I’ve been using a ThinkPad X13 for just under a week now. Being the first laptop I have used in a long time, I thought I could share my experience using one.
Main Spec (for anyone interested)
Most ThinkPads let you configure the spec yourself.
- CPU: Ryzen 7 7840U
- GPU: Radeon 780M
- RAM: 16GB
- Storage: 1TB SSD
- Screen: 1920x1200 (400 nit, low power)
- Battery: 54Wh option
- Ports: 2x USB-C, 2x USB3, HDMI, headphone jack
- OS: Fedora with KDE (installed myself)
Link to the laptop on Lenovo’s site
Photos
Transition from Desktop
Before daily driving the ThinkPad, I had been daily driving a desktop computer for the past three and a half years. Coming from a mechanical keyboard and 27" monitor might make the switch sound impossible, but I don’t mind it for basic code editing and web browsing. I still prefer the desktop peripherals, but it’s a pain to unplug my keyboard and mouse if I want to switch. Although I’ll say that I don’t like looking down at the screen, so in the future I might buy a dock to get around this.
Performance and Battery
I haven’t tested it throughly yet. Although I haven’t noticed any slowdowns. My desktop has a Ryzen 3100 and RX6600, which is good enough for medium gaming, but I didn’t buy this to do that. I opted for a 1TB SSD on this, which is roughtly the same as my desktop (although this is over two drives and two OSes). In a way I wish I chose 32GB of RAM instead of 16GB for the sake of futureproofing, although I can’t imagine my workload needing that much.
The battery is probably my favourite part of this laptop. So much so that it has resoted my faith in daily driving a laptop completely. The last laptops I had used were a Surface Pro 4 and an Acer A315. Both of with would barely last a couple of hours. This one seems to last all day for basic work, so I have no complaints.
Minor Things
This is subjective and I’ll probably get used to these, but they are what stood out to me first:
- I really like the light on the top of the lid. Not only does it look cool, but I can tell easily if my laptop is shut down or sleeping without having to open it.
- Fingerprint reader works out of the box. No issues at all, although I haven’t gotten it to work on the login screen. It works on sudo and the lock screen though.
- Setting up the TPM to unlock the SSD was finnicky. I used this guide, although it seems some of the steps were in the wrong order. But it works now so I’m happy.
- The bass in my earpods is somehow better, probably because I’m plugging it directly into the machine rather than into a monitor.
- I use the trackpoint a lot, but it’s had to aim at the moment. It gets in the way ocassionally when typing, which is annoying too, but I think I will get used to both of these eventually.
- I sometimes let go of the shift key too soon when typing. I haven’t noticed this on other laptops I’ve used although it’s probably more of an issue because I am coming from a mechanical keyboard.
I have never tried an old ThinkPad. I have no idea how it compares to one, but I still think the build quality of these is still much better than other brands. I can imagine that this will last me a long time.