Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 7 (2019) Review
Even though the Lenovo ThinkPad lineup is aimed at businesses, these rugged, feature-packed laptops enamor plenty of consumers, too. The latest ThinkPad X1 Carbon ($1,179 starting price, as tested), dubbed Gen 7, is a prime example of this crossover. This ultraportable business laptop distills the ThinkPad concept to its essence, shedding weight but keeping staple ThinkPad features like the comfortable keyboard, the iconic red TrackPoint, and copious IT security and manageability features. It also offers as options enthusiast-minded features like face recognition and a gorgeous HDR-enabled 4K glossy screen, which are overkill for many business users. To its credit, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon manages both business and pleasure with aplomb, earning our Editors’ Choice award for best high-end business laptop.
Mục lục bài viết
Admirable Dimensions
The ThinkPad X1 Carbon is now in its seventh generation, but at first glance, you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference between this generation and the one before that, the one before that, and so on. Lenovo has never strayed far from the classic ThinkPad recipe, which calls for a sturdy black chassis, a red silicone pointing device (the TrackPoint) in the middle of the keyboard, and of course the slanted “ThinkPad” emblem on the outside.
Plenty of other ThinkPads continue to follow this recipe too. What makes the X1 Carbon Gen 7 different from its ThinkPad X, T, and L siblings is mostly size, weight, and materials. The latest flagship T-series ThinkPad, the ThinkPad T490, weighs as much as 3.7 pounds and measures 0.7 inch thick, and that’s after slimming down significantly compared with its predecessor. The X1 Carbon Gen 7 is in another league entirely, measuring 0.59 by 12.7 by 8.6 inches (HWD) and starting at just 2.4 pounds. The weight varies a smidge depending on optional extras.
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 7 (2019) Review
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 7 (2019) Review
Not only do these dimensions fit the X1 Carbon Gen 7 squarely into ultraportable laptop territory, but they also mean that it is one of the lightest in that territory. This is even more impressive when you consider that the X1 Carbon Gen 7’s 14-inch screen is almost an inch larger than the 13.3-inch panels on most laptops we consider to be ultraportables.
Despite its light weight, the X1 Carbon Gen 7’s combination of a magnesium underside and a carbon-fiber display lid lends it a sturdy feel. A MIL-STD 810G certification lends some legitimacy to that impression, confirming that this is indeed as rugged as you’d expect from a ThinkPad. Many other laptops share these characteristics, but none that I’ve seen is quite as light. Even the extraordinarily well-designed Apple MacBook Air, the original trendsetter of the ultraportable laptop category, weighs in at 2.75 pounds. The nearly flawless Dell XPS 13 is also heavier, at 2.7 pounds, and don’t forget that both the Apple and the Dell have less screen real estate.
New Screen and Lid Options
The main changes to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon in this revision round involve the display and the exterior styling of its lid.
The base model I’m reviewing, with a full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) screen, has the same black display lid as the previous generation. Stepping up to the top-end model, with a 4K (3,840-by-2,160-pixel) screen, gets you a display lid with a distinctive carbon-fiber weave. It’s a small concession to people who would like a bit of flair on their otherwise very staid ThinkPad. Lenovo describes it as a way for owners to be reminded that their device is made partly of carbon fiber, since it’s not otherwise obvious. Presumably, the company believes that the same people who would be interested in such bling also want a 4K display. You can see the difference for yourself in the image below.
In between the 4K panel and the base-model 1080p one, Lenovo offers two more screen options. They include a unique 1080p touch screen with a matte finish, which I found to be very nifty when I tested it out on the previous generation. (See that review for more details on its unique use of screen technology.) The other display option is a WQHD (2,560-by-1,440-pixel) matte display without touch support.
If you want the brightest and most brilliant display, consider the 4K version (below right), which features a rated 500-nit brightness and also supports Dolby Vision for high dynamic range (HDR) images and videos.
The base model’s display has a brightness rating of 400 nits, which I find to be perfectly adequate for viewing text documents in a brightly lit office, though images and videos are a bit dull.
As Ever, a Luxurious Typing Experience
Despite its thin chassis, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 7 includes a keyboard that is at least as comfortable as any I’ve used on other ThinkPads in recent years. Its backlit keys are sculpted to give your fingertips intuitive guidance, and they offer extraordinary stability.
Unfortunately, the touchpad is not nearly as comfortable to use. It’s cramped, its click action is quite stiff, and it’s not very responsive, taking more time than I’d like to register movement. The pad uses the Microsoft Precision Touchpad interface, so adjustments are straightforward, but I found that increasing the sensitivity doesn’t really help much.
The classic TrackPoint cursor control serves as a consolation prize for the mediocre touchpad. It’s especially useful if you’re trying to move the arrow cursor in a cramped environment, like an economy-class airplane seat. It takes some getting used to, but ThinkPad fans have had a long time to do so; the TrackPoint has been around since IBM owned the brand, and other companies, such as Dell, have replicated it in their own business laptops.
Lenovo redesigned the X1 Carbon’s speaker system for this generation. It features two top-facing tweeters next to the display hinges and two downward-firing woofers. Overall, the sound is adequate for video conferencing, although I don’t find it to be as robust as the speakers on the MacBook Pro, which uses upward-firing stereo speakers.
The webcam on my test unit is also adequate for video conferencing, and it includes a nifty built-in privacy door that you can close when you’re not using it. It lacks the infrared sensors that let you log into your Windows account using face recognition, something that’s available only on models with an upgraded display. My test unit does come with a fingerprint reader, though, which accurately recognized my prints each time I used it over the course of several days of testing.
Get Adaptered-Up for Ethernet
To get the most out of the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 7’s I/O selection, you’ll need Lenovo’s proprietary Ethernet adapter. Integrating a full-size Ethernet jack in such a thin laptop is impractical, so the conventional approach is to design a squished jack with a “jaw” hinge that extends when you’re ready to plug in the Ethernet cord. The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 7 instead uses a proprietary Ethernet jack that isn’t squished, but requires the purchase of an adapter ($35). This method is undoubtedly more reliable than a hinged jack, though it means that Lenovo also gets to rake in profits from sales of adapter cables. The adapter really should come bundled.
Other than the unique Ethernet port, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon has a robust, if rather ordinary, port selection. The chassis has two USB Type-C ports (each of which supports Thunderbolt 3 speeds), as well as two USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A ports, an audio jack, a full-size HDMI port, and a Kensington-style notch for connecting a physical security cable. Wireless connectivity includes 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0, but not next-gen Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax). You can add a modem for LTE data, a rare option for laptops sold in the US, but it will top out at 450Mbps download speeds, not the 1Gbps that many cellular devices now offer.
Excellent Performance
The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 7 I tested comes with an Intel Core i5-8265U processor, 8GB of memory, and a 256GB PCI Express NVMe SSD. These are adequate specs for everyday computing tasks, though you can bump each of those up to the next level in competing ultraportables in the X1 Carbon’s price range.
You can also outfit the X1 Carbon itself with better components. If you max everything out in the online configuration tool, you’re looking at a Core i7 with vPro, 16GB of memory, and a 1TB SSD. So I’ve included a few systems with Core i7 CPUs, 16GB of memory, and 512GB SSDs for the purposes of comparing performance. Also in the mix is the more similarly configured MacBook Pro.
The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 7 performed admirably in our benchmark tests, finishing at or near the top in each one, even when compared with the better-equipped, heavier Asus ZenBook 14 and the HP EliteBook 840 G5. This is thanks in part to the X1 Carbon’s CPU, from Intel’s “Whiskey Lake” generation. Like many late-generation higher-end laptop CPUs from Intel, it has four cores and support for up to eight concurrent threads, letting it handle multiple instructions from software simultaneously. But with the exception of the ultra-low-power Core i7 in the Acer Swift 7, each of the other systems listed above also has a multithreaded CPU, so part of the X1 Carbon advantage is likely due to Lenovo’s behind-the-scenes performance tweaks.
See How We Test Laptops
To assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet work, web browsing, and videoconferencing, we use PCMark 10. This holistic performance suite simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows and generates a proprietary score. PCMark 8, meanwhile has a Storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the boot drive.
There are few surprises here. All of the systems perform roughly equally on the storage benchmark, since they all use similarly fast PCIe SSDs. The PCMark 10 differences are a bit greater, but the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 7’s score still represents excellent everyday performance even if it’s slightly lower than the ZenBook 14’s score.
For a more nuanced look at performance on specialized resource-intensive tasks, we test 3D rendering performance in Maxon’s Cinebench R15 tool and image-editing performance in Adobe Photoshop CC. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. Meanwhile, the Photoshop test stresses CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost.
It’s especially nice to see that the X1 Carbon Gen 7 eked out the best Cinebench score. Its Photoshop score wasn’t group-leading, but it’s still very competitive. Although this laptop isn’t designed as a multimedia editing platform, you can perform these tasks in a pinch.
To judge gaming performance, we use UL’s 3DMark benchmark suite and Unigine’s Superposition utility. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes.
As with PCMark, each of the systems performs about the same on the graphics tests, with the exception of the Acer Swift 7. None of these results indicates suitability for playing graphics-intensive games (gaming laptops, ideally, should post results above 60 frames per second on the Superposition test), but they do suggest that browser games, Minecraft, and other similar titles will work just fine.
As a check on these synthetic benchmarks, I also made some casual observations as I browsed the web and typed parts of this story on the X1 Carbon Gen 7. Everything was smooth, even when I unplugged the USB-C charging cable and the laptop automatically switched to Better Battery mode. I also spent some time with the 4K version of the X1 Carbon, and I did notice some lag and jerky window animations in Better Battery mode, which suggests some performance limiting in that model to eke out better battery life. Switching to Better Performance mode largely solved these issues on the 4K version.
Speaking of battery life, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 7’s time off the power plug is admirably long, at least as measured by our battery rundown test…
The system lasted for more than 14 hours on this test, which involves playing a local 720p video file at 50 percent screen brightness on a loop in airplane mode. This requires little processing power, so if you’re performing more typical tasks like web browsing or file conversions, you’ll likely experience a different result. The same goes for the 4K version—Lenovo itself warns that it won’t last as long on the battery as its 1080p sibling. A 4K screen tends to draw much more power.
The Ultimate Laptop for Business
The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 7 is as close to the ultimate business laptop as you can get. It’s not flashy, but it’s exceedingly well designed, offers many different configurable options, and has a rugged chassis that won’t weigh down your travel bag. As a result, it’s the rare business laptop that should also excite consumers looking for a premium machine.
It’s clear that Lenovo is aware of its crossover success, and the ability to add that carbon-fiber weave pattern and a 4K HDR display is a logical response to it. If you have deep pockets, it may make sense to add these options, especially if you plan to use the X1 Carbon for watching movies. On the other hand, most businesses will probably do better to buy the entry-level model reviewed here or one close to it, with the only option being vPro support, if they need it.
With few flaws other than its underwhelming touchpad and dongle-demanding Ethernet port, the latest ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 7 is the best high-end business laptop you can buy right now, a shoo-in for our Editors’ Choice award.
(Editors’ Note: This review was updated on Sept. 4 to clarify some details surrounding the screen and WWAN options.)
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 7 (2019)
4.5
Editors’ Choice
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$1,399.99
at Amazon
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MSRP $1,179.00
Pros
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The Bottom Line
With a sturdy, lightweight carbon-fiber exterior, an excellent keyboard, and plenty of security and manageability features, Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 7 is the best laptop you can buy for your business.
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