To call it by its full name, this is the “Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Intel Aura Edition” — a name so long it won’t fit in a Forbes headline. The latest and greatest generation of the X1 Carbon sports Intel’s latest Lunar Lake processor. My test system came specced with the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V, which is somewhere in the middle of Intel’s lineup. It also came with 32GB of RAM; Lenovo offers this model only in 16GB or 32GB configurations, because with Lunar Lake the memory is on-chip, so there’s no way to upgrade beyond that. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend a 16GB configuration, especially since that’s the bare minimum for a Copilot+ PC — and memory-hungry applications are growing by the day.
The configuration sent to me isn’t available on the Lenovo website because mine has 512GB of storage, while the site sells this model with 1TB minimum, so I’d assume that this spec as tested would come out somewhere around $2,300. To get around the extra-long name, I renamed my PC the “Carbon Aura.” (No, I cannot resist a delicious food pun.)
ThinkPad X1 Carbon Design And Materials
To start with the knockout feature of this machine, this is without a doubt the most absurdly light laptop I have ever used. This aspect of it is so pronounced that it has spoiled me; now, whenever I pick up any other PC (even other Lenovo laptops), they all feel so heavy. To put it another way, there have been times when I forgot this laptop was in my backpack at all.
The 14-inch clamshell is clearly made with premium materials, and the laptop has a highly professional look with traditional ThinkPad branding, including the red light-up dot on the outside, the TrackPoint keyboard and a glass touchpad. Speaking of the touchpad, I think it’s the perfect size for a 14-inch notebook and I enjoy the physical right- and left-click buttons for accuracy. That said, I do wish the touchpad had better haptics to match the quality of the keyboard, which I found fantastic for typing. The keyboard also has one of the best-placed fingerprint sensors in the industry; this Synaptics sensor lies just to the right of the Copilot button. The chassis is wrapped in a soft-touch material that I personally enjoy, although some people dislike it because it can be a magnet for visible fingerprints.
The display Is a gorgeous 14-inch OLED with a 120-hertz refresh rate, although this laptop ships with a 60-hertz screen by default — likely to reduce the drain on battery life. (OLEDs in general tend to make a bigger impact on battery life than IPS LCDs.) The resolution is 2.8K, which is great for almost any size of laptop, but especially for a 14-inch. The screen also has a respectable 400 nits of brightness and 100% DCI-P3 color gamut, plus I really like its anti-glare coating. That said, it would be nice if it could go brighter for better outdoor use.
Part of the display is a signature Lenovo camera bump, which includes a 1080P video camera and a Windows Hello camera stack. While the performance of these is on par with the rest of the industry, I think it’s time for Lenovo to upgrade the webcam quality to 5 MP or greater, since this is an executive laptop and competitors including HP have made 5 MP the default in many of their high-end notebooks. The webcam also comes standard with a privacy shutter, which disables both the webcam and Windows Hello.
Connectivity And Storage
The 512GB of storage — there are also 1TB and 2TB configurations available — is supplied by an SK Hynix Gen 5 SSD, which means you get to take advantage of the fastest interface and drive technology, which should be a must in such a premium notebook. I tested the sequential read speed at 14GB/s, which is respectable for an OEM Gen 5 SSD, but I was a little less impressed with the 7GB/s write speed, which is more Gen 3-like. This is especially important for anyone transferring large files from a USB drive, an external drive or even a camera.
Speaking of file transfers, this laptop sports a generous four USB ports, including two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 connectors and two full-size USB-A 5Gbps connectors. The USB-C connectors are both on the left-hand side, which I believe is a mistake but probably makes for easier Thunderbolt signaling on the PCB. I am a strong believer that every laptop should have one USB-C port on each side for charging. I cannot describe to you how many times on numerous laptops I’ve had to route the charging cable weirdly because I didn’t have USB-C slots available on both sides.
The laptop also has an HDMI 2.1 port, which supports up to 4K60 out resolution, along with a combination headphone/mic jack. I don’t know how much longer there will be HDMI out ports, but I do hope those eventually go by the wayside in favor of another USB-C connector. That all said, I did notice that when using 40 Gbps and Thunderbolt 5-compatible cables, memory card transfers were not as fast as with my desktop, which gets north of 800 MB/s on a 10 Gbps card reader. This laptop was in the mid 600s to 700s, much like the rest of the laptops I’ve tested.
Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on this machine are powered by an Intel BE201 2×2 chipset, which combines Bluetooth 5.3 and Wi-Fi 7. This chipset is typically bundled by Intel with its CPUs, and OEMs generally use it because it’s a good solution that is also performant in most configurations.
This laptop features a very effective 65-watt rapid charging solution that Lenovo claims delivers an 80% charge in one hour. I found that this was an extremely valuable feature because I have gotten quite bad at regularly charging laptops because of their long battery life, and an 80% charge is more than enough for a full day of work. The nice thing is that the default 65-watt charger is extremely small and light, weighing in at just 9 ounces, half of which comes from the cables. That said, you should get enough battery life out of this system that you might not even need to carry the charger with you every day. The standby power on this laptop is also very good, so you don’t need to top it off every night, or you can charge it up and come back to it in a few days (or even weeks) without worrying about it being dead. Traditionally, this was one of my biggest pet peeves about most Windows PCs, but it has finally been addressed by most chip vendors and PC OEMs. Lunar Lake is especially good for this; I believe its quality in this area was probably driven by a desire to match Apple’s and Qualcomm’s crazy-long standby battery life.
ThinkPad X1 Carbon Performance
The Core Ultra 7 258V processor is a balanced choice for good battery life and good performance. This CPU has strong single-core performance in GeekBench 6 tests, on par with many of the Snapdragon systems I’ve tested, and it beat the ASUS Zenbook S 16 using AMD’s Ryzen AI 370HX processor. (For more context, check out my review of that Zenbook.) However, in multicore performance in the same benchmark, this Intel processor fell behind the pack by a good 10% to 20%, meaning that it may struggle with some multithreaded apps compared to the competition. As a business laptop, the X1 Carbon Aura Edition needs to be fast and compatible, so CPU performance is fundamentally the most important thing, more so than GPU or AI performance. Because this is a Lunar Lake platform, Windows CoPilot+ capabilities are still in preview, but those will likely reach broader audiences soon.
In a rare drawback for this laptop, I found that Wi-Fi 7 performance over an MLO network was inconsistent and slower than with comparable laptops. Moving away from MLO and going straight to 6-gigahertz Wi-Fi exclusively, performance was much more in line with the competition. Personally, I would recommend 6-gigahertz Wi-Fi if your router is good enough because there’s considerably less interference and way more spectrum, but if your device is capable of MLO, that provides the best of both worlds since you can simultaneously be on both 5-gigahertz and 6-gigahertz, plus it improves throughput and range on 6-gigahertz as well. After making comparisons with another unit from Lenovo at CES, I believe that some of the Wi-Fi issues I faced may have been specific to my test device.
Battery Life And Sustainability
The battery life of this device is quite good — I would say among the best I’ve seen from Intel’s Lunar Lake platforms, even while running an OLED display. That said, this is also part of a more mature wave of Lunar Lake devices; I expect that battery life will continue to improve as Intel hones its platform optimizations. The laptop sports a 57 Whr battery, which is also customer-replaceable. I believe this is great for keeping the device in service for a long time, which is fundamentally the best way to be green. I am not totally surprised that this laptop has only a 57 Whr battery, although that actually puts it in about the same class as the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 and HP Elitebook Ultra, which are Snapdragon-based machines that have similar performance but even better battery life. (I wrote a comparison review of a few laptops of this type, including the Surface Laptop 7 and the Elitebook Ultra, a few months ago.)
In addition to the user-replaceable battery, the laptop came in extremely “green” packaging, with virtually everything in the package being made from recyclable or sustainable materials, even down to the handle of the laptop box and the twisty ties to wrap the cables. No detail was missed, and it was noticeable that Lenovo made the extra effort here — and it deserves recognition for that.
A Great All-Around Professional Laptop
The Lenovo ThinkPad Carbon X1 Gen 13 Intel Aura Edition lives up to the reputation of the X1 Carbon series by delivering one of the most durable (MIL-SPEC 810G), lightweight and premium notebooks on the market. With Lunar Lake, an OLED display and the absurdly lightweight chassis and cooling solution, this was by far one of my favorite laptops of 2024 and an incredibly easy recommendation for anyone looking for a well-balanced business notebook with very good specs.