Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 6th Gen (2018) Review

This is Lisa from Mobile Tech Review and this is the sixth generation Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon. Sixth generation, I've reviewed them all. Not only have I been doing this for a long time, but thankfully Lenovo keeps getting better and better with this iconic 14-inch business laptop that's very thin, 16 millimeters, and very light. 2.4 pounds, 1.13 kilograms. Now with Intel 8th generation CPUs inside, two Thunderbolt 3 ports, and it's a die-for HDR display option. We're going to look at it now. So goodness knows you have your choice when it comes to really nice thin and light ultrabooks these days. You've got the Dell XPS competition here, the 2017 and 2018 models. You've got our nice new X1 Carbon 6th gen, and even Lenovo's consumer-oriented. This is the Yogen 920 for those of you who are not buying just from the business line from Lenovo. So a lot to choose from. Why would you choose this new ThinkPad X1 other than the fact it's kind of been the iconic durable business ultrabook for some time now? And that still holds true, whether you got your mil-spec tests for dust and vibration and shock, not to mention the inner roll cage. It's very rigid, it's very strong, it's pretty durable. You can send this out on the road with your workers and it's going to survive or out with yourself and you don't have to be careful with it. Now what's new here, you have Intel 8th generation CPUs. They've finally updated to Kaby Lake R. These are those 15-watt U-series quad-core CPUs. You can get Core i5, Core i7 CPUs inside. Still a maximum of 16 gigs of low-power DDR3 RAM still soldered on the motherboard. There's just not much room in here to put things like RAM sockets. PCIe, NVMe, SSDs are pretty much standard across the line now. And you've got three different display options. You have, and they're all pretty nice, which is good. 14-inch of course. So you have the full HD 1920 by 1080 matte display, but it's touch, which is unusual to see matte and touch together. In-cell touch display, 300 nits. Pretty nice. Usual 100% of sRGB, approximately 75% of Adobe RGB. Or you can go up to QHD 2560 by 1440 matte display, 300 nits. Again, the same specs there, but not touch. And then what we have here is the QHD 2560 by 1440 HDR display. You know, like HDR on your TV, Dolby Vision supported here. That stands for high dynamic range. So this makes up for the fact that it seems Samsung is not going to be selling OLED panels for laptops anymore, which at first seemed like a disappointment. But when I saw the IPS display on this thing with complete, when they say 100% color gamut, and they don't bother to say, do they mean Adobe? Do they mean NTSC? Do they mean sRGB? It's because they mean them all. It's really something. Anyway, we'll talk about the display in depth a little bit later. As always, it's very thin and it's very light. 16 millimeters, it's 2.5 pounds, which is 1.13 kilograms. So it's almost as light as an LG Gram laptop, which is pretty impressive considering you get two Thunderbolt 3 ports on here, 40 gigabit per second PCIe 4-lane. Now that's if you're only using one of the Thunderbolts. If you're using two, I believe it's going to share those lanes, but that's still pretty good. So you got two of them there, and one is embedded for the new side mounting dock connector. They keep changing docks at Lenovo. It's really getting hard to keep up with that one. Still, there's a proprietary Ethernet dongle adapter available. Beyond those, so you still get more ports. You get two USB type A 3.0 ports. You have HDMI. Of course, you have your headphone jack, micro SD card slot, and also a nano SIM slot on the back, optional 4G LTE-A on this. So that's pretty well equipped. And you compare it to something like the Dell XPS 13 and 9370, latest generation, which just has USB-C slash Thunderbolt 3 ports. And you're already prepared to do more things, connect to more peripherals, which for business folks is often important. You hit the road, you got to plug into printers, projectors, whatever it is. So you're pretty well prepared with this one. Another nice thing is it has a webcam, 720p. That part's not nice or exciting particularly, but it's above the display. It's not a chin cam. And they have this thing, of course, everything is a Think Something with ThinkPads. It's the ThinkShutter. It's a little privacy slider for the camera shutter. So you don't have to worry about the camera suddenly being activated and recording you doing, goodness knows what it is you're doing in front of your computer. So there's that. You have a fingerprint scanner as well. Windows IR Hello Camera is an optional thing. And it also has eye tracking. I don't know. I mean, that was at first a thing for gaming and nobody really used it that much. I'm not sure what you're going to do with that, but it's available as an option if you want. Of course, Windows Hello facial recognition login is nice. Fingerprint scanner is available for you. You have the usual Intel 8265 AC Wi-Fi that is a socketed card inside. And it has far field microphones for using Cortana or Alexa, which means that the laptop can be across the room and it will hear you pretty well. And I've tested this out. It actually does. If you want to use voice assistant commands with the laptop, that's all the rage these days. It's the usual wonderful ThinkPad keyboard here. If you're a writer, this is your keyboard dream right here. It might be thin, but it still has pretty decent travel on it. It feels excellent. The usual damping, the smile shape keys, the backlighting, it's all good stuff. And the usual reliable ThinkPad trackpad with the dedicated buttons for the little NavPoint pointer embedded between the keys of the keyboard for those of you who are still fond of that. Now, pricing as always with ThinkPads when they first come out with the fresh model is scary. It starts at $1789. Now, if you do follow ThinkPads, you know that give it a couple of weeks to a couple of months and they're going to start having great sales on Lenovo's website and you can get it for less. So there's that. If you have to have it now, you're going to pay a pretty penny for the starting at $1789 with the full HD display and Core i5. You get the idea. Now we have the maxed out model with the HDR display, the Core i7-8650U, 16 gigs of RAM inside and a one terabyte SSD. That's a Samsung PM981. That's the latest generation. It's the first laptop I've actually seen with that SSD and it is very fast. And that with the HDR display is about $2579. So yeah, it's not cheap. It's a business-oriented laptop. I guess they're hoping that the business will pay for it for you and your employer must love you if they do. Now, in keeping with those specs, this is a fast performer and it is a big generational leap from the last gen because we're doubling the number of cores going from Intel's 7th to 8th gen CPU. So you have four cores. It's a 15-watt Ultrabook CPU and it's every bit as fast as you would expect, especially because we have a fast SSD inside here as well. So it scores as well as any of the competition and certainly a bit better given the high-end components that we have here. It's got a little bit of an edge and it keeps up nicely with the Dell XPS 13 9370, which is a performance tweaked Ultrabook as those things go. Heat and noise, you're going to hear the fan coming on with even just a moderate workload, not a heavy workload. In the first couple of days when Windows is doing updates and all that sort of thing, you'll hear it more. It's not a super loud fan, but it comes on a little bit more frequently than some other laptops. It's a very thin design, so that might be part of the reason. It's not super loud though. It's just, you'll hear it coming on. Surface temperatures on this are not hot and usually they aren't with ThinkPad. The materials they use, the carbon fiber and magnesium, all this, it just doesn't transmit a lot of heat to you. It's available in the usual Raven matte black ThinkPad finish and you can also get it in silver, which doesn't float my boat, but it might float your boat. I'm kind of a traditionalist. I like those matte black ThinkPads and they don't show a lot of fingerprints considering the fact they're matte black and you can wipe them off with a damp cloth and they clean up pretty easily. So like I said, the HDR display really steals the show here. Okay, it's now 4K resolution. You could say 4K is a little overkill, especially for a business user. 2K is plenty, plenty good enough. It looks nice and sharp, but the brightness on this, they claim 500 nits and we measured 486 close enough. I mean, even despite the fact that this is a glossy display, you can use this outdoors. You can see it just fine. It's insanely retina burning bright, but that's not all folks. It's got a hundred percent of sRGB. It has a hundred percent of Adobe RGB. Usually for the top displays, we see about 95%. Hitting an actual hundred percent is pretty impressive and it did 97% of NTSC, which is what your top end TVs will do also. So we have color gamut up the wazoo, not making me miss OLED at all because there's some things you don't have to worry about. There's no burn in here with an IPS display to worry about like there is with OLED. You are giving up that infinite contrast ratio in the pure, pure blacks. The black level at 0.38 is pretty good, not super duper low, but given the fact that we measure black level wall at maximum brightness, that's as bad as the black levels will ever get. It's pretty decent. It's a phenomenal looking display and it's less garish looking. That's one of the things with the OLED displays that we saw used in laptops in the last couple of years, given the fact that Windows 10 is not color managed for starters, so just tooling around the OS, the colors can look a little cartoony. And the fact that the displays that were used in laptops were not very well calibrated, it wasn't a great look, you know, if you were actually a color purist, if you're somebody who's doing photo and video production like we do, you know. So this one actually had very good factory color calibration. It looks intense, the colors, but it doesn't look insane, goofy, too much, you know what I mean, that sort of thing. It's really good stuff. But even if you have to go with a regular full HD display, if you want the touchscreen option, you have to do that because this HDR doesn't have touch, unfortunately. It's still a pretty darn good display and the QHD non-HDR, so you don't want to spend all the big bucks on the HDR. It's also a very competent display that keeps up with ultrabooks in this price range. Battery inside is 57 watt hour, which is at the high end of what you'll see in a 13 to 14 inch ultrabook, comes with a USBC 65 watt charger, 65 watts so it can charge fast. It is a fast charging machine, Lenovo does that, so they say 80% charged in an hour and they're not kidding when they say that. That's pretty impressive stuff. Now for the full HD model, which would use the least power among all these, they say up to 15 hours of battery life. We don't have the full HD model. Maybe it's true if you have like close to zero brightness and, you know, the usual exaggerations from manufacturers, but even with our HDR model, which in theory should have the worst battery life, particularly because it's going to depend on where you set that brightness. If you shoot for 500 nits, you're going to kill the battery a lot sooner, but most people wouldn't want to unless you're outside because it hurts your eyes it's so bright. So our usual 160 nits of brightness doing mixed productivity work and streaming video with Wi-Fi on, it managed nine hours, which is pretty impressive. That really does slightly better than the Dell XPS 13 9370 with the 4k display there. So once you're pushing high resolutions and high brightness, that's very competitive. I wouldn't be surprised if you can go 10 to 11 hours with the regular 1080p model without really trying hard. Like I said, with 160 nits of brightness and Wi-Fi on and the usual kind of activities. Opening this up is an IT person's dream. I tell you, there's just five screws here, Phillips head captive screws. That means that you unscrew them until you hear them click and they stay in there. So you're not going to lose them. And then there's no like clips to fight with or anything like that. You just yank it right off. And there you have your internals. So this is the removable cover for the micro SD card slot and nano SIM card slot. If you get the LTE module, here's our Wi-Fi card that's socketed. The antenna cards are there. If you had the LTE module for 4G, it would go right over here in this spot right here. Here is our M2 SSD. It's socketed right there. Obviously, this is the fan with large shroud cover over it. Heatsink for your CPU with four screws. It's not a tripod heatsink. Good. More even cooling there. And the big battery. And that's about all there is to see here in terms of serviceability since RAM is soldered on board. And our speakers are right over here. So they face down, but also kind of frontwards towards you. And they're a little thin sounding. Sometimes ThinkPad speakers are pretty darn impressive. This is just okay. You know, happy to have a headphone jack. Let's put it that way. So that's Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 6th generation for 2018 with Intel 8th generation KB Lake. Our CPU is inside. It's fast. You got twice the cores of last year. As ever, it's super thin and super light. And that HDR display, man, oh man, that's the best display we've tested yet on a laptop. And believe me, I have tested a lot, including high-end models. Doesn't make me wish for OLED anymore. So if you're in the market for a classic traditional laptop, it doesn't Yoga, it doesn't 360. It doesn't do any of those things. You want it really built nice and tough. You want it thin. You want it light. You want to have ports. Well, this one should be on your shortlist if you can afford it. I'm Lisa from Mobile Tech Review. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more cool tech videos and thumbs up if you like this vid.