(Credit: Lenovo)
Lenovo's ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 is the company's enterprise-focused Snapdragon-based Copilot+ PC. As such, it has the look and feel of the ThinkPad T series but with Copilot+ features. The unit I tested sported particularly good performance and outstanding battery life.
Measuring 12.35 by 8.64 by 0.67 inches, it’s not quite as small or light as Lenovo's X1 Carbon Gen 12, but it offers the traditional ThinkPad look with a matte "Eclipse Black" color, carbon-fiber top cover and aluminum bottom, the iconic red TrackPoint pointing stick, and a 2.40-by-4.53-inch touchpad.
As with the X1 Carbon, the T14s Gen 6's keyboard has been redesigned to include tactile bumps on some of the keys, making it easier for touch typists. It swaps the control and function keys (though you can switch them back with an included application), sports an integrated fingerprint reader in a power button on the right-hand side (above the speaker grill), and, of course, includes the new Copilot key required on Copilot+ machines.
(Credit: Lenovo)Weighing 2.66 pounds (3.23 with the included 65-watt charger), the T14s is lighter than the HP EliteBook Ultra G1g or the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x I tested recently, probably in part because it lacks a touch screen. Indeed, the unit I tested had a 14-inch 1,920-by-1,200 IPS display with 400 nits of brightness. This looks pretty good, but it’s not as nice as the 14-inch 2,240-by-1,400 IPS touch display on the EliteBook or the 14.5-inch 2,944-by-1,800 touch OLED display on the Yoga Slim7x. And I do miss having a touch display.
On the other hand, the ThinkPad T14s came with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, better than the others, which had 16GB of memory and 512GB of storage,
One area where the ThinkPad shines is in ports. The left side has two USB-C 40Gbps ports (used for charging), an HDMI 2.1 port, and an audio jack, while the right has a Kensington security slot and two 5Gbps USB-A slots. It’s good to have the HDMI port, and I’m glad to have a USB-A one, though in some ways, it would be more convenient to have USB-C on both sides.
For video, the ThinkPad T14s has a 1080p MIPI camera with IR. I found the camera to be fine, though not as strong as the one on the EliteBook. For special effects, it relies on Windows Studio Effects (as opposed to dedicated software Lenovo often includes with Intel- or AMD-based ThinkPads), and this worked pretty well. It supports Window Hello, and things like wake-on-approach worked as expected. Unlike most of the other Copilot+ machines I’ve seen, it has a physical webcam shutter, which I prefer.
It has dual two-watt speakers and a dual-microphone array for audio, and the sound quality was good, though not the best I’ve heard.
One area where the ThinkPad excelled was performance. Like the other Copilot+ machines I’ve tested, it is based on the Snapdragon X Elite (X1E-78-100), which contains 12 of Qulacomm’s Oryon ARM-based CPU cores that theoretically can run at up to 3.8GHz, with a boost to 4.3GHz. It also includes the higher-end version of Qualcomm's Adreno graphics and a Hexagon NPU rated at 45 trillion operations per second (TOPS).
Perhaps because it has more memory, it scored somewhat faster than the EliteBook G1 or the Yoga Slim 7x on most of the traditional benchmarks. It gave one of the highest scores on PCMark 10’s Applications test I’ve seen using the ARM native version of Microsoft Office. (Intel- or AMD-based machines still do better on most graphics-oriented tests, including gaming.)
On my toughest tests, it was able to transcode a video using Handbrake in an hour and 28 minutes, comparable to many regular x86 PCs I’ve tested, but notably slower than the Yoga Slim 7x. But it took about 46 minutes to run a complex Matlab portfolio simulation, again better than the EliteBook but not as strong as the Yoga, and notably slower than current Intel- or AMD-based systems.
Running a complex big data table in Excel took 54 minutes, a bit faster than other Snapdragon-based systems but slower than the 46 or 47 minutes I’ve seen on current Intel Meteor Lake systems (13th Generation Raptor Lake systems remain even better, taking only 37 minutes). Excel macros may rely on emulation, which may explain this.
Even though the 58-watt-hour battery is a bit smaller than the one on the EliteBook, battery life was excellent. It lasted 25 hours and 50 minutes on PC Mark 10’s Applications test with 100 nits of brightness, compared with 15 hours and 20 minutes for the Intel Meteor Lake-based Lenovo ThinkPad 2-in-1 Gen 9. I’m not sure how much this reflects real-world performance, but it certainly is impressive.
The ThinkPad does not have as much special software as the EliteBook. As you would expect, Lenovo includes all the features of Copilot+ PCs, including Windows Studio Effects, Windows Paint with Cocreator, and Live Captions. (For more details, see my earlier post and note that the much-touted Windows Recall feature has yet to be released.)
It does come with Lenovo Commercial Vantage, which makes it easy to check for system updates, and gives you basic control of power settings, display, and some basic audio, along with Dolby Access for some more audio control.
With a current price of $1,699, the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 sells for the same as the EliteBook, but includes twice the memory and storage, which can result in better performance in some applications. And it lasted notably longer on my battery tests. On the other hand, the audio-video system, the display, and the included software are better on the EliteBook. Again, I don't expect enterprise buyers to switch to Qualcomm-based Windows laptops in large numbers at this point; there's still work to be done on the security and management tools big organizations expect. But for testing, the ThinkPad T14s is a fine example.