Pros & Cons
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- Stylish, durable design
- Professional-quality 2.8K OLED touch screen
- Strong performance for general productivity
- Intriguing AI enhancements
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- Keyboard is good, but a step down from ThinkPad-typical
- No TrackPoint input nub
- Can't beat the competition on sheer speed
Lenovo ThinkPad X9 15 Aura Edition Specs
| Boot Drive Capacity (as Tested) | 1 |
| Boot Drive Type | SSD |
| Class | Business |
| Class | Ultraportable |
| Dimensions (HWD) | 0.51 by 13.37 by 9 inches |
| Graphics Processor | Intel Arc Graphics 140V |
| Native Display Resolution | 2880 by 1800 |
| Operating System | Windows 11 Pro |
| Panel Technology | OLED |
| Processor | Intel Core Ultra 7 258V |
| RAM (as Tested) | 32 |
| Screen Refresh Rate | 120 |
| Screen Size | 15.3 |
| Tested Battery Life (Hours:Minutes) | 21:02 |
| Touch Screen | |
| Variable Refresh Support | Yes |
| Weight | 3.09 |
| Wireless Networking | Bluetooth 5.4 |
| Wireless Networking | Wi-Fi 7 |
The 15-inch business laptop is an unusual breed these days, but there's one important holdout—Lenovo's ThinkPad line. I know what you're asking right now: Another review of a boxy black Lenovo workhorse? But hear me out. The Lenovo ThinkPad X9 15 Aura Edition ($1,599 to start; $2,069 as tested) is nothing like the ThinkPad you're picturing in your mind. Yes, it's a capable laptop, geared here toward small business and discriminating consumers instead of corporate fleets, and packed with Lenovo's usual mix of performance, features, and reliability. But the X9 is a sharp departure from the Lenovo norm: It's designed to go head-to-head with Apple's MacBooks, serving up a combination of sleek industrial design and advanced AI features. It's not a perfect laptop—but it's very, very good. We were slightly bigger fans of Lenovo's 14-inch version of the X9, tapping that smaller model for our Editors' Choice award.
What's an 'Aura Edition'? It's About AI Enhancements
The ThinkPad X9 15 is part of Lenovo's Aura Edition series of premium systems, part of a collaboration with Intel to deliver advanced features on machines with the chip maker's latest-generation "Lunar Lake" processors.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)For starters, every Aura Edition laptop is also a Microsoft Copilot+ PC, with the eponymous AI assistant and various generative tools for working with text and images. But Aura Editions also go above and beyond Copilot+ with Lenovo AI Now, a locally run version of Meta’s Llama 3 that adds a wealth of new features.
In this case, that means exclusive AI-enabled Smart Modes that automatically adjust your settings depending on what you need at the moment. Working in public? Shield Mode will protect your privacy. Online meeting? Collaboration Mode will optimize your camera settings. Need to focus? Attention Mode will mute notifications and block distracting domains to give you a timed chunk of wholly focused work. You'll even get a reminder to take a break when you're done.
Aura Edition also brings seamless tap-to-share with support for Android and iOS phones, using an "AI Virtual Smart Sensor"—imagine a mix of NFC and Intel Unison for sharing photos without having to fumble for a cable or navigate file menus. Lenovo Smart Care, meanwhile, offers real-time, on-device troubleshooting.
The Aura Edition enhancement even extends to the internal design, with a new cooling approach developed jointly by Lenovo and Intel. The setup—called "Engine Hub," and centered inside a blocky strip on the underside of the laptop—houses key components together for improved cooling. The Hub enables the laptop to be thinner and lighter while minimizing the performance compromise.
Configuration Options and Pricing
Let's talk processor power. The Lenovo ThinkPad X9 15 Aura Edition is an Intel-only laptop, with options for an Intel Core Ultra 5 and Core Ultra 7 processors. The base model has an Intel Core Ultra 5 226V with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD for $1,599. Our review unit came with an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD for $2,069. The top configuration ($2,249) serves up an Intel Core Ultra 7 268V processor, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD.
In terms of upgradability and reparability, the laptop uses soldered-on memory, so there's no option for adding RAM. However, you can swap in a different M.2 SSD to add more capacity.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Design: Not Your Average ThinkPad
The X9 15 may bear the ThinkPad name, but it doesn't look or feel like your typical ThinkPad. Instead of the black, boxy chassis you might expect, the X9 has an aluminum chassis and lid in a spiffy Thunder Grey shade with a textured matte finish.
The end product is a slim chassis that measures a mere half-inch thick and weighs just over 3 pounds, which is as portable as you'll get from a business machine with a display this size. The chassis build is sturdy enough to keep the machine from flexing when you pick it up or type on it, and durable enough to meet MIL-STD-810H standards for cold, heat, dust, and vibration. To get much more durable than that, you'd need a semi-ruggedized or fully rugged laptop.
Display, Webcam, and Audio: Anchored by an Awesome OLED
One of the ThinkPad X9's most striking features is its OLED display. The 15.3-inch, 2,880-by-1,800-pixel panel looks gorgeous, with vibrant colors, crisp detail, and rich dark hues and blacks. The base model has a standard OLED panel, but our review unit included a touch screen, which you can get on all but the most basic configurations.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)On a system clearly designed to compete with the MacBook Pro, Lenovo's combination of an OLED panel and touch-screen support gives it a visual and tactile advantage.
The panel itself has a 120Hz refresh rate for ultra-smooth motion and X-Rite color calibration for professional-grade color accuracy. Brightness of 500 nits (candelas per square meter), along with HDR support, makes this a vibrant and easy-to-read display, even for small text and detailed spreadsheets. It should also be easier on the eyes than most laptop displays, thanks to TÜV Rheinland certification for low blue-light emissions. You can hop up the screen even further with optional anti-glare and anti-smudge coatings.
Above the display panel, you'll find a small protruding stripe that houses the 1440p IR webcam and serves as a lip for easily opening the lid. Aside from this webcam bump, the display is surrounded by 5mm-wide bezels, which practically disappear when viewing the screen.
Keyboard and Input: Not Quite Up to ThinkPad Standards
If there's one downside to the ThinkPad X9's departure from many ThinkPad norms, it's the keyboard. The Lenovo faithful will miss the signature red TrackPoint in the center of the keyboard, and typing on the ThinkPad X9 is a definite downgrade from the usual ThinkPad.
For one, the overall key feel isn't great. The keys are lower profile, with a mushier feel. The sculpted keycaps are nice, but the feel of the spacebar is different from the rest of the keys, and the more generic layout will bug long-time ThinkPad users.
What's more, there's no number pad or dedicated function-key cluster—two very notable omissions. The arrow keys are another big drawback: Half-size up and down arrows are crammed into the space of a single key.
All that said, if you use the X9 keyboard side-by-side with a more traditional Lenovo ThinkPad, you'll be able to feel the differences, but the keyboard is still very good. It falls short of the best of the best, but it isn't half-bad versus almost everything else that's out there.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)There's one huge positive just below the keyboard, however: a high-quality haptic touchpad with a glass surface and impeccable response to every tap and swipe. It's also significantly larger than the normal ThinkPad offerings, measuring 6.5 inches diagonally, with thumb buttons to accompany a TrackPoint.
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Ports and Connectivity: A Light But Capable Mix
As is common for ultraportables, the port selection is slim but capable. You'll get two Thunderbolt 4/USB-C ports (which double as charging ports, supporting power delivery on both sides of the machine), a single USB-A connection, an HDMI 2.1 output that supports 60Hz output to any monitor or TV, and a headphone jack.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)As I said, there's not much port selection, but Thunderbolt 4 capability is significant and flexible, especially when paired with a desktop dock. You'll also get robust wireless connectivity, with support for both Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.
Performance Testing: 'Lunar Lake' Is Down to Earth
To get the best comparisons for the ThinkPad X9, I looked at some of the top thin-and-light 15- and 16-inch laptops. The Acer Swift 16 AI is a similarly AI-enhanced system with a comparable Intel processor. The Apple MacBook Air 15 and MacBook Pro 16 are flagship systems from Apple, but also the systems that the X9 is clearly built to compete with. The Asus ProArt P16 (H7606) is another high-quality professional system with an OLED display, while the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition is a more consumer-focused take on Lenovo's Aura Edition AI enhancements.
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
Our primary overall benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC's storage throughput.
Three more tests are CPU-centric or processor-intensive. Maxon's Cinebench 2024 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs' Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the freeware video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.
Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Creators rates a PC's image editing prowess with a variety of automated operations that it performs in Adobe Photoshop 25.
For everyday work, the ThinkPad X9 tips past the Acer Swift 16 AI and Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition in PCMark 10, but all of them are basically fine on that score; they all scored comfortably above the 4,000-point baseline that signals good business productivity. (MacBooks can't run PCMark, so they weren't included in this test.)
In Cinebench 2024, the MacBook Pro with its M4 Pro chip significantly outperformed the competition, as expected. The ThinkPad X9 delivered the lowest score in the group, but still a respectable one. The ThinkPad X9 was also the slowest in the Handbrake video-transcoding trial, taking more than seven minutes versus the five to six of most competitors here, and falling well behind the MacBook Pro and Asus ProArt.
Looking at Geekbench, the X9 is close to even with the Acer Swift 16 AI and the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i; in the Photoshop trial, the X9 fared better, thanks to our configuration's 32GB of RAM. It again trailed the premium MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, though, as well as the Asus ProArt P16.
In short, the ThinkPad X9 is a perfectly capable laptop for general office tasks. However, it's not the fastest machine out there, and it gets outpaced by more elite, content-creation-focused systems with more powerful hardware. Keep it to the basics, and it should satisfy.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
We challenge laptops' graphics with a quartet of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K) use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds, while Steel Nomad's regular (4K) and Light (1440p) subtests focus on APIs more commonly used for game development, like DirectX 12, to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. A fifth test, Solar Bay, emphasizes ray-tracing performance.
The pattern we saw in our general performance tests continued in the 3DMark graphics benchmarks. The ThinkPad X9 showed a slight downgrade in graphics capability versus the consumer-oriented Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i, and it was often neck-and-neck with the Acer Swift 16 AI. However, the higher-end pro laptops like the Apple MacBook Pro and the Asus ProArt left them all behind, thanks to their workstation-level graphics. (Note: The MacBooks are compatible with only a subset of these 3DMark graphics tests; some of the tests are Windows-only. That's why the Macs appear in some bar charts here and not others.)
This isn't too surprising when you consider that those pro systems have either a dedicated graphics card or, in the MacBook Pro's case, powerful discrete-grade graphics silicon on the SoC. When you compare the ThinkPad X9 with other similarly equipped laptops in our lineup, it holds its own.
Battery Life and Display Tests
We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits.
When it comes to battery life, the ThinkPad X9 delivers an impressive 21 hours on a single charge. That's a little better than the Acer Swift 16 and the MacBook Air, and a lot better than the Asus ProArt P16. However, the ThinkPad X9 doesn't quite reach the all-day-plus mark of systems like the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i and the 16-inch MacBook Pro, which can go beyond 24 hours on our playback trial.
Where the ThinkPad X9 really shines, even against tough competition, is its display. In our tests, the 2.8K OLED touch screen performs just as magnificently as it looks. It covers 100% of both the sRGB and DCI-P3 color ranges and 94% of Adobe RGB, giving it a slight edge over the Acer Swift 16 AI and the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i. Even the Asus ProArt P16, designed for creative pros, beats it in Adobe RGB coverage by just three percentage points.
It's also nice and bright, hitting 492 nits in our testing, which lines up with Lenovo's 500-nit claim. That brightness also puts it ahead of both the Acer Swift 16 AI and the Asus ProArt P16.
While a great display won't speed up your spreadsheets, it does make a noticeable difference in the overall experience. The clearer, sharper, and easier-to-read screen contributes to a more premium feel, and it can even boost productivity, letting you tile windows side by side in a way that might feel overly cramped versus, say, on the 14-inch version of the ThinkPad X9.