Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Carbon series has long been a standard in lightweight executive notebooks. It’s no longer the lightest corporate machine around—the ThinkPad X1 Nano and HP’s Elite Dragonfly Max are both lighter, but the X1 Carbon remains a terrific choice.
The ninth-generation X1 Carbon doesn’t depart much from the previous versions, though it does come with the Tiger Lake generation of Intel processors. Earlier in the year, I looked at this year’s X1 Yoga, which in many ways is the same excellent machine as a convertible, though with an aluminum casing. Measuring 0.59 by 12.4 by 8.7 inches, and weighing 2.49 pounds (3.22 pounds with the charger), the X1 Carbon remains among the lightest 14-inch notebooks on the market. And the version I tested has the matte black carbon-fiber and magnesium-alloy chassis that has been the hallmark of the ThinkPad designs for years.
Though the basic look is the same, there are some subtle improvements that stand out. To begin with, it now has a display with a 16:10 ratio and smaller bezels, giving you a bit more depth on web pages and documents. The unit I used had a 1,920-by-1,200-pixel non-touch display rated at 400 nits of brightness, and it looked quite good, but there are touch-screen, privacy guard, and 3,840-by-2,400 display options, too.
In addition, the touchpad is a bit bigger, which is nice, though it still shows wear a bit more than I’d like. It still has physical buttons on the touchpad and the classic TrackPoint pointing stick. I’ve gotten quite used to ThinkPad keyboards over the years, and this is pretty much as you’d expect, with function keys doubling for calling, and a fingerprint reader built into the power key. It remains among the best keyboards on the market.
The ThinkPad X1 Carbon offers a good selection of ports. The left side has two USB-C/Thunderbolt ports for charging, a USB-A port, and an HDMI port; the right side has a second USB-A port (one of which offers power) as well as a headset jack.
Of course, for more ports, you can use a USB-C dock. I tried it with both the ThinkPad Thunderbolt Dock 3 Gen 2 and OWC’s Thunderbolt Dock and it worked fine with external drives, an external keyboard, as well as 2,560-by-1,440 HDMI and FHD DisplayPort external monitors.
The unit I tested had an 11th Generation Intel Core i7-1185G7 (Tiger Lake), a 4-core/8-thread processor with a nominal speed of 3GHz and vPro support, made on Intel’s 10nm SuperFin process, with 16GB of memory and a 512GB SSD. In general, it did slightly better on most of the normal benchmarks I ran than other machines with the same processor (including the HP Aero 840 G4 and the Dell Latitude 9420).
On my most difficult performance tests, it took 42 minutes to complete a large Excel model with a data table and Monte Carlo simulations, about the same as the other Tiger Lake machines. It took 47 minutes to execute a complex MatLab portfolio simulation. Again, these were just a little better than other Tiger Lake-U machines. Lenovo talks about how the rear ventilation on this year’s model improves efficiency, and while I’m not sure that’s the reason, it’s still good to see.
It has a 57-watt hour battery; I got over 14 hours on my battery test, an improvement from last year’s model. PCMag got more than 19 hours in a video playback test, the best in class.
For video conferencing, I found the 720p webcam to be pretty good, if a bit on the dark side. It has a decent size button that activates a physical privacy cover.
With four microphones, and speakers on both sides of the keyboard plus two down-firing woofers, it sounded quite good. A Dolby Access app includes features such as keyboard noise suppression and a mode that focuses on the speaker, suppressing other noises in the room.
Options include 4G and 5G modems; and a camera with an IR sensor, which you can use for Human Presence Detection and face recognition. Instead, I used the fingerprint reader built into the power button for Windows Hello, and that worked fine.
Lenovo does not include a lot of extra software. The Lenovo Commercial Vantage software offers quick settings for power, audio, and display options, while a Quick Clean application temporarily locks the keyboard and touchpad while you clean them. These are nice, but unobtrusive.
On the Lenovo website, pricing starts at $1,332 for a model with an Intel Core i5-1135G7, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD. A model similar to the one I tested (but with 32GB of RAM) was selling for $2,099. That’s a good price for this class of machine. Overall, the X1 Carbon is fast and lightweight, and still perhaps the best choice for businesses that need lightweight notebooks.
