IT buyers who think the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon is the pinnacle of thin and light corporate laptops will have to think again. The new ThinkPad X1 Titanium Yoga ($ 1,899) reinvents the classic executive notebook. This slim look is the thinnest ThinkPad to date, rising to just over 0.4 inches from the desk in the corner of the office. But based on the initial look Lenovo gave us, before the ThinkPad X1 Titanium debuted at CES 2021 (we have a pre-release sample in hand), we found that its redesigned keyboard can keep you out of corporate stardom.
Any color, as long as it is titanium
Companies like ThinkPads, in part because their rugged black chassis has changed very little over the years. Lately, however, the current owner of the ThinkPad line, Lenovo, has been shaking things up. The X1 Yoga Titanium is the latest effort by the tech giant. The new laptop comes only in a light color scheme of Titanium, ending the black finishes of the X1 Carbon and other previous ThinkPad flagships.
It is a Yoga, which means that it has a 360 degree swivel hinge that allows you to turn it into an easel, tent or tablet. This has been the standard rate for some ThinkPads for a while; there is already a ThinkPad X1 Yoga for sale, now in its fifth generation, with a sixth generation announced alongside the Titanium.
In addition to being much thinner and lighter (weighing 2.5 pounds) than the X1 Yoga and X1 Carbon, the X1 Yoga Titanium’s unique display sets it apart. It is a 13.5-inch touchscreen with 450 nit backlight and 3: 2 aspect ratio, which makes it taller and narrower than the 16: 9 widescreen orientation on most current ThinkPads. The additional height allows you to view more than one text document or web page before you need to scroll, a gift for overworked executives who review memos all day.
The 3: 2 format is also returning in other ultraportable laptops; we saw several of those models introduced last year. Before the advent of widescreen video, the 3: 2 aspect ratio was more common on laptops.
Cutting-edge business resources
The ThinkPad X1 Titanium Yoga has many high-end business features that you would expect from a laptop that costs so much. They include easy-to-use innovations, such as a webcam that includes infrared sensors for face recognition logins via Windows Hello and a secure shutter for privacy. These components need a little extra space between the top of the screen and the edge of the laptop, which means the interior looks a little less modern than, say, the most recent iterations of the Dell XPS 13 (whose pixels practically drip on the sides of the laptop).
Within the X1 Titanium Yoga, there are plenty of features that IT employees will appreciate, including the option of new Core 11th Generation processors with remote vPro management and security features. The unit that Lenovo made available for testing has 8 GB of RAM and a 512 GB SSD, although buyers can order configurations with twice those quantities. The addition of vPro processors is often the key to adoption by Fortune 500 companies and other large corporations that deploy and manage large fleets of laptops. Intel claims that the new 11th generation processors with vPro offer 20% better performance than the 10th generation they replace.
Despite all the business features, the X1 Titanium Yoga does has, some of the main ones are still missing. The main missing is a full-size HDMI port for physical connections to conference / conference room A / V systems. (The chassis is too thin for such a large port.) Instead, the only physical connections the X1 Titanium offers are two USB Type-C ports, a SIM card slot for the optional 5G / LTE modem and a headset connector by ear.
Sure, you can easily order a USB-C-to-HDMI adapter or cable, but that’s one more thing to remember before embarking on your next business trip (which, judging by the still violent pandemic of COVID-19, may not be for a while).
Hey, what happened to the keyboard?
The most controversial features of the X1 Titanium Yoga are, by far, the keyboard and touchpad. These two traditional means of input are important for ThinkPad users, and Lenovo has radically changed them on this new laptop, starting with the touchpad. It dispenses with the traditional physical click button, opting for tactile feedback that simulates physical clicks with small vibrations.
This technology has been around for a few years on Apple laptops, where it works very well. But based on the brief time I spent with the X1 Titanium, Lenovo’s implementation looks stranger. It features the technology of a small company called Sensel, whose design integrates the sensors of the haptic engine and all other components of the touchpad in a single package. This compact design is one of the main reasons why the X1 Titanium can be made so thin.
Sensel, which debuted its next generation haptic touchpad prototype at CES on Monday, offers some configurations in a standalone application on the X1 Titanium. They include setting the limit for detection and finger clicking, as well as adjusting the intensity of tactile feedback or turning it off entirely. These options are similar to what MacBooks offer, but in general, I have found that touch and tactile clicks are a little less accurate on the X1 Titanium. This is based on just a few minutes of use, so I may not have passed the required learning curve yet.
The keyboard on the X1 Titanium is equally unusual and potentially more controversial. It dispenses with the luxurious keys and distance traveled that are endemic to ThinkPads in favor of a shallower and more rigid keyboard. I think this is an unequivocal negative aspect. The keys are big, but they just aren’t as comfortable as those on the X1 Yoga or X1 Carbon, or any other ThinkPad laptop I’ve tried.
The overall feel is more like the feel of typing on the XPS 13 or the previous generation of the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air equipped with butterfly-style switches. He’s typing, not typing.
Of course, we will have to wait to give our full verdict until we can test the keyboard and the rest of the X1 Titanium, but it is now clear that the new keyboard is not a definite advance in the ThinkPad’s design.