It seems Lenovo couldn’t wait for CES 2017, they’ve set the benchmark for new laptops with the announcement of their new ThinkPad X1 Carbon. what was already regarded as one of the best on the market is getting even better.
We’ll get to the details in a second, but first lets take a look at the burn on Apple.
No Re-Inventing the Wheel
Lenovo understands what Apple has apparently forgotten, that is the typing experience is feature number 1. Their product page highlights the fact they’ve shipped more than a 100-million ThinkPads, all with their award-winning, ergonomic, highly accurate keyboard and they have no intention to change it (just to shave off a mm or 2).
The X1 Carbon delivers that same legendary interaction that IT pros and end-users alike have come to love and expect from ThinkPad—all day, every day.
In case you were living under a rock, the latest MacBook Pro has been widely panned for an unusable keyboard, something they used to be an industry leader in, but pushed too far and broke it, frustrating even the most avid Apple fan.
Lenovo weren’t done there, they loaded the new X1 Carbon a massive 15.5 hours of battery life. Even if real world is around 13-14hrs, that’s a marked improvement on what’s in your laptop bag right now. For professionals, making it through the day has still been a challenge that has evaded us, and before you start to tell me a work day is 8 hours, lets be honest, lots of us are on the laptop for nearly double that.
Maybe even more impressive is the inclusion of fast charging. We’ve had this in our phones for a few years now and its been missing from our laptops. The rapid charging feature provides 80% capacity in just 60 minutes. That means if you can find power during a lunch break or between flights, you’ll easily boost your battery up to more than 12 hours.
The 2017 ThinkPad X1 Carbon will come with Windows 10 Signature Edition, that means Lenovo are shipping stock Windows, without the typical bloatware. At this premium end of the market, this should be standard and we certainly hope Lenovo set the standard for the industry here.
In terms of connectivity, the new X1 Carbon will feature 2 Thunderbolt 3 (and 2x USB3.0 ports) with the USB-C connector, delivering up to 40 Gbps. With 4x times the data and 2x the video bandwidth of any other port type, you can output to two 4K displays.
It may be in the available options that Levono excels the most, with processor up to the Intel Core i7-7600U processor, a choice between 2560 x 1440 and 1920×1080 resolution on the 14″ display, up to 16GB 1866MHz DDR3 RAM and 1TB of SSD. There’s also the option to throw in a LTE SIM card and be connected on the road, the option for a fingerprint sensor and NFC, this is really a computing platform for you to customise to suit you.
While the Carbon has meant a single black colour option, this year they’re adding a silver option, but I’d still expect a serious majority of sales to be in the stealthy black.
The only knock may be the Integrated Intel HD Graphics 620, and only 720p webcam (the saving grace is that it supports Windows Hello), but if you can look past that, its one hell of a starting point for laptops in 2017.
Via Thurott.com