IT buyers who think the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon is the pinnacle of thin and light business laptops will have to rethink. The new ThinkPad X1 Titanium Yoga ($ 1,899) introduces the classic executive notebook again. This dazzling look is the thinnest ThinkPad to date and rises just over 0.4 inches from the corner office. But based on the early look Lenovo gave us, ahead of the ThinkPad X1 Titanium’s debut at CES 2021 (we got a preview beforehand), we’ve found that the redesigned keyboard might like corporate stars .
Any color, as long as it’s titanium
Businesses like ThinkPads in part because their rugged black chassis has changed so little over the years. Recently, however, the current owner of ThinkPad line, Lenovo, has shaken things up. The X1 Yoga Titanium is the latest effort from the technology giant. The new laptop only comes in a lightweight titanium color scheme, which eliminates the black finishes of the X1 Carbon and other previous ThinkPad flagships.
It is a yoga, which means it has a 360 degree rotating hinge to turn it into a donkey, a tent or a tablet. This has been a standard standard for some ThinkPads for a while now; there is already a ThinkPad X1 Yoga on sale, now in its fifth generation, with a sixth generation announced along with the Titanium.
Besides being much thinner and lighter (it weighs 2.5 pounds) than the X1 Yoga and the X1 Carbon, the X1 Yoga Titanium’s unique screen distinguishes it. It’s a 13.5-inch touchscreen with a 450 nit backlight and a 3: 2 aspect ratio, making it longer and narrower than the 16: 9 widescreen orientation on current ThinkPads. With the added height, you can see more of a text document or webpage before browsing, a boon for overcrowded drivers who review memos all day.
The 3: 2 aspect ratio also makes a comeback with other ultra-portable laptops; we have seen a handful of such models in the past year. Before the advent of widescreen video, the 3: 2 aspect ratio was more common on laptops.
Leading business functions
The ThinkPad X1 Titanium Yoga has many leading business-friendly features that you can expect from a laptop that costs so much. It features user-friendly innovations, such as a webcam that includes both IR recognition sensors for face recognition via Windows Hello and a reassuring privacy shutter. These components require a little extra space between the top of the screen and the edge of the laptop, which means that the inside looks a little less cutting edge than, for example, the latest versions of the Dell XPS 13 (whose pixels actually drip ) from the laptop).
Within the X1 Titanium Yoga, there are many features that IT staff will appreciate, including the option for brand new 11th Generation Core processors with vPro management and security. The unit that Lenovo made available to try out has 8 GB of RAM and a 512 GB SSD, though buyers are able to order configurations with twice as much. The addition of vPro processors is often the key to adoption by Fortune 500 companies and other large corporations that use and manage large laptop fleets. Intel says the new 11th Generation Core processors with vPro offer an overall 20% better performance than the 10th generation they replace.
Despite all the business-friendly features, the X1 Titanium Yoga do has, there are still some keys missing. The most important among the absentees is a full-size HDMI port for physical connections to conference rooms and A / V systems in the lecture hall. (The chassis is way too thin for such a large port.) The only physical connections the X1 Titanium offers are rather two USB Type-C ports, a SIM card slot for the optional 5G / LTE modem, and ‘ a headphone jack.
Of course, you can easily order a USB-C to HDMI adapter or cable, but this is one more thing to remember before embarking on your next business trip (which, judging by the still raging COVID-19 pandemic, start) for a while).
Hey, what happened to the keyboard?
The most controversial X1 Titanium Yoga features are by far the keyboard and the touchpad. These two traditional means of input are important to ThinkPad users, and Lenovo has drastically changed that in this new laptop, starting with the touchpad. It omits the traditional physical click switch, but instead chooses a haptic feedback that simulates physical clicks with small vibrations.
This technology has been around for a few years on Apple laptops, where it works pretty well. But based on the short time I spent with the X1 Titanium, implementing Lenovo feels more uncomfortable. It relies on technology from a small company called Sensel, whose design integrates the haptic car sensors and all the other touchpad components into a single package. This compact design is a major reason why the X1 Titanium can be made so thin.
Sensel, which unveiled its next-generation prototypical haptic touchpad at CES on Monday, offers some settings in a standalone app on the X1 Titanium. This includes setting the fingerprint and click threshold, as well as adjusting the intensity of haptic feedback or eliminating it completely. This is similar to the options MacBooks offers, but overall I found typing and haptic clicks to be slightly less accurate on the X1 Titanium. It’s based on only a few minutes of use, but I may not have passed the required learning curve yet.
The X1 Titanium’s keyboard is equally unusual and potentially more controversial. This leaves the luxury keys and travel distance endemic to ThinkPads, in favor of a shallower, stiffer keyboard. I find this an unequivocally negative aspect. The keys are full size, but they are simply not as comfortable as on the X1 Yoga or X1 Carbon or any other ThinkPad laptop I have tried.
The overall feel is more similar to the way typing on the XPS 13 or the previous generation MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, which are equipped with butterfly-style switches. It taps, not taps.
Of course, we’ll have to wait to deliver our full verdict until we can further test the keyboard and the rest of the X1 Titanium, but it’s clear that the new keyboard is not a definite step forward in the ThinkPad design.