Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 12 Review: Too Dang Expensive? A Review of ThinkPad’s Best ThinkPad On The Market
The ThinkPad X1 Carbon has been in use since 2012 and now is in its 12th incarnation, it is the best laptop on the market. Today’s X1 Carbon has been honed to a fine point—yet it would be legitimately difficult to distinguish from the original. I reviewed it for WIRED when I was younger.
The song writ large is the same it’s always been. The business laptop is designed to kill other people. It retains the same size 14-inch LCD (with 16:10 aspect ratio, now at 2,880 x 1,800 pixels) that it has always had, with the weight now hitting 2.2 pounds— exhibiting a healthy and steady weight loss over the years.
I measured the thickness at 21 millimeters, largely owing to a sizable rubber foot that runs along the back of the base to prop the keyboard up a bit. It is made from recycled aluminum, magnesium, carbon fiber, and post-consumer materials that are used throughout its construction.
Source: Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 12 Review: Too Dang Expensive
The HP Spectre x360: A Powerful Graphics Processor for a New Laptop, and Its Performances on AI Tasks
There are many other innovations here that are still being worked on. You know that the brand is close to an innovation conclusion when they start talking about new markers on the keyboard. There’s also a small ridge that juts out at the top of the screen where the webcam (featuring a manual shutter) appears, plus a relocated fingerprint reader, but any other cosmetic changes are tough to suss out.
The major upgrade this season is the introduction of the Intel Core Ultra processor, which has more power, and is backed up by a large amount of memory and hard drive space. The unit is light on ports and partially covered by a flip-out panel, with two Thunderbolt 4 ports and a single USB-A port.
The HP Spectre x360 series was once an alternative to stuffier laptops such as the Lenovo ThinkPad line. Back in the late 2010s, Spectres looked like props from Tron, with sharp edges, cut corners, and gold trim on some models, for Pete’s sake.
Sure enough, there’s ample power in those specs, and the Spectre x360 turned in the best performance I’ve seen to date on general business apps—by a healthy margin of 20 percent or more versus other Core Ultra laptops on many tests. It’s not a bad place to be on graphics apps, though it’s not a great place to be in this department. If you wish to do significant rendering and gaming activities, you need a laptop with a graphics card that can deliver more performance than the Core Ultra. On AI tasks, the Spectre fell just a hair shy of the high mark set by the MSI Prestige 13 AI Evo in my prior testing.
Size and weight are not an issue, since the unit is heavier than the X1 Carbon with 19 millimeters of thickness and a 2.4-pound weight. The inclusion of a touchscreen and a 360-degree hinge is not bad. A slightly larger battery may be reflected by the extra weight. My testing (with a YouTube video playback at full brightness) achieved 10.5 hours of running time—significantly better than other Core Ultra laptops I’ve tested to date.
The OLED screen is dazzlingly bright, which is right in line with the rest of the market today. The speakers on the unit are great, with both front and rear speakers, and they were improved by an impressive cooling system that wasn’t very loud.
The Performance and Usability of the Spectre Penta-Like Cortegral Based Multi-Core Pencil
My only real complaint is a fairly mild one. While the Spectre’s keyboard is fine, the haptic touchpad can be erratic, missing taps and clicks, depending on where you hit it. I don’t know whether this is a simple user error due to freakishly long fingers, but it’s an issue I’ve had with various Spectres for years. It has arguably improved a bit with the new touchpad, but it’s still a thorny problem that created a minor headache for me during extended use.
Pricing is tricky, as the exact specification I was sent isn’t readily available. There is a close version of the computer for $1,400, but it will cost around $1,850 if you change it to one that has 16 GB of RAM. Even at the higher price, I’d say the exceptional performance, battery life, and usability options merit the outlay.