Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 12 Review: Too Dang Expensive? A Short Review and Some Realistic Consequences
The laptop of the brand, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon line, has been in use for 12 years and has reached a level of maturity few other brands can boast. There is a fine point to the X1 Carbon, but it would be difficult to distinguish it from the original. I’d know, because I reviewed it for WIRED way back when.
The song writ large remains the same as ever. This is the flagship laptop by the company, designed to kill all others. It retains the same size 14-inch LCD (with 16:10 aspect ratio, now at 2,880 x 1,800 pixels) that it has always had, with the weight now hitting 2.2 pounds— exhibiting a healthy and steady weight loss over the years.
I measured the thickness using the rubber foot that’s on the back of the base to support the keyboard. The current chassis is made from recycled aluminum, magnesium, and carbon fiber as well as post-consumer materials.
Source: Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 12 Review: Too Dang Expensive
Benchmarking Core Ultra CPUs on Business Apps and Graphics: The Case of the Spectre x360 Laptop in 2024
There are many other innovations that are incremental. When the brand starts mentioning the new markings on the keyboard, you can see that we are getting close to an innovation terminus. There’s also a small ridge that juts out at the top of the screen where the webcam (featuring a manual shutter) appears, plus a relocated fingerprint reader, but any other cosmetic changes are tough to suss out.
The big news is that the new Intel Core Ultra CPU can be found in the model with the Ultra 7 155H chip. A small group of companies are dropping machines with Ultra chips this month with the major pitch being around artificial intelligence performance, better power efficiency, and improved integrated graphics. AI-driven benchmarks are still a new thing, so until I have a decent base of results to draw from, I’m reporting on my standard battery of tests that mix various business apps and graphics benchmarks.
The 2024 rendition of the Spectre x360 sticks closely to the design of the 2023 model, all built around showcasing the “360” portion of the name. The laptop is able to be converted to a 14-inch tablet by folding back 180 degrees. A fingertip works on the screen, as does the stylus included in the box, and the rechargeable active pen snaps magnetically to the side of the chassis when not in use.
I think the Spectre x360 turned in the best performance I’ve seen to date, by a good margin of 20 percent or more, over other Core Ultra laptops on many tests. It was about par for the course on graphics apps, though no slouch in this department either. You still have to upgrade your laptop to get a graphics card with integratedGPU if you want to do a lot of gaming or rendering. On AI tasks, the Spectre fell just a hair shy of the high mark set by the MSI Prestige 13 AI Evo in my prior testing.
Size and weight are fine, although the unit is heavier than the similarly sized Lenovo X1 Carbon, with 19 millimeters of thickness and a 2.4-pound weight. The inclusion of a touchscreen and a hinge is not bad. The extra weight may also reflect a slightly larger battery. My testing (with a YouTube video playback at full brightness) achieved 10.5 hours of running time—significantly better than other Core Ultra laptops I’ve tested to date.
The screen is beautiful and in line with the rest of the market. The speakers on the unit are top-performing, with top-firing speakers, two front-firing speakers and an impressive cooling system that barely saw a fan kicking in.
A Review of the Prototype Pencil with the HP HP P9050 Touchpad for a High Performance, Low Cryogenic Computing System
The only real complaint I have is a fairly mild one. The keyboard is fine, but the Hapsis can be missing taps and clicks depending on where you hit it. I didn’t know whether it was a simple user error or a problem with the software, but it has been a problem with various Spectres for years. It has arguably improved a bit with the new touchpad, but it’s still a thorny problem that created a minor headache for me during extended use.
Pricing is difficult because the exact specification I was given isn’t readily available. You can get a close version for $1,400 on HP.com with 16 GB of RAM, but if you configure it on HP’s website, you’ll come up with a price of around $1,850. Even at the higher price, I’d say the exceptional performance, battery life, and usability options merit the outlay.
