Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 MSRP $1,680.00 Score Details DT Recommended Product “The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 isn't a performer, but excels in battery life and security.” Pros Cons A laptop should be fairly refined by the time it’s hit its 10th generation. That’s particularly true with one as iconic as the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, the company’s marquee business-oriented thin and light laptop.
Of course, Lenovo provides several other configuration options with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10. CPUs range from the 28-watt, 12-core/16-thread Core i5-1540P to the 28-watt 14-core/20-thread Core i7-1280P with vPro. As we’ll see in the display section below, there are a dizzying number of display options that make it possible to dial in precisely the desired efficiency and display resolution and quality.
In the ThinkPad’s case, though, it’s very minor and most people won’t notice it, but it doesn’t quite live up to the standards of more solid machines like the Dell XPS 15 and the MacBook Pro 14. The hinge is perfectly balanced, light enough to open the lid with one hand but stiff enough to hold the display in place.
Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 provide the latest in wireless connectivity, and a Nano SIM slot is optional supporting 4G LTE WWAN. Finally, the webcam is Full HD and has a webcam privacy shutter. The webcam provides excellent video quality in normal and low-light environments and should meet anyone’s videoconferencing needs. There are options for a Full HD webcam with infrared for facial recognition and another with Lenovo’s Computer Vision technology.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you’ll notice. It’s still a fast enough laptop for demanding productivity tasks, and it’s faster than Intel’s 11th-gen equivalents in most cases. But the ThinkPad’s ability to handle heavier tasks in creative applications is significantly less than with some other competitive machines.
Colors hit the premium laptop average of 98% of sRGB and 76% of AdobeRGB, although I’ve seen more displays lately falling in the 80s for AdobeRGB. Color accuracy was okay at a DeltaE of 1.96, below the 2.0 mark that’s the minimum for creative work but still higher than I like to see. The MSI Summit E14 Flip and Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 7 had wider and more accurate colors.
After running our suite of battery benchmarks, I came away mostly impressed. Its 7.5 hours in our web browsing test that cycles through a series of complex websites is about half an hour less than we like to see, but it was competitive among our comparison group. The Yoga 9i Gen 7 lasted longer, as did the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 7 and the AMD-equipped Asus ZenBook S 13 OLED with a power-hungry display. Even so, the ThinkPad did okay.