block of six, much as they are on desktop keyboards. They also included the trio of print screen, scroll lock, and pause/break.

I would love one day for these to return. Unlike some recent Lenovo machines, the X1 does include the full set of page navigation keys, but with the page up and down adjacent to the cursor. Print screen is found near the keyboard, and scroll lock and pause/break are missing entirely. While these keys are esoteric in use, they are not altogether without purpose. Combinations such as Windows+Break and Ctrl+Break remain useful from time to time. I’m not sure what the advantage of removing these buttons really is. It certainly isn’t being done for lack of space.

The fingerprint reader, positioned to the right of the keyboard, is of the swipe type. Like the touchpad, it’s made by Synaptics. With fingerprints registered, it can be used to log in to Windows and unlock the machine. It worked as expected.

The screen is OK. After using the XPS 13 and its glorious 400 nit 3200×1800 screen, everything else looks a little dull. Simply put, the X1’s screen is not as glorious as the Dell’s. It’s by no means terrible; while the cheaper 1920×1080 screen is TN and suffers limited viewing angles as a result, the 2560×1440 unit in the system I used is IPS, with good viewing angles as is expected from IPS screens. If I hadn’t been spoiled by my recent experience with the XPS 13, I’d probably rate the screen as very good; colors are bright, blacks are dark, and the resolution is high enough to enable crisp text and a good work area.

The system I used also included the touch screen option. While I think this is a good option in general, as touch scrolling in Windows 8 is a great addition to casual browsing, it comes with a penalty in screen brightness: the high-resolution screen has 300 nit brightness without touch, only 270 with.

The embeardening continues.

Credit: Peter Bright

The webcam works.

While I am normally pretty indifferent to laptop speakers, the ones in the X1 deserve particular mention, as they’re ridiculously loud. I’m not sure I’d necessarily call them good, as the constraints imposed on laptop speakers preclude true high fidelity. But if you can’t be good, being loud is a good fallback position.

On the inside

We opted for an i7-5600U processor in the X1 we tested. This is the fastest processor currently offered in the X1. Compared to the i5-5200U that we expect will be the mainstream SKU in this processor generation, the i7 part ups the cache to 4MB from 3MB, and clock speeds from 2.2GHz base/2.7GHz turbo, to 2.6GHz base/3.2GHz turbo, while fitting in the same 15W power envelope.

As we’d expect, this produced a marked improvement in core CPU metrics when compared to the i5-5200U we tested in the XPS 13 and the i5-5250U we used in Intel’s Broadwell NUC.

The GPU scores, however, show something of a shortfall. Let’s ignore the onscreen scores, as they’re heavily influenced by the screen resolution, something that will obviously favor the X1 over the XPS 13, and focus on the off-screen, which used a fixed 1080p target resolution. Though the GPU and notional power envelope is identical between the two machines, the XPS 13 sometimes pulls ahead of the X1.

This is a little surprising. Both chips have a 15W TDP, and both have an HD Graphics 5500 GPU. The variations are in the cache and core clock speed, as described above, and also the GPU clockspeed. On the i5, the GPU clock is meant to run at between 300 and 900 MHz. In the i7, those limits are 300 and 950 MHz. If anything, the i7 should be faster than the i5, not slower. Sometimes it is, such as in the GFXBench T-Rex test. But sometimes it isn’t, such as the 3DMark scores.

We’re not entirely sure what is going on, but we have noticed a few things. Using Intel’s Power Gadget to spy on the CPU and GPU clockspeeds, temperature, and overall power consumption, we see that, as expected, the X1 normally runs its GPU a little faster than the XPS 13; 950 MHz instead of 900 MHz. During CPU benchmarks, the X1, as expected, can boost its CPU speed higher, and for short periods even has headroom above the 15W long-term limit, drawing more power as long as the overall temperature does not get too high.

But in a mixed CPU/GPU benchmark, we see different behavior. In Cinebench, for example, the GPU speed is throttled substantially, quickly dropping to 750MHz. The XPS 13’s i5, however, stays at a solid 900MHz for the duration of the test. It also aggressively ramps up its fan speed, becoming quite loud. The XPS 13 includes richer control of the processor’s power management features; it has Intel’s Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework drivers, which give finer control over the processor’s power/performance and power/noise tradeoffs.

Whether this is the reason for the greater GPU performance we can’t say, but it’s clear that it’s doing something to protect GPU performance that the Lenovo isn’t. The i7 should be unequivocally faster, and it’s a little strange that it isn’t. We’re talking to Lenovo to see if we can get a better understanding of what’s going on.

The system we tested included a 512GB PCIe SSD. This was blisteringly fast in benchmarks. In normal usage the difference between this and high-speed SATA SSDs was less pronounced, but if you have a workload that makes substantial demands of the disk, it’ll deliver.

In spite of our concerns over its power management behavior, in our battery life benchmarks, the X1 performed admirably. Its battery isn’t the biggest, but with the Broadwell processor and a screen that’s less power-hungry than some of its higher resolution brethren, it posted a fine result. The machine also supports Lenovo’s RapidCharge feature, enabling an 80% charge to be achieved in 55 minutes using the supplied 65W charger (though some markets default to a 45W charger, which takes 1.1 hours for the same 80 percent). The last 20 percent takes more than an hour, for a total charge time of 2.3 hours (or 2.5 on the low power charger). This is very handy; with RapidCharge a quick airport layover can be enough to give your laptop a new lease on life.

The X1 comes with more pre-installed software than I would like. There are Lenovo’s own multitudinous programs for keeping drivers up-to-date, providing useful hints and tips, and changing various pieces of configuration that are already exposed in Control Panel or elsewhere, along with the Maxthon browser, some wretched Norton software that complained whenever a benchmark used a lot of processor time, and some other pre-installed apps. I’d uninstall all of them with a scowl, except perhaps the system update program, as it beats hunting for drivers and firmware on the Lenovo website.