Carbon is great, but I highly recommend looking into the lenovo t14 lineup. Especially interesting is the ryzen chipped ones. You can get a base model and then easily upgrade components, I did this and upgraded the panel and SSD if I remember correctly, saved quite a bit of money that way.
It's fatter than a carbon but more performant, has more ports, and is much more extendable / repairable in my opinion.
edit: I really hope framework comes out on top here though because I really hate that lenovo has started soldering RAM and the state of consumerism and e-waste in our industry is genuinely completely out of control at this point.
I really need to go ahead and pull the trigger on buying a framework laptop... it's just so very hard to give up that lenovo keyboard!!
I'm a long-time X1 Carbon user (over the years, between personal and work laptops, I've had 1st, 4th, 5th and 6th gen models)
I recently got a Gen 3 AMD T14s and I've been very happy with it. it's a bit thicker / heavier / wider than my old Carbons, but still a very comfortable size, and has much better specs (6c/12t Ryzen 5 6650U, 32gb RAM, 1TB NVMe, Radeon 680M GPU) than comparably-priced Carbons I looked at.
I'm using a T14 for my work machine. I would not have recommended it until last week, when it got a firmware update, but since then - it just works, and I'm really happy with it.
<1.41>
- (Fix) Fixed an issue that CPU is frequency stuck.
- (Fix) Fixed out of order idle state under Linux.
- (Fix) Fixed an issue that battery icon show yellow bang when system is waken up from Full Shutdown, which Wake On LAN is AC Only in BIOS Setup.
- (Fix) Fixed an issue that "The connected AC adapter has a lower wattage than the recommended AC adapter which was shipped with the system..." pops up after press power button when Wake on LAN in system BIOS Setup is AC and Battery.
Ok now we're in fun linux world, make sure to do more research (sadly) before doing firmware updates, and choose your version carefully. See
IMO this is not unique to lenovo, more just what we put up with for mushing software freedom onto hardware non-freedom. Repairable though lenovo is, the reality is there's no such thing as a GNU chip / board fabrication plant. Though maybe there should be, lol.
> In an ongoing Lenovo forums thread, there has been a discussion regarding battery drain issues in suspend/powered-off states. Presumably, laptops with AMD Renoir CPUs and relevant hardware are affected. As of now, BIOS firmware version 1.29 is suggested for use, as version 1.30 introduced significant battery drain; the battery loses up to 50% in 2-3 days while the laptop is in suspend mode.
It's fatter than a carbon but more performant, has more ports, and is much more extendable / repairable in my opinion.
edit: I really hope framework comes out on top here though because I really hate that lenovo has started soldering RAM and the state of consumerism and e-waste in our industry is genuinely completely out of control at this point.
I really need to go ahead and pull the trigger on buying a framework laptop... it's just so very hard to give up that lenovo keyboard!!