Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 14" Gen 13 2024, Core Ultra 7 255U, 16GB, 1TB SSD

The X1 Carbon Gen 13 is insanely light at 1.10kg with excellent battery life and a great keyboard. It's a top-tier business travel laptop, but the weak speakers and subpar touchpad keep it from being perfect. Worth it if portability is your number one priority.

The Core Ultra 7 255U is a 12-core chip that handles spreadsheets, video calls, and a dozen browser tabs without breaking a sweat. Our CPU score lands in the 61st percentile, which is solid for an ultraportable, not a barn burner. The 16GB of LPDDR5X is fine for most office work, though power users running VMs or heavy data analysis might feel the ceiling. Storage is a bright spot at the 80th percentile, and the 1TB NVMe SSD loads everything fast. The integrated Intel Arc graphics sit at the 56th percentile, so light photo editing is fine, but don't expect to game on this thing. Our gaming score for this laptop is a rough 20.4 out of 100.

Against the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7th Edition, the X1 Carbon is lighter and has more ports, but the Surface has a better touchpad and speakers. The MacBook Pro M4 Max is in a completely different performance league, but it's also heavier and more expensive. The ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 and HP OMEN Transcend 14 are gaming machines that crush this in graphics performance, but they're heavier and their batteries don't last as long. For pure business travel, the X1 Carbon is the most focused tool here.

Pricing is tricky here since we only see one listing at CAD 1,923. That's a lot of money for a laptop with integrated graphics and 16GB of RAM. But you're paying for the engineering that gets a full-featured 14-inch laptop under 1.1kg. If portability is your top priority and you have the budget, it's worth it. If you're just looking for a good business laptop and don't care about weight, there are cheaper options that perform similarly.

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 is the lightest laptop we've tested in a long time. At 1.10kg, it basically disappears in a bag, and Lenovo didn't gut the specs to get there. You get a Core Ultra 7 255U, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a 500-nit display that's easy to read in bright rooms.

This is a business machine through and through. Our database puts it in the 91st percentile for compactness and 90th for portability, which is exactly what you want from an ultraportable. The integrated Intel Arc graphics won't impress gamers, but that's not who this is for.

Skip this if you need any real graphics horsepower. The integrated GPU means video editing, 3D work, or gaming will be painful. Also skip it if you're on a tighter budget, since you're paying a premium for the lightweight build. And if you care about speaker quality for media consumption, look elsewhere, the audio here is a letdown.

If you travel constantly and want a laptop that feels like nothing in your bag, this is the one. The X1 Carbon Gen 13 nails the fundamentals: light, fast enough, great keyboard, all-day battery. Just don't expect it to be a media machine. The speakers are weak and the touchpad is mediocre, which is a shame at this price. But for getting work done on the go, it's hard to beat.