Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 13th Gen Aura Edition

Let me be completely honest; I have been a MacBook man for a long time. Yes, I've reviewed a sea of Windows-based laptops, and just this year I've spent time with a Razer Triton 14 AI, the slightly antiquated Microsoft Surface Studios Laptop 2, and a beast of an Asus ProArt PX16, all examples of PC manufacturers coming close to emulating Apple.

But it's been many, many years since I've worked on a ThinkPad. Yes, for a while we explored Lenovo's somewhat iconic line-up, which expanded with both Yoga and Extreme variants, but as with certain personal relationships throughout life, we drifted apart.

But now I've spent the last few weeks on the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Aura Edition, the almost completely standardised ThinkPad that is so widely used in the business segment and which even school teachers will be using in a few years' time. And to put it mildly, I'm happy to be back.

More specifically, we are talking about the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition, which uses an Intel Core Ultra 7, an integrated Intel Arc GPU, 32GB LPDDR5x RAM, and a 2TB PCIe Gen 5 SSD. This gives us a Geekbench 6 multi-core score of approximately 11,344 points, which is enough to play common small games at limited settings - but that is really far from the intended use.

What you get is the same carbon fibre-based chassis, which still has a soft-touch surface that still picks up fingerprints a little too eagerly, but feels infinitely comfortable to hold, carry, and use. This is seriously still one of the most comfortable laptops to use for crucial work tasks, whether you're sitting for long periods or just a short time. This also applies to the keyboard, which, in my opinion, continues to stand shoulder to shoulder with Microsoft's Surface keyboards as the best on the market. I could type on it all day long. The same can be said about the machine's well-designed trackpad and, of course, the little red TrackPoint.

However, it should be noted that the whole thing weighs just under a kilo, and it's quite liberating to have something so light that is built so robustly that Lenovo continues to obtain MIL-STD 810H certifications, meaning you can trust that this laptop can survive most things you throw at it. And for a long time, too. This 57Wh battery gave me a solid 11 hours of mixed use, which is more than enough, in my opinion.

And that's even though this more expensive variant has an OLED panel. More specifically, we're talking about a 2.8K 14" OLED panel, which means that the webcam is raised above the panel, giving the screen a true "edge-to-edge" feel. It is 120Hz, and although we measured a slightly lower brightness than on other OLED panels in larger, more expensive laptops, it still performed adequately with an average of approximately 450 NITS.

When it comes to the price, I can easily see that they are too expensive. If you choose the OLED panel and 32GB RAM, you are looking at a machine that can be twice as expensive as a MacBook Air and considerably more expensive than the new MacBook Pro M5. That said, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition feels like the ultimate productivity tool on the Windows side, and if you're looking for something to aspire to, you really get quality for your money.