I could tell you that the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon is one of the best business laptops, but I'd be surprised if you don't already know that. I've been reviewing them since 2016, but the story's been the same throughout the industry since the product was introduced. And with the Gen 13 Aura Edition model, the product has leveled up.

It still hits the key marks, with a best-in-class keyboard and an OLED display, but there's more. The X1 Carbon's claim to fame has always been its weight, and it's even lighter now. On top of that, Lenovo packed its new Aura Edition features into it, which...can be useful.

Intel Lunar Lake is a massive upgrade in itself, if only for the massive boost in integrated graphics performance. Oddly, battery life really hasn't been on par with other Lunar Lake systems I've tested, which is a bit unfortunate.

Lenovo sent us the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition for review. It had no input on the contents of this article.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition pricing and availability

The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition is available now, starting at $2,267, at least for the moment. Lenovo.com pricing does tend to fluctuate.

To be clear, this is an expensive product. It's always an expensive product, and Intel's Lunar Lake CPUs are driving up the prices of the laptops it's included in.

Lenovo has a whole range of ThinkPads, and you can always look to the T-series or X-series if you want a really great product that's not quite as pricey.

It's just a great laptop

It hits the core experience just right

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon is named after the material it's made out of, carbon fiber. It's a lightweight material that doesn't sacrifice durability, which is why the product is consistently lighter than aluminum laptops while still passing the dozen or so MIL-STD-810G tests that all ThinkPads get.

For the last few years, the X1 Carbon has been 2.4 pounds, but this one is down to 2.17 pounds, or 986kg. That's over a half-pound lighter than a MacBook Air and over 0.4 pounds lighter than a Dell XPS 13, while having a larger screen.

And you're not making any compromises to get there. It has two Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI, and two USB Type-A ports, so it has what you'd expect from a business laptop. It's just that when you put it in your bag, you can barely tell it's there.

When you put it in your bag, you can barely tell it's there.

It nails the rest of the core experiences too, mainly including the display and the keyboard, the two things you're interacting with the most on a laptop. The 14-inch screen has a 2880x1800 OLED panel that supports a 120Hz refresh rate; however, it's not dynamic.

The OLED display is excellent, producing vivid colors and true blacks. And while I love a good 120Hz refresh rate for buttery-smooth animations, the fact that dynamic refresh rate isn't supported is a big oversight. A big benefit of Intel Lunar Lake is power efficiency, so you're losing out on some big battery life benefits by not being able to automatically switch between 60Hz and 120Hz. Of course, you could just set it to 60Hz, but I'll complain about that later.

The keyboard is 1.5mm, which seems to be about the sweet spot these days. But it's not just about the depth of the keys. For comfort when typing, it's just as important to have an appropriate amount of force required to push the keys. Lenovo plays around with this a lot since different ThinkPad keyboards have different depths, so for example, a shallower 1.35mm keyboard would be tuned to require just a bit more force, so it would feel the same.

It's something that the ThinkPad team really nails every time. This is one of the most comfortable laptop keyboards that you can type on. I love it.

There are little things too, like how if you type an 'A' a little too close to the CapsLock key, it's not too quick to turn it on. It probably sounds silly, but a lot of Windows laptops have that problem, and while I haven't asked, I'd bet real money that the ThinkPad team did this on purpose. That team is incredibly thoughtful when it comes to decisions about these products.

Anyway, I usually break sections about the design, display, and keyboard into different sections, but I thought I'd do something a bit different. I thought I'd spare you all from 100 words about how it's black again.

Intel Lunar Lake is wonderful

But is it better than a MacBook Air?

I've never been a fan of the trend of comparing Windows laptops to MacBooks, but since the introduction of Apple Silicon, it's become unavoidable, especially since every laptop-maker has been desperately trying to prove that it can produce a better product than Apple can. Remember when Microsoft mocked the MacBook Pro by demoing the Surface Laptop Studio 2 doing something faster, without mentioning battery life? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

One of the things that I've been paying attention to a lot are the compromises that the Windows market forces you to make. For example, almost every premium laptop has an option between an FHD display and a high-res (which usually isn't very good), high-refresh rate OLED panel. You have to choose between battery life and a good display. There are tons of settings in Windows where you can choose between better battery life and better performance.

With Intel Lunar Lake, this is the first time I've felt that you don't have to make compromises. You can comfortably keep a laptop at 'best performance' settings when power is disconnected, and still not worry about bringing a charger with you. And I will say, Lunar Lake is pretty disappointing at 'balanced' power settings.

The graphics are legit too, and I'm unfortunately going to have to draw another parallel to a MacBook Air here, because no one is asking for dedicated graphics on a Mac. With the Windows market, it's almost like you're not supposed to be able to handle video editing on integrated graphics, with OEMs brushing off users saying, "Oh, that product isn't made for those people. We have more powerful machines for them."

This problem is also solved by Lunar Lake's surprisingly powerful Arc graphics. It's fantastic. A great real-world usage of this is the AI Denoise feature in Adobe Lightroom Classic, which runs off of the GPU. My desktop's RTX 4080 can run it on an image in a few seconds, but laptops would always take a couple minutes (since Lightroom Classic is x86-only, it's more like 10 minutes on Snapdragon), per-image. A Core Ultra 7 258V like this one gets it done in under 40 seconds, making it extremely easy to do it on a series of images at once.

Integrated graphics on Core Ultra Series 2 make it easy to ignore MacBooks.

To sum it up, thanks to Intel's new laptop processors, you no longer have to worry about power settings to balance performance and battery life, and you no longer have to consider if a thin and light laptop can handle GPU-intensive tasks (I guess I should still point out that this isn't a gaming laptop; we're not quite there yet).

I do have some bad news though, which is that having used the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition for quite a while now, I've been disappointed with the battery life compared to other Core Ultra Series 2 units that I've tested. As far as I can tell, that's due to the lack of support for dynamic refresh rate, meaning you have to choose between 60Hz and 120Hz.

The higher refresh rate does chew up battery life, and the fact that it can't scale down to 60Hz when it doesn't need it affects it. So yes, this laptop does have one major compromise that goes against the principles I outlined above, which isn't in an issue in say, the Dell XPS 13.

Running a battery report in Windows 11, it's claiming an average of four hours and 35 minutes battery life throughout my time using the X1 Carbon. That's pretty bad, considering that I've used other similarly specced systems. There were times when I'd use it for a period that would pace for a good nine hours, but it wasn't consistent enough to factor into its own data.

Setting the refresh rate to 60Hz does boost battery life considerably, bringing it to that level where I can throw the laptop in my bag and not think about bringing a charger with me. Also, once you get to that point where you're not thinking to make sure you have a charger with you, it changes things.

Don't sleep on this Gen5 SSD

It's fast

PCIe Gen 5 SSDs in laptops are still pretty rare, and the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition has one. Outside of generational leaps, laptops tend to have similar components. In fact, while I test all laptops with CrystalDiskMark, I really only put scores in reviews if there's an anomaly. But this is a proper generational leap, so have some scores. They're delicious.

New PCIe generations are usually double the bandwidth of the previous one; however, the Dell Pro 14 Premium is on the slower side of Gen 4 SSDs. I used it for this comparison because it's the closest competitor to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon.

Aura Edition is unique

You might not buy it for this, but it's there

Aura Edition is a new suite of features from Lenovo and Intel, and it's a bit strange because it's seemingly random which products get to it, although the ones that are are always Intel. But for example, the new Yoga Slim 9i is an Aura Edition, while the Yoga 9i and Yoga Book 9i are not, despite all using Intel chips. Also, to be clear, there's no non-Aura Edition of these products. It might seem like this is a special edition of the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13, but it's not. This is it.

Some of the features are cool though. And I do love that OEMs are adding their own software features to make their laptops unique. Indeed, the AI age is finally giving companies ways to add value, instead of useless bloatware.

Aura Edition adds unique features without making it feel like bloatware.

Attention Mode

Attention Mode lets you block certain websites, with presets including Facebook, Twitter (interestingly, setting it to block the preset Twitter.com domain does not block X.com), Instagram, and YouTube. You can, of course, add your own.

It works across the board, so switching it on will block these sites in whatever browser you're using.

Wellness Mode

Wellness Mode will warn you if you're slouching, or remind you to take breaks using the 20-20-20 rule (after 20 minutes of staring at a screen, look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds). The thing that's annoying about this is that it turns your webcam on constantly, so you get a white light in your face all day, but it's pretty neat. You do have to specifically tell it to work when running on battery; it won't by default.

It's pretty cool, as someone that spends my days staring at screens. If that's what your workday looks like, you should probably take care of yourself, and I appreciate products that bake in features to help with that.

Shield Mode

Shield Mode will alert you if someone is looking over your shoulder, and even blur your screen if you opt into it. It's obviously made for privacy.

Smart Share

Smart Share is a neat concept, but it's not so great in practice. The idea is that you can tap your phone against the screen and share images and other files. It works with both iPhone and Android, and when this was demoed, iPhones were used because iOS compatibility is just rarer to see in a feature like this.

The problem is that it doesn't always work. It's using Intel Unison, so you'll quickly realize that it's easier to just launch the app and use it that way.

Should you buy the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition?

You should buy the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition if:

• You're already an X1 Carbon user and you're thinking of upgrading
• You want a light PC without compromises
• You just really want a great laptop

You should NOT buy a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition if:

• You're on a budget
• You want the best webcam

The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition is a fantastic product, and if you're a fan of the brand, this is a worthy upgrade from any of its predecessors. It's about as light as laptops come, and it's got the power to do things that thin and light laptops haven't been able to do before.

The best alternative would be HP's new EliteBook Ultra or EliteBook X laptops, which are also wonderful, with AMD, Intel, and Snapdragon options and some unique AI PC features. If you're using the integrated webcam, those will do a bit better for you. However, HP's EliteBook Ultra doesn't have quite as good of a keyboard as it used to, and you'll have to watch out for the display option you choose. The X1 Carbon definitely wins in the 'core experiences' area.