The basic design doesn’t look all that much different. Measuring 12.31 x 8.45 x 0.59 inches, it’s a bit smaller than the previous X1 Carbon Gen 11, mostly because it has smaller bezels around the 14-inch display, and because Lenovo removed the speaker grills on either side of the keyboard. Above the screen, there’s now a small bump for a camera unit, just like in the company’s Z series of notebooks. It’s even lighter, weighing 2.41 pounds by itself and 2.96 pounds with a new smaller 65-watt charger. Despite this, it still felt quite solid. As a result, it’s even easier to carry than the previous version. In fact, it’s the first 14-inch notebook I’ve tested to weigh less than 3 pounds including the charger.
The keyboard has been redesigned somewhat to include tactile bumps on some of the keys, making it easier for touch typists, swapping the control and function keys (though you can switch them back with an included application), and adding a separate fingerprint reader key in place of the old PrtSc one, rather than having the reader integrated into the power key. The power is now located on the right-hand side. I still found the keyboard very easy to type on. The keyboard now has an interesting air intake design, with two-front firing speakers placed beneath it. I could feel a bit of vibration through the keyboard, but it wasn’t as noticeable as on other systems. The speakers support Dolby Atmos and sound very good.
The X1 Carbon Gen 12 now has a larger 120mm glass touchpad, with the familiar ThinkPad buttons on top. It’s a fine touchpad, though some competing models are larger. Double tapping the familiar TrackPoint pointing stick in the middle of the keyboard brings up a Quick Menu that controls settings for the microphone, choosing your output device, and using your voice to type into a text box. It's an interesting collection of options, and I can see where it could be useful, although I didn't use it much.
The port selection remains similar to the previous generation, though the locations have changed. It has two USB-C/Thunderbolt ports on the left-hand side, along with a USB-A port and a slot for a SIM for an optional WWAN feature. The right side has a Kensington lock, HDMI 2.1, another USB-A, an audio jack, and the power key. This is a great selection of ports, the only thing I’d prefer would be USB-C on both sides.
The unit I tested has a 2880-by-1800 OLED display, supporting up to 400 nits and 120Hz, in the now standard 16:10 ratio. This was a non-touch version, and while I prefer touch screens, it looked great. Lenovo will offer versions with an OLED touch screen, and with 1920-by-1200 IPS screens, either with touch or with a privacy guard.
One area I’ve been consistently disappointed by the X1 Carbon line is the webcam. This model had a 1080p webcam with IR. Pictures seemed a bit blurry and it just didn't seem to focus as well as on other current machines. In an era where video conferencing is important to so many office users, this just seems baffling. It does have a physical shutter to cover the lens, something many people like for privacy. Lenovo says an 8MP MIPI camera will also be available as an option shortly.
As with the Z13, when you bring up a video conferencing application, the system suggests you launch Lenovo View, the firm’s software for controlling video displays. Lenovo View includes the traditional controls for light, intensity, and color, as well as background blurring, and auto-framing. These worked fine. Interestingly, Lenovo View with the X1 Carbon's camera doesn't support the other things it does on the Z13, including video conferencing enhancements such as auto-framing, eye contact, and background blur, though you can still do those through the camera app and Windows Studio Effects.
Nor does the X1 Carbon Gen 12 include various more advanced features, such as a privacy alert that can tell you when someone is looking over your shoulder at the machine, which optionally blurs the screen. This is becoming more standard.
A separate Lenovo Commercial Vantage application checks the health of the machine and includes basic settings options, including the ability to flip the control and function keys, set keyboard brightness, and adjust the display temperature.
The version of the X1 Carbon Gen 12 I tested is based on the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H (Meteor Lake), a 28-watt processor that includes six "performance" cores, each capable of running two threads, and eight "efficient" cores on the main CPU tile, along with two additional "low-power efficient" cores on a separate tile. The performance cores have a base frequency of 1.4GHz and a maximum turbo of 4.8GHz. For graphics, it uses Intel Arc Graphics, which means eight Xe graphics cores instead of the four used in models with "Intel graphics." It includes AI Boost, an NPU. It came with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. In past years, most of the ThinkPads I’ve tested have included processors with vPro support for enterprise management features. Intel just announced such versions of the Core Ultra this week; I would expect that Lenovo will offer vPro versions of the ThinkPad soon.
I went into more detail on performance in a post about testing AI PC processors, but overall performance was generally very good. The X1 Carbon Gen 12 scored better than the previous version on all the basic benchmarks and slightly better than the HP Spectre x360 14, based on the same processor, or the ThinkPad Z13 Gen 2, based on the Ryzen 7 Pro 7840U. On my toughest tests, it took an hour and 16 minutes to transcode a video with Handbrake. That's not quite as good as the results I've seen on current Ryzen machines, but better than any other Intel-based laptop without discrete graphics. It took 46 minutes to run a complex data table model in Excel, which is on par with the Spectre 14 and the ThinkPad Z13, but notably slower than the 35 minutes it took on the X1 Carbon Gen 11, based on the 13th Generation Intel Core (Raptor Lake) processor. It ran a portfolio simulation in MatLab in just over 30 minutes, the fastest time I've seen on a thin-and-light laptop.
On my AI tests, the X1 Carbon had the best scores running a local version of Stable Diffusion, as well as on UL's Procyon AI Inferencing test when using Intel's OpenVino framework, in both cases beating the Spectre 14 by relatively small amounts.
The X1 Carbon Gen 12 has a 57-watt-hour battery, and on PC Mark 10's Modern Office battery test, it lasted 12 hours and 11 minutes with the screen set to 40 nits, and 10 hours and 57 minutes with it set to 100 nits—good numbers, but not as good as the Spectre 14 (which is heavier and has a bigger battery). I was quite pleased with the battery life.
As Lenovo's executive thin-and-light, the X1 Carbon has always been pricey and the Gen 12 is no different. As I write this, the only two versions available on Lenovo’s website are a unit configured similar to mine (with a Core Ultra 7 155H process, 32GB, a 1TB SSD, and a 2.8K OLED display) for $2,703, while a similar version with 16GB and a 512GB SSD is available for $2,335. The previous generation X1 Carbon Gen 11 is considerably less expensive now. Lenovo says more models should be coming next month.
Overall, there’s a lot to like about the X1 Carbon Gen 12. It offers a solid design with strong performance on most applications, an excellent screen and keyboard, and is the lightest 14-inch laptop I’ve seen. But it seems a little early to recommend it. I’d like to see lower prices, as well as the touch screen option and better webcam, which are promised shortly.