Laptop giant Lenovo has partnered with repair and upgrade watchdog iFixit to boost the fixability of its mass-selling IT-darling machines. Here’s a taster of the collaboration’s first fruits.
Lenovo sells lots of laptops in its IdeaPad, ThinkBook, and Legion lines, but the company’s many sub-series of ThinkPad business machines are its bread, butter, and jam, all in one. Among the many series of ThinkPads—from the ThinkPad E to the ThinkPad Z—the ThinkPad T series is the most vital of them all. These models sell in droves as fleet machines to medium and large businesses everywhere.
Because of the T-series models’ ubiquity, any upgrade or repair innovation that comes to them is a big deal. And so, we were excited to hear that Lenovo has partnered with iFixit, the independent watchdog (and inveterate seller of PC toolkits) that deconstructs and rates popular consumer- and business-technology products on their repairability. Lenovo’s aim? To gin up its sustainability game with the latest revision of the T series.
We enjoyed an early look at the new ThinkPad T14 and T16 models, which Lenovo debuted at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week. On the outside, these are typical ThinkPad business laptops, with a few welcome usability tweaks, if no great shakes. Lenovo has made finer adjustments that should hold lots of appeal for IT departments and fleet buyers that handle hundreds or thousands of these machines a year and are loyal to the T.Meet the New ThinkPad T-Series: The Configurations
First off, a bit about the component loadouts. Lenovo will sell ThinkPad T14, T14s, and T16 models at the 14- and 16-inch screen sizes. The most obvious visual change is a new bump, which the company dubs the “Communications Bar,” along the top of the screen. This strip is now home to a buffed-up 5-megapixel camera, as well as noise-canceling mics. A side benefit of this camera bump is that the protruding part makes it easy to open the laptop one-handed. According to Lenovo, it also enabled the laptop designers to slim down the rest of the screen’s top bezel, with the remainder no longer needing to be thick enough to house the camera and microphone components.
Most of the 2024 ThinkPad T14 and T16 configurations will employ Intel’s new Core Ultra (aka “Meteor Lake”) processors, with their onboard AI-accelerating silicon, dubbed by the chip maker a neural processing unit (NPU). A subset of these Intel-based T-series models will support Intel’s vPro technology. These Windows 11 machines will also include Microsoft’s new Copilot key for easy access to the operating system’s built-in AI functionality. A different subset of ThinkPad T14 models, coming later, will use AMD processors and start at a lower entry price.
Other tweaks to the basic T-series design include tactile markings on a few keys on the keyboard, meant to help visually impaired users locate keys and orient their fingers by feel. These little nubs first appeared in the Gen 12 version of the ThinkPad X1 Carbon that rolled out late last year alongside the first Core Ultra chips. In the same vein, Lenovo has added a raised-nub power LED along one edge that signals, by feel, which of the USB-C ports are the ones to use for plugging in a charger.
The new ThinkPad T-series models will be available in April with the ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 starting at $1,199, the ThinkPad T14s Gen 5 starting at $1,399, and the ThinkPad T16 Gen 3 starting at $1,219. In May, Lenovo will also offer its AMD version of the ThinkPad T14 Gen 5, using Intel rival AMD’s Ryzen 8040 AI-enabled chips, starting at $949.It’s What’s Inside That Counts: Under the Hood With the 2024 ThinkPad T14
The updates inside are where the real meat of this generation lies. According to Lenovo, its collaboration with iFixit extended to cooperation on reparability and usability manuals that will be available online to IT personnel and end users, accompanied by videos illustrating the nuts and bolts of fixes and upgrades. That, paired with a host of internal changes to the laptops, has led, according to Lenovo, for iFixit to provisionally rate the new T series at a 9.3 out of 10 in a Reparability Assessment it performed in advance of the products’ release.
These assessments are technical reports evaluating the assembly and industrial design. Before that point, Lenovo did a series of “design for repair” workshops with iFixit that helped both its engineering personnel and its sustainability team to weigh design choices against longevity and reparability.
