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Lenovo X1 Extreme

The Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Extreme is a more powerful version of the iconic X1. Why is it a no compromise laptop?

Thinkpad X1 Extreme

So why is the X1 special at all? It's because of its built material. The original X1 named Carbon launched back in 2012 with the very original body made out of carbon fiber. I remember holding it for the first time - it was really light compared to others but at the same time without any flex at all because of the sturdiness of carbon fiber. This material looks really great and like nothing else. If feels in some way close to plastic but unlike it is completely resilient. Carbon fiber is truly amazing and having a whole laptop out of it felt and feels unique.

The X1 at that time was on par not only with build quality but with specs as well. And this year the Extreme edition pushes them to the limit of such a portable device. You can opt in for a 4k touchscreen, Xeon CPU, up to 64GB, a P2000 or 1050Ti GPU and up to 2TB nVME storage. The highest configuration will cost you around $4500 which is insane, but still $1500 less than a maxed out MacBook Pro with a worse screen, GPU and CPU. The Lenovo also has an arguably better keyboard to type on and a bunch of not yet obsolete I/O.

Unfortunately two things keeps the X1 to be the best laptop ever in my opinion: the trackpad and OS. And even though so many years passed and there is still not a single PC with a decent trackpad I keep my hopes high that someday someone will build a Mac-level trackpad for PC. What I'm not holding my breath for is having anything except Windows working properly on such nice hardware like this. Although each year I constantly hear about Ubuntu supporting more and more devices, so maybe it can be worth trying on this beast?