Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon: Gen 9 goes to 16:10

This Lenovo laptop is a phenomenal option for business professionals.

- MATT ELLIOTT

Nearly ten years old, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9 has grown taller. Lenovo’s flagship ThinkPad is still the same sleek, sturdy corporate ultrabook you may recall, but the manufacturer has ditched the 16:9 display ratio in favor of a 16:10 display that provides more room from top to bottom. The taller display gives you more room to work and requires you to scroll less through lengthy documents and long web pages.

Lenovo also tweaked the display hinge, expanded the touchpad, improved the positioning of the laptop’s speakers, and integrated the fingerprint reader into the power button. Inside, the laptop received the expected Intel update to the chipmaker’s 11th-gen Tiger Lake chips. With its roomier display and other improvements, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon remains a top choice for business execs, even if its webcam is behind the times.

SPECIFICATIONS

Nailing down the pricing for Lenovo’s laptops is a challenge because the company lists inflated prices on its website that are usually then discounted by substantial and fluctuating amounts. The baseline X1 Carbon Gen 9, for example, features a list price of $2,459 but is currently discounted to $999.99. It has an 11th-gen Core i5 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD. The manufacturer also lists a handful of preconfigured ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9 models, but our test configuration is not among them. Using the customizable model on Lenovo’s site, we outfitted our test system for $1,799.60. Here are its specs:

CPU: Quad-core Intel Core i7-1185G7

Memory: 16GB

Graphics: Intel Iris Xe

Storage: 512GB PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD