Chinese manufacturer Lenovo is one of the only companies that it still making serious money on the traditional PC business. In fact, it is now responsible for around 20% of the world’s PC shipments.
The ThinkPad line of business notebooks are particularly famous having come from Lenovo’s acquisition of IBM’s PC business in 2004 and retains a cult following among those looking for a serious machine to take on the road with them.
Last year the design of the company’s flagship X1 Carbon notebook was updated to remove the physical ‘function’ keys on the top row of the keyboard and replaced them with a set of touch sensitive keys that adapted to whichever app they were being used in to give the user different on-touch commands. While the keys worked well for the most part, the fanboy-ish user base rebelled against the change which is why for the 2015 version of the notebook Lenovo has returned to a standard row of function keys at the top of the keyboard.
While the keyboard’s design has gone back in time, Lenovo has kept the rest of the machine looking the same with black, soft touch plastic surrounding a carbon fiber frame. The components have been updated to the latest generation of processors from Intel, called Broadwell, which offer further increases in battery life as well as improved processing power and graphics capabilities over the already excellent Haswell parts that they replace.
The display on the top end of the model list remains the excellent 14 inch 2 560×1 440 resolution IPS touch screen display with the entry level model making the welcome move from a lowly 1 600×900 resolution to a full HD 1 920×1 080 unit.
Storage is an all solid state affair with 128GB, 180GB, 256GB and 360GB options all available as well as faster 128GB, 256GB and 512GB PCIe based SSDs, like those used in Apple’s Retina MacBook Pros, promise up to 80% faster storage than their traditional SSD brethren if Lenovo’s marketing hype is to be believed.
To round everything off there are LTE capable internal modems available for the X1 Carbon as well which should ensure that you remain connected to the internet no matter how far from a WiFi hotspot you find yourself in your travels.
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[Source, image – Lenovo, Via – PC World]
