The X models are designed to be ultraportable, aka as thin and light as possible. As a result, they're not great machines for people who need lots of RAM, storage, etc.

The P series (https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-p/c/t...) is more the "desktop workstation replacement" line; heavier and thicker, but with more room for components. You can get those with up to 128GB of RAM.

You forgot about 15” X1E, which is a desktop replacement. It’s still light and portable but comes with higher specs. I have one with UHD screen, 32GB and 1TB. Same weight as a 15” MacBook Pro. Configured with an FHD screen, it’s lighter than MacBook.

I just switched to the X1E after using Mac for the past 20 years. I'm running Ubuntu 20.04.

It's an amazing machine: excellent build quality, screen, and variety of ports. The only thing I can complain about is the battery life, which isn't great.

You installed cpufreaq yet? It is a life saver and a battery saver too. I run most of the time with 4 cores, turbo disabled, and capped at about 50%. Makes a huge difference in battery runtime.

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1082/cpufreq/

FWIW, PowerTOP [0] and tlp [1] used to be the "go-to" utility for this sort of thing.

---

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerTOP

[1]: https://linrunner.de/tlp/

also the FHD screen has twice the battery life, if you want to make that trade off.

I was hoping for the best of both worlds - something with a 14" 3K display, very light (don't care too much about thinness TBH), but with a good processor and 32GB of RAM.

The all-arounders are the T series: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-t-ser...

The AMD-based T495 can be configured with up to 32GB of RAM; the Intel-based T490, up to 48GB.

I regret getting the WQHD (2560x1440) screen on my X1 Carbon 7th gen. Text is too small to read without scaling, and I haven't figured out how to configure consistent scaling behavior across Wayland and XWayland applications.

FHD is plenty on a 14" screen.

I have the same configuration and leave display scaling at 100%, but set the font scaling factor to 1.5 in the Gnome Tweak Tool. In this way, all fonts in Wayland and XWayland apps have the right size and nothing is blurry. Only controls like window borders are a bit smaller than intended by the designer, but I actually prefer it that way because it's more compact.

Likewise (scaling factor 1.4 here). I find that quite usable.

Counterpoint, I also got the WQHD screen, on my T480, and it's great. I absolutely love the print-quality text in my terminals. "Scaling" is not a problem at all - I eventually figured out that the way to get flawless graphics is to ignore all "scaling" settings and simply throw an xrandr command in .xinitrc that forces the DPI to its correct value (144). For some strange reason X11 ignores the real screen DPI (which it knows perfectly well!) and forces it to 96, which is broken behaviour in 2020. Most of the rest of the software ecosystem is a team player, and respects the DPI setting (things that don't are broken - I believe GTK requires an environment variable, but QT respects it). "Scaling" is a broken concept - 12pt font should render at 12pts, no matter your screen size or resolution.

I have an X1 Carbon 7th gen with a 4k screen (3840x2160). I run it at 2x scaling on Wayland (sway) and I haven't had any issues with native Wayland apps. X apps are rendered at 1x and upscaled, making them blocky or blurry. Apparently there are some apps like Spotify that ignore scaling settings and always render at 1x, but I haven't run into them.

There is a fix in progress for XWayland scaling: https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/pull/2064

I'm assuming you're a developer (just because this is HN) - curious to know what kind of battery life do get with a UHD screen?

I use Windows, so consistent scaling wouldn't be an issue. I was more wondering with regards to battery life.

I'm pretty sure I'd prefer a WQHD screen to FHD, but am also pretty sure I wouldn't get any benefit of going to UHD. But at the same time, if WQHD has a significant impact on battery life, I'd probably stick with FHD.

I have a T480s with a 14" FHD (1920x1080) screen and the experience isn't good either. Wayland apps work with fractional 1.25X scaling but are laggy and have odd graphical glitches. XWayland apps are just blurry.

I think 1920x1080 is the perfect native resolution for 14", without scaling. It's a bit small on first look but you're closer to laptop screen than you're to a real monitor, so that turns out just fine for me.

They're ridiculously light too. I have the 7th with the 6-core i7-10710U and it weighs under 1000g (not including power adapter).

That is pretty impressive.

Does it have any issues with heat dissipation or/and fan noise when doing CPU intensive work?

My HP Zbook is pretty heavy and chunky, but still gets pretty hot and can be annoyingly noisy (thanks Mcafee...).

It does get hot, and I'll admit I don't generally use it for sustained workloads, but I've never noticed the fans getting loud. This is just anecdotal but it seems like most of the heat is generated near the screen, above the keyboard, where you don't have as much contact with the machine.

13" MBP is available with 32 GB of RAM now, Lenovo needs to up their game :)

My cheap 2 year old ultraportable Lenovo supports 32 gigs of ram. And it's DDR4. And they're still socketed.

The person I was replying to made it sound like they didn't offer this for their ultraportables, I guess I misread it.

Hell, my 7-year-old W530 has had 32 GB (4 x 8 GB) since the day I got it -- and it's not soldered in either!

Lenovo has plenty of 32GB Thinkpads... nothing new.

I meant in the ultraportable space, which smacktoward made it sound like they don't offer.

Just that 32GB isn’t considered “a lot” I guess.

Besides DDR4 SODIMM 32GB modules exist, if 32GB is what you want you just buy it off Amazon and put it in. Don’t have to mess around with “what they offer us the privilege to be able to purchase” like with soldered RAM.

Didn't fit their desired form factor for the X1, maybe. Their P53 line goes up to 128GB RAM and may be more suitable for your worklaod (I use an X1 but mostly use remote machines and don't need local VMs). I believe the construction is mostly the same as the X1 and T series Thinkpads, it's just bulkier and heavier.

The P series is such a workhorse. If I had purchasing power over my hardware at work, I'd crank one of those up and replace my workstation+laptop with it.

Yep, that's a good description. I have a P51 and T480, and the P51 is basically the same laptop, just supersized.

I believe Intel had some limitations on their support for the LP-DDR (low power) memory and that's why so many systems had the 16GB limit.

On light road-warrior machine like X1 they likely wanted to maximize the battery life. And supporting many types of memory on same model was not likely an option.

Memory power consumption is overlooked but real, and they increase as capacity increase, so if customers aren’t going to use up it makes sense not to offer too much capacity.

I have a T25 with 32 GB of RAM and there's easily 16 GB too much in it. It's only 4 threads so using 32 GB at least as a programmer is a stretch.

With 16 cores and 32 threads I'm able to use all 32 GB easily. I guess I should run more VMs to really understand where people need 32 GB in a laptop.

If you're interested in Thinkapds but find the X1 a bit limiting, check out the T-series or the P1. They're only slightly thicker but often have a much higher RAM headroom (and often can be easily upgraded by the user).

I use an x1 and this is my biggest issue with it; mine is from 2017 maxed out from the factory at 16gb and it’s amazing the ceiling has not been raised even three gens later.

That said, the forthcoming x13 mentioned in the linked piece goes up to 32gb, looks like. It’s only 0.25lb heavier and looks to be much less expensive. The catch is a smaller screen :-\

I do development work on it and haven't ran into any issues. That being said, if you need something a little more beefy, and a little less lightweight, the T line is the next place to look. There's also the X1 extreme. However, after the XPS15 I wanted something a bit more mobile.

I have X1 Extreme Gen 2 with 64GB of RAM