Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 review: A fast-but-flawed version of a great laptop

Enlarge / Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Dell's XPS 13 has been the pace car for the Windows side of the thin-and-light laptop race for years now, ever since it adopted the now-ubiquitous ultra-thin display bezel back in 2015. Dell was also a step ahead of the competition a couple of years ago when it moved to a slightly taller screen with a 16:10 aspect ratio, further improving the design's usability without increasing its size.

But for power users who can afford to spend a few hundred extra dollars, Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon has always been an appealing upsell. It's a little lighter than Dell's ultraportable, but it nevertheless manages to fit in a bigger screen and a better port selection. Lenovo's laptop keyboards and trackpads are almost always best in class. And the ThinkPad's pedigree as a business laptop means that the Carbon's design still makes nods to repairability and upgradability, even if many of its internal components have still been soldered down to save space.

This year's version of the X1 Carbon-we're up to Gen 10, if anyone's counting-doesn't change much on the outside. But it includes new 12th-generation Intel Core processors, which, as we've seen in other laptops, can be a blessing and a curse. Performance in CPU-heavy tasks can be faster, sometimes dramatically so. But it comes at the expense of extra heat and less battery life, and that's a tough trade-off to recommend for a general-use ultraportable.

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