Major laptop manufacturer, Lenovo, has announced a new ThinkPad X1 to add to its arsenal, a powerful new laptop that crams in a rather powerful and much sought after GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card. As well as that, there's also news of a new ThinkPad Yoga laptop and some new Chromebooks too so there's something for every need here.
Starting out with the powerhouse of a ThinkPad X1, or the ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 to give it its full name, it's certainly going to put on quite the fight to top our best laptops list if its specs are anything to go by. The laptop will offer Intel's latest 11th generation processors with configuration options up to a Core i9 H-Series processor. You can also choose to have a Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card, up to 64GB of RAM, two 2TB SSDs and even 5G support so you won't need to rely on Wi-Fi hotspots when out and about.
Simply put, it's a tremendous piece of hardware providing you can afford all the upgrades, of course. The only thing it seems to be missing is an OLED option for the 16-inch screen which is something the X1 Extreme Gen 3 before it offered. Other than that, we're expecting the ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 to rival even the best home computers in terms of power.
The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 will be available from August starting at $2,149 although expect that price to rise steeply if you configure a high-end specification.
Alternatively, if you're looking for something a bit more budget-friendly laptop for college, Lenovo has new options here too.
There's the ThinkPad L13 Gen 2 and the convertible L13 Yoga Gen 2 with the models starting at $799 and $999 respectively. They're both AMD Ryzen 5000-powered systems with the latter being Lenovo's first AMD-powered Windows 10 convertible. The L13 Yoga Gen 2 also comes with an optional integrated pen if you want to get hands-on with your work. In either case, expect a battery life of over 10 hours with the focus here on making productivity on the move the key to how these systems work.
If your budget is even tighter, there are also Chromebooks in the form of the not so catchily named 5i-14 and Flex 5i-13. Yup, the names reflect the sizes of the screens with both offering Intel Core i5 processors and up to 512GB of SSD storage. We're not convinced something so heavily dependent on using apps from the cloud needs 512GB of storage but it's nice to know it's an option.
Both models start at $440 with the Flex launching later this month and the 5i-14 following in July. If the Flex sounds appealing, you can even switch over to an OLED display if you fancy it although - again - feels like overkill for the purpose. It will look delightful when streaming content though so your mileage will vary here. Expect battery lives of about 10 hours for each of these.
Whatever your plan, it certainly seems like there's a Lenovo device for you right now with plenty of options available to accommodate your budget.
