The IFA 2018 tech trade show has come to its conclusion and many gadgets manufacturers have come out to showcase their new products to the world. A brand that have stood out, however, is Lenovo. The Chinese company unveiled the Lenovo Yoga C930, the world’s first PC with Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos together, laced with other mind blowning features like a redesigned speaker hinge, 4K display, 16GB RAM, 2TB of storage, and a “Knock to Open” mechanism.
Another PC released by Lenovo at the IFA 2018 is the Thinkpad X1 Extreme… and this one is even more monstrous. Already being nicknamed the ‘Macbook Pro killer’, ‘Classic Workhorse: and whatnot. While things might have been overstretched with the nicknames, one thing is true though: this is Lenovo’s strongest laptop yet!
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Key Specifications
- Dimensions — 14.24 x 9.67 x 0.72 inches or 361.8 x 245.7 x 18.4 mm
- Display — 15.6-inch UHD 4K (3840 x 2160) IPS touchscreen with Dolby Vision OR 15.6-inch FHD (1920 x 1080) IPS touchscreen
- Weight — 1.7kg / 3.75Ibs
- Processor — Up to 8th-Gen ntel Core i7 with vPro
- Operating System — Windows 10 Pro
- RAM — 64GB of DDR4 RAM
- Storage — Up to 2TB (tw 1TB PCIe SSD)
- Battery — 80Whr, up to 15 hours on full charge.
- Ports — two USB 3.1, two ThunderBolt 3, SD card slot, HDMI 2.0
From a design and build quality point of view, though more lightweight, the Thinkpad X1 Extreme isn’t anywhere near the MacBook but it only an improvement from the previous and typical Thinkpads. The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme has a lid made out of four layered carbon fiber which contributes to the laptop’s lightweight while the laptop’s bottom is constructed with aluminum alloy; this serves many purposes in the aspects of durability, heat dissipation, and performance in extreme climatic conditions.
The keyboard on this particular ThinkPad is another upside of the X1 Extreme over the MacBook Pro. Lenovo stuck with the Thinkpad trademark keyboard — with eraser-nub TrackPoint navigation pointing stick combed with actual mouse buttons — on the ThinkPad X1 Extreme. For authentication and laptop unlock, there is a fingerprint scanner embedded beside the keyboard.
An alternate way to logon to the ThinkPad X1 Extreme aside using the fingerprint reader (though its arguably faster) is the Window Hello camera at the top of the display which allows you log in to the factory-installed Windows 10 Pro OS (or any version of the Windows 10 OS) on the X1 Extreme with just your face. The gadget comes with a ThinkShutter camera cover.
On display duty is a 15.6-inch display which makes the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme the first laptop in the ThinkPad X1 series to has a display bigger than 14-inch. The X1 Extreme, however, comes in two versions based on display quality: a UHD or 4K IPS touchscreen version with max brightness of 400 nits and a Full HD version with max brightness of 300 nits and anti-glare. As an icing on the cake, Lenovo laced the Thinkpad X1 Extreme with the Retina display technology renowned with Apple’s MacBooks.
The new Thinkpad is powered by a CPU similar to that on the MacBook Pro 15. The base Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme will be offered with an Intel 8th-generation Core i7 with 64GB DDR4 RAM (really, who does that!?!) and two 1TB PCIe SSD. Not even the MacBook Pro 15 with a cost of $2500 (32GB DDR4 RAM) offers that much amount of RAM.
Lenovo will officially commence sales of the ThinkPad X1 Extreme in September at $1,859. Later in December, an Intel Core i9 version of the laptop with 6-core processor will be released; price is unknown at the moment.
This Thinkpad flagship has a 80Whr battery capable of powering the laptop for over 15 hours on a single full charge; the MacBook Pro 15 comes with bigger 83.6Wh battery but a shorter (10 hours) projected run-time of up to 10 hours, on a full charge of course. In addition, Lenovo states that the laptop can charge up to 80% from 0% in under an hour as it comes with Rapid Charge technology.
Other interesting features of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme will be the joint combo of two popular AI assistants: Microsoft’s native Cortana AI and Amazon’s Alexa. Perhaps this might just be the perfect go-to workstation for creatives in search of something just better than the MacBook Pro 15 (or any Mac) in terms of performance (and definitely not design) and about $700 cheaper.
