Month: February 2022

Enlarge / Lenovo ThinkPad X13s. (credit: Scharon Harding)

Lenovo's ThinkPad X13s will be the first ThinkPad to use an Arm-based processor, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, Lenovo announced on Friday.

ThinkPads represent Lenovo's most powerful laptop lineup, and they're marketed to enterprises and power users. It's interesting to see one of the machines foregoing the new Intel 12th-generation and AMD Ryzen 6000 laptop chips to put Windows 11 Pro on Arm. We briefly saw the ThinkPad X13s in person, and it had a lighter, cheaper plastic feel to it but also sported a textured matte finish.

The 8cx Gen 3 is the first 5 nm Windows PC SoC. It has four Arm Cortex-X1 cores at up to 3 GHz and four Cortex-A78 cores at 2.4 GHz. Qualcomm's chip enables the ThinkPad X13s' fanless design and longer claimed battery life. The upcoming ThinkPad is 0.53 inches thick and 2.35 pounds and comes with a 49.5 WHr battery that Lenovo claims can last up to 28 hours, based on local video playback.

Enlarge / Lenovo ThinkVision M14d. (credit: Scharon Harding)

We've been watching PC screens get taller, especially those of laptops, and now Lenovo is bringing that trend to its ThinkVision line of small screens. Today, it announced the ThinkVision M14d, Lenovo's first portable monitor with a 16:10 aspect ratio.

Lenovo's other portable monitors, as well as most PC displays, use the 16:9 aspect ratio these days. But more customers are embracing options with additional vertical space, citing a nostalgia for screens of the past and more length to display long articles, spreadsheets, and such as marked improvements. Lenovo is touting the display as the first 14-inch, 16:10 portable monitor, based on research analyst Omdia conducted in December.

But that doesn't mean you have to stay committed to 16:10. Lenovo demoed the monitor's 16:9 button to Ars Technica. It takes the screen from 16:10 to 16:9, or vice versa, with one press.