Lenovo continues to make the “laptop with a Kindle stuck to the lid” aesthetic work at CES 2021, announcing the ThinkBook Plus Gen 2. It raises the ante of the original ThinkBook Plus by a bigger and better 12 -inch E-ink. panel on the lid, with faster refresh rate, higher resolution and improved software that makes it easier to start applications without opening the laptop.
The ThinkBook Plus debuted at CES last year and stands out as a laptop with an E Ink screen built into the lid, which allows users to take notes, read e-books and things like display calendar information.
However, the new model enhances it with a 12-inch, 2560 x 1600 E-ink panel that supports multitouch and works with the pop-out stylus, which should be a more enjoyable E-Ink experience. The main screen on the inside swaps E Ink for a standard IPS screen, but it also has a resolution of 2560 x 1600, while offering 400 brightness and Dolby Vision support.
The rest of the specs also point to a capable laptop with Intel’s 11th generation processors, 16GB of LPDDR4x memory and up to 1TB of PCIe Gen 4 storage. The design has also been improved, with a smoother look. These improvements have also resulted in a higher price: it will be available sometime in the first quarter of 2021 starting at $ 1,549.
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In addition to the new E Ink-equipped ThinkBook, Lenovo has also announced three other new products in the range. There’s the ThinkBook 13x, which starts at $ 1,199 and claims to be one of the ‘slimmest 13-inch Intel Evo laptops’. It’s actually just a ThinkBook Plus Gen 2, minus the E Ink screen on top.
Finally, there are some AMD-powered options. First, there’s the ThinkBook 14p Gen 2, which starts at $ 849, offers AMD’s next-generation Ryzen processors (probably the rumored Ryzen 5000 chips for laptops expected to be announced at CES 2021) and offers configurations with up to 32 GB RAM and up to 1 TB PCIe Gen 4 storage. There are also two interesting screen choices: a 2.2K 14-inch IPS panel and a 2.8K 14-inch OLED.
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There’s also the ThinkBook 16p, the 16-inch version of the 14p, which also offers AMD’s next-generation chips and a larger screen (though there is no OLED option here). That said, it offers the option to add an upcoming Nvidia GeForce RTX discrete GPU for those who need extra power. The 16p starts at $ 1,299, and like the other three laptops, it’s available in Q1 2021.