Carbon (2018)
The sixth-gen ThinkPad X1 Carbon is a worthy business ultraportable, but you’ll have to put up with some kinks
“It’s a 14in laptop, with room for full-size USB and HDMI ports, but it only weighs as much as a superslim 13in ultrabook”
SCORE PRICE £1,564 (£1,877 inc VAT) from uk.insight.com
This year sees the ThinkPad X1 Carbon series enter its sixth generation – and deservedly so. Few other business ultraportables have proven so consistently brilliant. There haven’t been any big changes to this version, other than making the jump to eighth-generation Intel Kaby Lake chips. We tested the Core i7-8550U, non-touch Quad HD model (20KH007BUK), which sits in the upper-middle of the range.
The new ThinkPad X1 Carbon is built with a mix of carbon fibre, glass fibre, plastic and magnesium alloy. As well as giving it a pleasant soft-touch finish, this makes it impressively light at only 1.13kg. So it’s a 14in laptop, with room for full-size USB and HDMI ports, but it only weighs as much as a super-slim 13in ultrabook.At 16mm, it’s also rather svelte.
The ThinkPad X1 Carbon’s ports are a cut above most ultraportables. Two USB 3.1 ports look after older peripherals, while there’s HDMI and a USB-C 3.1 port that can be used for either data or charging, but it’s the Thunderbolt 3 port that adds real flexibility. Also, hidden on the rear edge is a tiny compartment containing both a microSD slot and a micro SIM slot, which goes hand-in-hand with the integrated LTE-A receiver.
There’s no Ethernet jack, but there is an Ethernet extension adapter for another, slimmer port next to the Thunderbolt 3 connector. However, the two are so close together that the adapter prevents an USB-C cable from being plugged in – an unfortunate oversight, especially if you’ve connected to a monitor and want to use a wired network connection at the same time. Another issue is heat. The base can get noticeably warm on light use and uncomfortably hot under heavy loads.
On a more positive note, Lenovo has updated the ThinkPad X1 Carbon’s webcam with its “ThinkShutter”, a fancy term for a small piece of plastic that can slide over the camera sensor, obscuring it. This is a nice win for the privacy-conscious, while there’s also a fast-acting fingerprint reader on the right palm rest.
The keyboard has spacious, curved keys with plenty of travel, which makes for a comfy and quiet typing experience. In addition to the trackpad, Lenovo’s signature red pointing stick makes another appearance. Oddly, after every restart, the trackpad would suffer bouts of sluggishness, with occasional delay between swiping and the cursor moving, and taps sometimes not registering as clicks. Even weirder is the fix: closing and opening the lid, sending the laptop to sleep just long enough to snap the pad out of its funk. It’s not ruinous, but it is annoying.
You can equip the 14in ThinkPad X1 Carbon with either Full HD and Quad HD resolutions, as well as touch capability, but we were happy with our non-touch IPS panel running at a beautifully crisp 2,560 x 1,440. It’s a massive improvement on the 2017 version, which only reached a peak brightness of 312cd/m2 and covered 82% of the sRGB colour gamut. This time, brightness peaks at a searing 526.9cd/m2, and sRGB coverage has shot up to a near-perfect 99%. Wide viewing angles and a high contrast ratio of 1,525:1 also contribute to the general loveliness of this screen. The only catch is accuracy: an average Delta E of 4.04 is far from ideal. Our review unit had the same key internals as the Dell XPS 13: a quadcore Intel Core i7-8550U, 16GB of RAM (which is soldered on, preventing upgrades) and a 512GB PCIe SSD. But Dell’s laptop does a better job of avoiding throttling – it scored 96 overall in our 4K application benchmarks, whereas Lenovo’s scored 80. It’s still not that slow by ultraportable standards, but we know the hardware is capable of better. Battery life is middling. The ThinkPad lasted 7hrs 3mins in our video playback tests, which, again, isn’t as impressive as the 10hrs 7mins achieved by the XPS 13. This latest ThinkPad X1 Carbon is a more qualified success than its recent predecessors: it’s hot, expensive and not as powerful as the XPS 13, despite having the same processor and RAM. And yet, it’s still remarkably endearing.
SPECIFICATIONS Quad-core 1.8GHz Intel Core i7-8550U processor Intel UHD Graphics 620 16GB RAM 14in IPS display, 2,560 x 1,440 resolution 512GB M.2 PCIe SSD 2x2 802.11ac Wi-Fi
Bluetooth 4.1 Thunderbolt 3 USB-C 3.1 2 x Type-A USB 3.1 HDMI 2 microSD card reader micro SIM HD webcam 41Wh battery Windows 10 Pro 324 x 217 x 16mm (WDH) 1.13kg 3yr on-site warranty