If you bought a ThinkPad from Lenovo (or IBM back in the days) in the past, it was pretty certain that you got one of the best keyboards on the market

Why does Lenovo sabotage its flagship ThinkPad X1-series?

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2021-05-23 23:00:07

If you bought a ThinkPad from Lenovo (or IBM back in the days) in the past, it was pretty certain that you got one of the best keyboards on the market. Obviously there have been changes over the years, like the switch from 7 to 6 rows, or the switch to chiclet-style keyboards. But they were still better compared to other rivals and the expensive ThinkPad X1-series in particular had excellent input devices. This seems to be a thing of the past though…

Let’s have a look at the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (14 inch), which offers a very sturdy and lightweight chassis in combination with numerous ports for years now. But with every new generation, you get the impression that things are not getting improved, but you have to make more compromises instead. The 7th generation, for example, introduced a good speaker system and low power displays, but the keyboard quality suffered due to the reduced key travel from 1.8 to 1.5 mm, which is immediately noticeable. The new X1 Carbon Gen 9 now switches back to 16:10 screens and the key travel stayed at 1.5 mm, but the height of the keys itself was reduced and some keys are narrower, which is also immediately noticeable. But why did Lenovo change the keyboard again? We can only speculate, maybe the space was required for the bigger battery and the new cooling solution without using a thicker chassis. Maybe Lenovo just wanted to reduce the quality gap to the new X1 Nano and X1 Titanium Yoga, which use 1.35 mm key travel.

Lenovo still advertises the keyboards with “proven ThinkPad quality” and yes, the keyboards are not bad by any means. Based on our own experiences, we can also say that you get used to the new inputs pretty quickly. It also depends what you have used before; if you come from an inexpensive consumer laptop, you will probably be very happy with the keyboard of the ThinkPad X1 Nano, for example. We at Notebookcheck, however, review a lot of laptops, and if you compare the new keyboards with other current ThinkPads, you just notice the big difference and you start asking why less expensive models (like the T or L series) are equipped with superior keyboards? The ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 3 is currently the last exception within the X1 lineup, because it is still equipped with an excellent 1.8 mm keyboard. We have information that the upcoming 4th generation of the X1 Extreme will also be equipped with 1.5 mm key travel.

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