Lenovo announced a slew of new business laptops at Mobile World Congress, but two of the most interesting ones happen to be the smallest — the ThinkBook 13s Gen 4 i and ThinkPad X13s Gen 1.
The all-new ThinkPad X13s Gen 1 is the first true business Windows on Snapdragon laptop, Lenovo said in its announcement. The 13.3-inch 16:10 laptop was in development for four years with Qualcomm and Microsoft. It’s powered by the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 compute platform, which it says has an 85% CPU and 57% GPU improvement from the last-gen chips.
The ThinkPad X13s is the world’s first laptop powered by the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 compute platform.
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Past laptops we’ve tested with Snapdragon chips like this were always extremely thin and light and great on battery life, but processing performance was routinely disappointing compared to Intel or AMD processors. If the performance claims hold up here, that would be fantastic, making it an incredible ultraportable for getting work done anywhere.
The ThinkPad X13s is also expected to be great on battery life, getting up to 28 hours. And because this runs more like a phone than a typical laptop, it’s got a fanless design with a thin 13mm body made from 90% recycled magnesium and weighs under 2.4 pounds (1.1 kilograms). There are some other nice extras like a 5-megapixel webcam, an IR camera for face recognition and Wi-Fi 6E, and it’ll support 5G mmWave or sub6 as well as 4G LTE.
Look for the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s to start shipping in May, starting at $1,099 and available in the US from AT&T, and from Verizon also later this year. That price converts to about £820 and AU$1,520.
Joining the ThinkPad X13s is the ThinkBook 13s Gen 4 i, which is Lenovo’s thinnest ThinkBook to date at 14.9 millimeters, with a weight of 2.8 pounds (1.3 kilograms). It’s made for the small-to-medium-business market (SMB) and will have a starting price of around $850 when it arrives in April. The 13s has a tough metallic body that meets Mil-Spec standards, so even though its meant for SMB buyers, it could be good for students or anyone who wants something small and sturdy that weighs under three pounds.
The ThinkVision M14d portable display and ThinkBook 13s have a combined weight of about 4 pounds.
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The laptop can be configured with up to a 12th-gen Intel Core i7, 32GB of memory and up to a 1TB SSD for storage. You can also get it with Wi-Fi 6E and a full-HD webcam with a privacy shutter. Like the rest of Lenovo’s business laptops, the ThinkBook 13s made the jump to a 16:10 aspect ratio display, and this is a 13.3-inch one with a 2,560×1,600 resolution.
The last version of this laptop Lenovo released was AMD-based, so its USB-C ports were not Thunderbolt. But, since this one is Intel, its USB-C ports are Thunderbolt 4 and you also get an HDMI out so it’s perfect for hoteling or hot-desking where you might want to quickly connect to power, an external display or peripherals with a single cable.
Lenovo also announced the new ThinkVision M14d, a portable 2.2K 14-inch 16:10 USB-C display, which would make an excellent companion to the ThinkBook 13s Gen 4 i (or the X13s for that matter). The display is tilt- and height-adjustable, and it only weighs 1.3 pounds (600 grams). Combined with the 13s Gen 4 i, the total travel weight with the display would only be a touch over four pounds.
The upcoming ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 5 looks like it’ll live up to its name.
Josh Goldman/CNET
Lenovo also announced several other updated models in its ThinkPad lineup including 14- and 16-inch P-series workstations, 14- and 16-inch models of its T-series ThinkPads — its most popular business laptop line — and the ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 5. The 16-inch X1 Extreme looks like a powerhouse, built around a 16:10 165Hz display with 4K resolution and 600-nit brightness. It can be configured with up to 12th-gen Intel Core i9 H-series vPro processors, up to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti graphics, up to 64GB DDR5 memory and optional dual SSDs that can top out at 8TB of storage. It’ll be available in June starting at around $2,050.
