(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
For the past few weeks, I've been traveling with Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13, the Intel Lunar Lake version of the company's high-end business laptop, and I'm impressed. Not only is this year's version lighter, it offers much better battery life and surprisingly better performance, particularly on my toughest tests.
Physically, the newest X1 Carbon looks a lot like its Meteor Lake-based predecessor, with a 14-inch screen and relatively small bezels, a bump above the screen for the webcam, and the traditional ThinkPad black matte color with a red TrackPoint pointing stick in the middle. Measuring 12.31 by 8.45 by 0.32-0.59 inches, it's just a bit thinner than last year's version, and it weighs 2.17 pounds (2.9 pounds with a new 65-watt charger that is smaller but slightly heavier than last year’s version), making it the lightest 14-inch clamshell notebook I've tested. (Last year's version weighed 2.41 pounds by itself and 2.96 pounds with the charger.)
From a hardware perspective, most of the features are similar to the previous generation. It has two USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 ports on the left-hand side, along with a USB-A 3.2 port and a slot for a nano SIM for an optional WWAN feature. The right side has a Kensington lock, HDMI 2.1, another USB-A, an audio jack, and the power key. This is a great selection of ports; the only thing I’d prefer would be USB-C on both sides. It has a 120mm glass trackpad, with a TrackPoint that you can double-tap to bring up a Quick Menu that controls settings for the microphone, choosing your output device, and using your voice to type into a text box. As with the earlier version, I didn't use this much but can see where it might be helpful.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The unit I tested has a 2,880-by-1,800 OLED display, supporting up to 400 nits and 120Hz, in the now-standard 16:10 ratio. This was a non-touch version, and while I prefer touch screens, it looked great. At the moment, it is not available with a touch screen.
One change seems to be the webcam. While it's still listed as a 1080p camera with IR, I found this year's version to be vastly improved. It's not the best camera I've tested, but it's sharp, has good colors, and a nice depth of field. As before, it has a physical privacy cover. It has two speakers and two microphones with support for Dolby Atmos and Dolby Voice. I found these to be pretty good, but not special.
Of course, the big change is that it is based on Intel’s Core Ultra 7 258V (Lunar Lake), which is a huge change from the previous version. The main processing parts of the chip are made on TSMC’s N3B (3nm) process, a big departure from previous chips made by Intel itself. And it has 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores, but no multi-threading, so a total of 8 threads—notably less than the previous (Meteor Lake generation). Still, it runs at a base frequency of 2.2GHz, with turbo speeds up to 4.8GHz, requires 17 to 35 watts of power, has Intel Arc Graphics 140V with 8 Xe cores, and a NPU that intel rates at 47 Int8 TOPS.
The current generation does not have vPro support—a requirement for many large organizations—but Intel has said versions with vPro will come this spring, and Lenovo will almost certainly offer a version with that when it is available.
The change in processor really shows up in performance testing. On basic benchmarks, the Lunar Lake version scores fairly similar to the Meteor Lake version and a bit behind the HP OmniBook Ultra 14 with AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 HX375 known as Strix Point. In graphics tests, it even beat the Strix Point system on some—though not all—of the tests.
But on my toughest tests, those that run for a long time, the differences were striking. Transcoding a video in Handbrake took 40 minutes, compared with 54 minutes on the Strix Point machine and 76 minutes on the Meteor Lake version. Running a large model in MatLab took under 25 minutes on the Lunar Lake system, compared with about 36 minutes on the Strix Point one and over 30 on the Lunar Lake system. And it finished a huge Excel model with a lot of data tables in 34 minutes, compared with 44 on the Strix Point one and 46 on the Lunar Lake. (This same test finished in 35 minutes on the Raptor-Lake based X1 Carbon Gen 11).
I’ve gotten slightly better numbers for Handbrake and MatLab on larger systems with more power-hungry CPUs and discrete graphics; but in all these cases, these are the fastest performance I’ve seen on these tests on typical small laptops, often by a big margin. That means that when performance really matters for business applications, Lunar Lake makes a big difference. The new ThinkPad also seemed quite snappy, though that’s true of all the recent systems I’ve tested.
I also saw a big improvement in battery life. On PCMarks 10’s Modern Office, I was able to run the new system for 16 hours and 54 minutes at 40 nits, and 15 hours and 58 minutes at 100 nits. This isn’t as good as I saw on the HP system (where I got more than 20 hours at 40 nits and a bit over 16 hours at 100 nits), but much better than I saw on Meteor Lake systems. In practice, this worked great for me. I carried it around CES, taking notes in many meetings and left the charger in the hotel room, yet still had plenty of power left at the end of the day.
The ThinkPad X1 Gen 13 is a Copilot+ PC, with the typical set of Copilot+ applications, including Windows Studio Effects, Live Creator, and Cocreator. Presumably, it should also support other Copilot+ features that Microsoft has promised, including the Recall feature, Click to Do, and improved search.
Lenovo is marketing this as an "Aura Edition," referring to a set of software that supposedly is unique to this generation of Intel hardware. These include Smart Care, a phone app that connects you with support, including how-to videos, and Smart Share, a version of Intel’s Unison software for easily letting you transfer photos between the machine and your phone.
The highlight is Smart Modes, which are a set of options within Lenovo’s Commercial Vantage software. The Power option is the standard choices for Windows power. In the Shield option, you can set the machine to alert you when someone is looking over your shoulder at your screen, or even to blur the screen in those situations; or automatically connect you with a VPN when using Wi-Fi. The collaboration option includes low light enhancement. Attention silences notifications and blocks specific domains (such as social networks) for a period of time. Wellness reminds you to take breaks from looking at your screen and reminds you to sit up straight. These are all nice, but hardly groundbreaking. (And of course, the Vantage software continues to have other features, including firmware updates, details about the device, and management tools for the display and power.)
As I write this, a ThinkPad Gen 13 Aura Edition as I tested is available on CDW’s website with a Core Ultra 7 258V processor, 2.8K OLED display, 32GB and a 512 GB SSD, for $2,043. Lenovo’s website shows a 1 TB SSD version for $2,294 and a 2 TB SSD version for $2,749, so today your only choices are fairly premium configurations. (Lenovo is still selling both the Gen 11 and Gen 12 versions of the X1 at lower costs with lower configurations; and says more configurations – including touch-screen and vPro versions, as well as build-to-order – are coming shortly.)
Still, for the extra money, you’re getting additional AI and CoPilot+ features, a big bump in battery life, and notably better performance – particularly in big applications where performance matters most. All in all, it’s a great machine.