Review Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 12) Review: Light in Weight, Heavy in AI

[Admin]

Lenovo shrank the X1 Carbon’s footprint while amping up performance with a Meteor Lake CPU. But is it worth the money?

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 12) Review: Light in Weight, Heavy in AI : Read more

 

[cknobman]

Outside of businesses and corporations with huge contracts to buy laptops for their employees I just dont see many individual consumers wanting stuff like this.

High prices and crappy battery life = hard pass.

Honestly when I see a product with an Intel sticker on it then its an instant "no buy" for me.
Been that way for several years now, actually ever since 11th gen.

I have 2 jobs and both of my companies issued me laptops with 11gen intel processors.
One is a Lenovo workstation class laptop the other is an HP business class laptop.
Both are slow as dog crap and both wont even get me 3 hours off the plug.

I loath Intel.

 

[apaluq]

It would be great if they would stop cramming AI Into items. We never asked for it.

 

[brandonjclark]

Wait, WHAT??!?!?!

The battery life from this gen is nearly FOUR HOURS LESS than previous gen?

Am I reading this right?

 

[Notton]

Wait, WHAT??!?!?!

The battery life from this gen is nearly FOUR HOURS LESS than previous gen?

Am I reading this right?

That Gen11 running 11hrs is an outlier. I looked at other reviews for Carbon X1 Gen11 with OLED they only do about 7hrs using dark mode.
Did Gen11 get an LCD option? or a battery size larger than 54Whr?
It's well known that OLED is power hungry.

"Unfortunately, the battery life – at least with the 2880 x 1800 OLED panel on our review unit – was subpar"
I have never been impressed with the screens Lenovo equips on their laptops. Like they always cut corners and give the most unimpressive results from IPS, OLED, etc.
OLED without vibrancy is very befitting from the OEM of TN that inverts colors at 1m, and IPS that leaves ghost trails while playing video.

 

[JamesJones44]

Funny they marked their Thunderbolt ports when there are only 2 ports. A lot of the manufactures mix the TB ports and USB-C ports and put zero markings on them leaving it a guess as to which side supports what.

 

[NedSmelly]

Outside of businesses and corporations with huge contracts to buy laptops for their employees I just dont see many individual consumers wanting stuff like this.

High prices and crappy battery life = hard pass.

Honestly when I see a product with an Intel sticker on it then its an instant "no buy" for me.
Been that way for several years now, actually ever since 11th gen.

I have 2 jobs and both of my companies issued me laptops with 11gen intel processors.
One is a Lenovo workstation class laptop the other is an HP business class laptop.
Both are slow as dog crap and both wont even get me 3 hours off the plug.

I loath Intel.

Oh that's disappointing to hear how this model is going backwards. I've been using an X1 5th Gen (7500U 35W 2-core) on a regular basis for 5 years. Very reliable, battery life hasn't been a problem. I've always seen them as MacBook Air substitutes for general office/internet stuff, but with much more durable chassis/hardware for grab-and-go scenarios (a Gigabyte and Asus laptop has been lunched during that same operating period).

 

[bit_user]

It's disappointing this wasn't compared to any AMD laptops. I didn't even see the specs of the other models listed anywhere, but the competitors also feature the same CPU (I assume, because that's the configuration they previously reviewed) and the Gen 11 has a Raptor Lake CPU with 2P + 8E cores (which explains the difference in performance & battery life).

 

[bit_user]

Honestly when I see a product with an Intel sticker on it then its an instant "no buy" for me.
Been that way for several years now, actually ever since 11th gen.

I have 2 jobs and both of my companies issued me laptops with 11gen intel processors.
One is a Lenovo workstation class laptop the other is an HP business class laptop.
Both are slow as dog crap and both wont even get me 3 hours off the plug.

I can confirm that my i5-1250P (Gen 12) work laptop also features sub-3 hour battery life on MS Teams calls with only a couple video streams open and the Windows Performance settings set to "Max Efficiency", while on battery. Basically nothing else running in the background.

 

[bit_user]

Wait, WHAT??!?!?!

The battery life from this gen is nearly FOUR HOURS LESS than previous gen?

Am I reading this right?

This laptop has a core configuration of 6P + 8E + 2LPE. The Gen 11 model they reviewed last year (which I'm assuming is the same one listed in this review) had 2P + 8E. So, that aligns with both the performance & battery life data.

 

[subspruce]

Also copilot should have never been a key in the first place, we just can't afford to cramp small laptop keyboards any more.