List Price: $1,999.99
Sale Price: $1,475.00
Today's Bonus: 26% Off
Update: Got machine on Jan 18th. It stopped working on Jan 21st. I had to lower my rating from 5 to 3 stars due to service problems. My new laptop is stuck in "depot" repair, waiting for a new touch screen to arrive. They can't offer me even an ETA on the repair. I would not ding them for having a design problem in a new machine, so long as they fix it quickly. As it is, they're selling new machines with new displays, but they're not fixing the machines that are breaking. Service really is everything, and Lenovo failed in this case.
Update: I lowered my rating from 3 to 1 stars due to the continued service nightmare. I've paid for depot service, and couldn't get a person to talk to me about my machine for two weeks. Now, my machine is in limbo... I needed that machine desperately in January, and now the slow hard drive in my old one is causing some schedule slip. You just can't develop Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 web apps with a slow laptop hard drive... it's totally miserable. Two months in limbo and counting. when will a company finally figure out that business users need good support? It's just like the freaking airlines that no longer get me to my meetings reliably.
Update: March 15th, and I can't even get Irma, Lenovo's customer loyalty person assigned to my case, to call me or e-mail me about the new machine Lenovo was supposed to build to replace the broken one.
Update: March 20th. I just got an email saying Lenovo estimates my replacement machine will ship April 10th. Unfortunately, it seems to be standard practice at Lenovo to lie about ship dates.
Update: April 9th. PC Connections rocks. They sent me a replacement machine a week ago when Lenovo wouldn't. I'm using it right now. This machine is fantastic when it works. Lenovo finally delivered the new machine yesterday. In theory, my replacement from PC Connections is from the same batch of machines which have bad displays, so I started to configure the new machine from Lenovo so I would not be left with another broken machine any time soon. The new machine is already dead! It's battery is fully charged and diagnostics say it has good health, but when power is disconnected, the machine dies instantly! Thank goodness for the machine from PC Connections! That's 2 out of 3 of these things that broke within 3 days! On top of that, Lenovo service is a disaster!
In short, I strongly recommend looking elsewhere, and avoid Lenovo. I don't know who makes good hardware or offers good support, so you're on your own. However, I do think it's a good idea to buy through PC Connections.
------------------------------
Pros:
Touch screen works well with Windows 8
Fantastic build quality
Beautiful, small, thin, and light
Outstanding keyboard
Keyboard backlight
Excellent touchpad
Very fast SSD, excellent overall performance
Rapid charging
Fingerprint scanner
Good phone support
Quiet
Spill resistant keyboard
Does not get hot
Cons:
Some Lenovo bloatware
No VGA or Ethernet port
A bit light on battery life
Power brick is a bit large
This machine will change how you use your laptop. Before, I always left my laptop on the table by my chair when I got up. With the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Touch, I grab the laptop in one hand, my soda in the other, and walk around. Because it stays cool, I don't mind using it in my lap, unlike my previous workstation class laptops. I'm finding that I'm working all over the house. It's not quite as mobile as a tablet, but it's close. If I'm going out for coffee, taking it along is a no-brainier. Being so mobile, I find that I don't bother plugging in the laptop as often. I'm finally truly wireless.
While Windows 8 has issues, I doubt I will ever again buy a laptop without a touch screen. Being able to pinch and zoom in the browser is huge, and half the time I see something I need to poke on the screen, I just poke it, rather than finding my mouse cursor, moving it over and tapping the touchpad. As someone with poor vision, I have to give Microsoft huge kudos for their work on accessibility. Windows 8 is the most accessible operating system ever. The high contrast mode works wonderfully, and zooming in on text has never been easier. With Windows 8, most people should choose a touch screen.
Compared to my wife's 13" MacBook Air, the X1 Carbon Touch is slightly heavier, but has a slightly larger screen. My screen seems slightly brighter, but both seem excellent to me. I'm not one to worry about screen resolution, but I love the high contrast on the X1 Carbon Touch. Like many people, my wife protects her MacBook Air with a plastic shell. With that protector, her machine is thicker, feels all plasticy, is uglier, and slips on surfaces easily. Why anyone would want a phone or laptop that they worry about scratching so much that they dorkify it is beyond me. With a ThinkPad, you just throw it in your case and don't worry about it. The main difference in thickness is the X1 Carbon Touch has a much thicker lid. It's stiffer than the MacBook Air's, which is good for the touch feature. Overall, with this machine, I am finally rid of MacBook Air envy. Now it's my wife's turn to envy my laptop's touch feature.
The touchpad deserves special attention. It is nearly as large and works nearly as well as the one on the MacBook Air. Why did HP, Dell, Lenovo and others ship laptops for years with horrible multi-touch touchpads? That drove me crazy on my last too machines, so I'm excited to finally have one that works well. There are a couple of features I thought I would not use, but was wrong. I have sensitive data on my machine, so I got the 240G encrypting drive. I have an insanely long and difficult to type password (> 35 characters, with a mix of upper/lower case letters and digits). I found that my old 24 character passphrase had only 44 bits of strength, and could be cracked with a GPU in a few days. The fingerprint scanner saves me a lot of time, though I worry that it's not secure enough. The backlight on the keyboard is more useful than I'd thought it would be. Having low vision, I'm a solid touch typist, and often code in the dark, but with the new keyboard layout, the backlight actually helps. However, the extra pointing device in the middle of the keyboard seems to have zero utility now that the touchpad is solid. Because I wander around so much without my power supply, the rapid charge is quite useful. I spend a couple hours here, an hour there, and then in half an hour in my work chair, I've got back most of my charge. Still, the battery wont last all day, so you have to have access to a power source. I was worried about not having a VGA connector for presentations, or an Ethernet port for the rare cases when I have to plug in. However, I'll just put USB adapters in my laptop carrying case, and problem solved. I don't miss having a DVD drive at all. Why do people still carry these devices around when a USB thumb drive is cheaper, smaller, faster, higher capacity, and can be written to many times? As for the spill resistant keyboard, I've killed two laptops in the past with a spilled beverage, so I'm a fan. Also, I've read a number of complaints about having a USB 2.0 port, in addition to the USB 3.0 port. The reason for this is the USB 2.0 port has an always-on feature, which can be pretty useful.
I'm a full-time programmer, a power user, and I hammer my laptop about 10 hours a day. I require high built quality, high speed, a good screen, and an outstanding keyboard and touchpad. Our IT guys want us to buy ThinkPads, and I need a laptop with a touch screen to develop touch features in our software. Those requirements mean I had little choice but to buy the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Touch. Fortunately, I didn't have to compromise much. I would have preferred having a graphics chip, and a quad-core high voltage CPU capable of full speed full-time, rather than just in bursts. That would have required a bigger fan and much larger battery, but I would have chosen such a machine if Lenovo offered a ThinkPad W line laptop with a touch screen and large SSD. In reality, this machine is faster than anything in Lenovo's ThinkPad W workstation line of high performance laptops. My older high voltage quad-core laptop is slower, because the SSD drive in the X1 Carbon Touch is amazingly fast, and more than makes up for the loss in CPU power. Incredible boot times and wakeup times are the first thing you'll notice, but also file copy, starting bloated apps like Libre Office or my CAD tools, and doing any disk-grinding tasks are several times faster. I'm probably going to save 2-3 hours a week, because I do a lot of huge software builds and installs, and run lot's of huge applications. So far, I've installed 100G of stuff on my 240G SSD. On a regular laptop, just writing 100G would have taken all day, but with this machine, I hardly had to look at the hour glass cursor. Also, I'm enjoying the lack of fan noise compared to my older power-laptops.
For a professional programmer, reliability and durability are huge, and I feel good going with the ThinkPad line. When something does go wrong, I require quick and capable support. Losing a couple days of work can easily cost my company more than the price of a laptop. So, I tested Lenovo's phone support. If you buy an IdeaPad don't bother calling Lenovo when things go wrong you're mostly on your own. However, for ThinkPads, the support guys are located in Atlanta. I had a hard technical question, so after a few minutes, the guy I was talking to put me on hold and consulted their guru. He had the right answer when he came back. I miss the old support Dell had in the 1990's when a guru would answer the phone directly, but Lenovo's ThinkPad support is good enough. This is the main reason our IT guys are pushing employees to buy ThinkPads, rather than anything from Dell or HP. Because Lenovo offers the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Touch, I was able to get a machine that fulfilled my requirements with few compromises, while keeping our IT guys happy. At the same time, I'm finding new freedom in where I choose to code. All in all, at least for initial quality, it's easily the best machine I've owned.
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Lenovo was kind enough to send me a review unit of the X1 Carbon Touch for a few weeks to play around with and write a review of it.The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Touch is an impressive ultrabook that is (you guessed it) made of carbon fiber and it is extremely light (only 3.4lbs/1.55kg), slim and durable. Lenovo has done a fantastic job at making it as thin and light as possible and it really shows when holding it. It is slightly thicker and heavier than the original X1 Carbon non-touch (2.93lbs) which is hardly noticeable. The X1 Carbon Touch has the same look and feel as the regular X1 Carbon non-touch and Lenovo has added an impressive touchscreen to the X1 Carbon Touch. My review unit came with an Intel Core i5-3427U, 4GB of Ram DDR3, Intel HD 4000 graphics, and a fast Intel 180GB SSD. The X1 Carbon Touch comes with Windows 8 Pro 64bit that is (obviously) designed for multi-touch and can support up to 10 fingers and the screen is extremely responsive even to the lightest touches.
While the X1 Carbon Touch is definitely a premium ultrabook made with high quality materials, it also costs more than other ultrabooks on the market. The base for the X1 Carbon Touch starts at $1,257 and goes up to $1,785. Those prices were taken directly from Lenovo's website in case you are wondering. It's defiantly not a gaming laptop by any means but it has absolutely no problem handling all of your business work like a champ. The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Touch has an excellent touchscreen and a great keyboard that I have always been very fond of. The battery life is also acceptable and it can charge extremely quickly and when I say quickly I mean you can easily charge it from 0% to 100% in less than 90mins.
Pros:
+Build Quality / Design:
The build quality is absolutely fantastic and it is made of the same materials as the original X1 Carbon non-touch. Previous Lenovo laptops were made of magnesium but the X1 Carbon Touch is made of carbon fiber (hence the name) and it is as strong as aluminum but only a 1/3 of the weight and almost fifty-percent lighter than magnesium. This makes it for a slim, durable and super light ultrabook. I love the nice thin bezel that it has around the edges and viewing angles are amazing in both the horizontal and vertical planes. The touchscreen is extremely responsive and supports up to 10 fingers and works really well with Windows 8. I found myself using the touchscreen more than the keyboard just because I'm so used to using smartphones.
+Keyboard:
The keyboard is easily the best thing about the X1 Carbon Touch. The reason why I purchase Lenovo laptops over some other brands is purely because of the keyboard. I mean it just doesn't get any better than this. It has an excellent backlight keyboard with scalloped keys that make it easier to type. The track-pad is glass this time around and it works really well. There's no hard buttons on the bottom of the track-pad but they are hidden beneath it and it works very well. I'm used to having hard buttons there with my personal Lenovo laptops but the soft buttons work really well in the X1 Carbon Touch. There's nothing negative to say about the keyboard on any ThinkPad laptop because Lenovo has perfected the keyboard so well that even if it had only the arrow keys, it would still be awesome.
+Ports / Sound:
On the front side you don't have anything but on the right side you have an SD card reader, mic/headphone jack, mini-display port, USB 3.0 and a Kensington lock. Moving on to the left side we have the AC adaptor, vent holes, USB 2.0 and a Wi-Fi switch. On the back side we have an option to put a full size sim card for 3G only, not 4G LTE. Both the USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 have the same color so make sure to use the correct one. The USB 3.0 port should have obviously been colored blue but oh well, it's not the end of the world. It doesn't have a lot of ports and lacks some ports that I would have loved to see such as HDMI but you can get an adapter for that. On the bottom of the X1 Carbon Touch, we have a small straight line cut on each side of the laptop and that's where the sound comes from. The sound is pretty decent and I normally keep it at 45% when watching YouTube videos but at 100%, it is somewhat loud and a bit distorted.
+Web Browsing:
The web browsing experience is awesome on the X1 Carbon Touch thanks to the touchscreen display. I found myself using the keyboard only when having to write something on forums but for everything else, I was using the touchscreen because it's so much easier and a lot of fun. I absolutely love the touchscreen and the on screen keyboard is pretty sweet. You can pinch to zoom which is awesome if you are reading something that has a tiny text.
+Screen/Display:
The screen is 14 inches and the resolution is 1600x900 HD+ and I'm glad that Lenovo didn't go with a 1366x768 resolution because that wouldn't have made any sense for an ultrabook this good. I know that Lenovo likes the 1366x768 resolution quite a lot and most of their laptops come with that resolution but they just need to let it go and stick with either 1600x900 or go full 1080p like other companies. What would be even better is if Lenovo put a 1080p display on the X1 Carbon Touch because most of the ultrabooks nowadays come with a 1080p display and 1600x900 is sort of small. The Dell XPS 13 offers a 1080p display that's IPS and looks fantastic. Don't get me wrong because the 1600x900 fits perfectly well with the 14 inch screen size in the X1 Carbon Touch but a 1080p display would have been better. The colors and viewing angles are fantastic and you can even tilt the screen all way back (180 degrees) and it still looks fantastic. The screen has a matte finish and it can handle glare from the window pretty good but the colors won't look as good.
+OS / Camera:
The X1 Carbon Touch comes with Windows 8 Pro 64bit that is optimized for multi-touch. You don't have the option to choose between Windows 7 or 8 when purchasing one because Windows 7 (obviously) doesn't utilize the touch screen and it wouldn't be smart to have an OS that's non-touch on a touchscreen ultrabook. For some reason, the X1 Carbon Touch comes with some bloatware that it is just not needed in my opinion and really harms the experience when using the laptop. Most of the bloatware runs in the background and I feel like it is wasting precious battery life and you could really improve the battery life if you just uninstall them. These are some of the bloatware that come pre-installed on the X1 Carbon Touch: Kindle, Lenovo Companion, Skitch Touch, rara.com, Evernote Touch, Accuweather.com, Norton Internet Secutiry, Skype, Intel AppUp, and an ad for Microsoft Office.
Another pre-installed program is Lenovo's QuickLaunch which is essentially a start button that includes the typical search functions that you would see in Windows 7's start button. I replaced Lenovo's QuickLaunch with ViStart 8 which is a third party program that replaces it with a start button that's identical to Windows 7's start button. I just had to have a start button because it was driving me crazy. But other than that, Windows 8 is awesome and works very well on the X1 Carbon Touch. The camera on the X1 Carbon Touch is 720p and takes acceptable low light pictures. It's not by any means the best camera on an ultrabook but it's more than acceptable if you ask me.
+Battery:
The battery capacity on the X1 Carbon Touch is 4-Cell 45.8 Whr which roughly translates to around 5-6hrs with the brightness turned down a bit. It is non-removable and you do not have the option of adding an external slice battery. I tested it by fully charging it to 100% and then letting it drain by just watching YouTube videos, web browsing, Facebook and other basic things like that and it lasted ~5hrs and 10minutes and that was with the brightness turned down a bit. It's not the best battery life on an ultrabook but for me it's more than acceptable. I know that there are other ultrabooks that get more hours than the X1 Carbon Touch but 5-6hrs isn't bad either considering that it's still running an Ivy-Bridge CPU and not Haswell. If you want the best battery life
on an ultrabook then you should wait for Haswell to be released and possibly wait for the ThinkPad T440s to be released as well.
+Storage:
It comes with a fast Intel 180GB SSD that has ~120GB of free space after doing all the configurations and installing all the windows updates/drivers. It boots extremely fast, less than 4 seconds if you don't have a lot of startup items and if you put it to sleep, it can resume in less than a second. Applications load extremely quickly and you never have to wait for anything to open. Transferring large files (10GB+) on the X1 Carbon Touch is blazing fast thanks to the SSD. I also installed the latest AHCI driver using Lenovo System Update software before I did any of the benchmarks listed below. I tested the speed of the SSD by transferring my large movie collection folder and it transferred in less than a few minutes considering my movie collection folder is 10GB+. I benchmarked it using CrystalDiskMark and I posted the results below.
+System Performance / Processor:
My review unit came with a Core i5-3427U (dual core/four threads) that runs at 1.8Ghz and turbo boosts itself up to 2.8Ghz. The Core i5 is a typical ultra-low voltage CPU that uses far less voltage than a regular full CPU. This is (obviously) done to prevent it from overheating and using as little battery as possible. At idle, the CPU uses around 0.801 volts and under full load (2.8GHz turbo boost) it goes up to 1.01volts but the majority of the time it hovers around 0.966 volts. The i5-3427U has a max TDP of 17 watts and has 3MB of L3 cache which is pretty nice. I find that dual cores are more than enough on an ultrabook for doing pretty much everything except gaming even though some people want quad cores on an ultrabook. There would be no way to cool a quad core CPU on an ultrabook and it would waste a ton of battery but I guess some people really want the very best performance.
The Core i5-3427U is blazing fast; it never lags and has absolutely no problem handling everything you throw at it. If you do a lot of multi-tasking then the Carbon Touch is fantastic on that area because it has a ton of ram (4GB), a fast dual core CPU and an Intel SSD 180GB that can handle everything you want running in the background.
It does run quite hot if you start running heavy applications such as Adobe After Effects or benchmarking tools such as Cinebench 11.5 or PCMark Vantage that really stress test the CPU to its limits. When I tested it by running PCMark Vantage, the laptop automatically shut down itself half-way through the test because the temperature of the CPU had gone well over 95c. I had to let it cool down for a few minutes before booting it up again. Running the CPU at 100% for a few minutes will give you a warning at the bottom of the screen which tells you to close whatever you are running. Even when the CPU was running at 100%, you could hardly hear the fan spinning. The fan is silent at all times and doesn't make any noise at all.
+Bios:
The bios has the typical features that you would see in a standard bios. Under the config tab, you have the basic options such as USB, Keyboard/Mouse, Display, Power, Beep and Alarm, Serial ATA, CPU, Intel AMT. If we go over to the Security tab, you will see that we have Password, Fingerprint, Security Chip, UEFI Bios Update Option, Memory Protection, Virtualization, I/O Port Access, Anti-Theft and Secure Boot. It also has Bluetooth 4.0 as well as Intel a/b/g/n Wi-Fi. I have posted some pictures of all the options in the bios here on Amazon along with other info so be sure to check it out.
+Benchmarks (CPU/GPU/SSD):
I'm copying the results that I got here but they are also uploaded on Amazon.
CrystalDiskMark:
---------------------Read ----------Write
Sequence: 437.5MB/sec --173.4MB/sec
512K: 370.0MB/sec -------179.3MB/sec
4K: 23.70MB/sec -----------45.76MB/sec
4K QD32: 235.2MB/sec -----80.86MB/sec
Cinebench 11.5:
CPU: 2.56 (Multi-Threaded)
CPU: 1.15 (Single-Threaded)
GPU: 14.54fps
Windows Experience:
Processor: 7.0
Memory: 5.9
Graphics: 5.4
Gaming graphics: 6.4
Primary Hard-Disk: 8.1
PCMark7: Score: 4836
Futuremark 3D Mark (2013) Fire Strike: 538
Cons:
-Expensive:
As I have already said, the price is the biggest con for this laptop and it is priced a lot higher than other ultrabooks on the market that offer better specs (i7, 256GB SSD, 1080p IPS and even a dedicated GPU) and are cheaper. It is a premium laptop and the built quality easily sets it apart from the rest but it just needs to be priced a little lower so it can grab people's attention. That's just my opinion.
Conclusion:
The X1 Carbon Touch is one the sexiest looking ultrabooks on the market and it is made of carbon fiber that is extremely light, slim and durable. I can safely say that it is by far my favorite looking ultrabook on the market but the price is what sets me off. It has a superb touchscreen that is very responsive, an excellent keyboard that is by far my favorite feature of this laptop and charges extremely fast (you can go from 0% to 100% in less than 90mins) thanks to the RapidCharge technology from Lenovo. It has a fast CPU that can handle of all your work without a hassle, more than enough ram for multi-tasking and an extremely fast SSD from Intel that can boot the laptop in less than 4 seconds. It is just all around a great looking ultrabook with great features.
The price of the X1 Carbon Touch starts at $1,257 and comes with a Core i5-3427U, 4GB of ram, Intel HD 4000 graphics and an 180GB SSD. There other ultrabooks out there that are cheaper (less than $1,000) that come with a Core i7, 256GB SSD, 1080P display and even a dedicated graphics card (Dell XPS 13 being one of them). If you have deep pockets then I highly recommend the X1 Carbon Touch to anyone who wants possibly the most attractive looking ultrabook on the market. It is made of high quality materials which make it extremely light, slim and very durable. When holding it, you can really feel that you are holding a premium ultrabook in your hands! Lenovo has another winner in their hands but the price easily ruins it.
I'd like to thank Lenovo once again for sending me a review unit of the X1 Carbon Touch and letting me write a review of it.
Best Deals for Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 14-Inch Touchscreen Laptop (Black)3444CUU
Having read about screen problems with Lenovo X1 Carbon Touch was wary but the new (2013) version seems fine and the machine is really attractive and fast. With Windows 8 and Office 365 I can get through my work very efficiently. Admittedly downloaded a free start button replacement (Classical Start Menu) which also has a "Shut Down" and "Restart" command and starts the X1 Carbon Touch in the Desktop, not Start screen.Lightweight and fast somehow attractive, after a months use I am in love with this very useful companion.
Disadvantages new power socket (throw away your old extra power packs) and no Ethernet input, also built in battery so cannot carry a spare. However, now very rapid charging and it is easy to get a USB 3.0 Gigabit Ethernet adapter (Cable Matters SuperSpeed).
Honest reviews on Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 14-Inch Touchscreen Laptop (Black)3444CUU
The product was delievered quickly and was packaged for shipment extremely well. Everything worked out of the box and I had no troubles. I was concerned about getting a 14 inch screen because my eyesight is not that great. But the HD screen makes all the difference and I can read the small print just fine. I need the business features like encryption and connection to an LCD projector so was willing to pay more. It is surprisingly thin and light which my shoulders appreciate. The battery life seems as advertised. Windows 8 takes some getting used to but that was expected. I have not yet tried the web cam. It looks beautiful and I certainly will never feel outclassed in the laptop department. Overall I am very happy with my choice.Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 14-Inch Touchscreen Laptop (Black)3444CUU
After I turned the computer on for the first time, i realized the touchscreen was not working. I tried to apply the fix that was released by Lenovo and that didn't work either. Contacted the store (17th Street) requesting the item to be replaced (a few hours after i received my notebook), and received the following message from them:"Unfortunately we cannot take back opened computers, as stated on our Amazon page at this time we are not able to issue a return authorization for your order; you do have a manufacturer's warranty."
How would I know that the touchscreen was defective, had i not opened the box and turned the computer on?
Avoid buying anything from this seller. If the item is defective, you are on your own.
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