Lenovo ThinkPad X13s

The first Arm-based ThinkPad is a lightweight travel laptop with long battery life and a fanless design, but there are still some Windows app compatibility issues, and the performance has a way to go.

I’ve had quite some time with this Thinkpad X13s, but I still have mixed feelings about it. On the positive side, it's excellently built, it offers a good keyboard, and a useful matte touchscreen. It's also a fanless design, thus completely silent, and fairly efficient on battery use. On the other hand, the Snapdragon CPU isn’t as fast as I would like, and Windows on ARM can get sluggish sometimes and is not compatible with all programs.

As the first manufacturer, Lenovo has introduced a laptop with the current Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 to the market. While this laptop processor represents significant progress compared to its predecessors, in order to catch up with Intel, AMD, and Apple, Qualcomm still has to make a lot of improvements.

The Lenovo ThinkPad X13s is a solid productivity laptop aimed at office workers or university students. It does not indulge itself in many luxury features, despite the asking price matching a powerful MacBook or sleek Zenbook.

This laptop begs to ask the question of why you might want Windows 11 if you can’t run all Windows applications. There are some reasons, but there are just as many for running Linux or using a Chromebook. Amazing battery life is available for those willing to embrace this hybrid concept.