Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Carbon may be the perfect laptop for mobile elites

It’s all about the flare now. Laptops need to look cool, feel cool and have cool features that aren’t necessarily useful (I’m looking at you, Touch Bar) in order to appeal to the mass market, to appeal to that group of people who want to feel like they’re one of the elite. What about those of us who want all the performance, but without the frills?

Well, thankfully, you’ve still got the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon. And it’s the clean, focused and durable machine it’s always been — only now it’s looking even better than before.

For starters, it’s got new internals. The refreshed 2017 ThinkPad X1 Carbon comes with the new 7th-generation Intel Core i7 processors (up to an Intel Core vPro i7-7600U) and up to 16GB of 1,866 MHz LPDDR3 memory. For mass storage, the device will come packing up to 1TB of PCIe TLC OPAL2 storage.

Then, it’s got a new body. For this new 14-inch ThinkPad X1 Carbon, Lenovo’s gone for super slim display bezels (similar to that on the Dell XPS 13’s Infinity Display). This means they’ve managed to fit a 14-inch panel into the general footprint of a 13.3-inch laptop. You’ll have a choice of two display resolutions, a Full HD panel with 1920×1080 pixels and a 2K panel with 2560×1440 pixels. Both have a brightness of 300 nits.

Despite the fact that the laptop’s got really thin displays, Lenovo did compromise a little on the display forehead’s width. But because of this, they’ve managed to fit a 720p webcam there and an Infrared camera for Windows Hello, which is much better than the XPS 13’s signature up-your-nose camera angle.

Lenovo’s efforts in saving space on the new ThinkPad X1 Carbon yielded a footprint that’s 8% smaller than the past generations and a staggering weight of just 1.14kg. And the best part is that Lenovo’s managed to do all that yet still give the ThinkPad X1 Carbon a rated battery life of up to 15.5 hours on the variant with a Full HD display.

Lenovo’s also updated the I/O on the 2017 X1 Carbon, so now it’s got two Thunderbolt 3 ports (it also charges via USB Type-C), two USB 3.0 Type-A ports and an HDMI port. It’s also got a Qualcomm Snapdragon X7 LTE modem for those times where you don’t have WiFi. Its trackpad is also a Microsoft Precision Trackpad now so you get full access to all the handy gestures. The biggest drawback of the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, however, is that it lacks an SD card slot — what a bummer.

Although I’d personally prefer to have a dedicated graphics card in my laptops, I really can’t argue with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon’s seemingly excellent battery life — something laptops with dedicated GPUs simply can’t match. Pair that with solid specs, a great build (mmm, that carbon fibre), great size and weight, sleek no-nonsense looks and it seems like you’ve got a really really good all-day laptop for work here…unless your work requires lots of GPU power, that is.

Besides the X1 Carbon, Lenovo also updated the ThinkPad X1 Yoga (the bendy 360 one) and the ThinkPad X1 Tablet for 2017 too. The X1 Yoga gets an updated processor (up to a Core i7-7650U), Microsoft Precision Trackpad and two USB Type-C Thunderbolt 3 ports. The X1 Tablet, on the other hand, gets new 7th-generation Intel Kaby Lake Y processors.

Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Carbon has prices starting from USD1,349 (around RM6,070) while the X1 Yoga will start at USD1,499 (around RM6,750). Both these variants will be available beginning February 2017 and will come in classic ThinkPad Black and a new Silver colour. The ThinkPad X1 Tablet, on the other hand, will see prices start from USD949 (around RM4,270) and will be available beginning March 2017.