I just bought myself a Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen3 for $359.10. I have been quite happy with the Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen5 I’ve had for just over a year (apart from my mistake in buying one with lost password) [1] and I normally try to get more use out of a computer than that. If I divide total cost by the time that I’ve had it working that comes out to about $1.30 per day. I would pay more than that for a laptop and I have paid much more than that for laptops in the past, but I prefer not to. I was initially tempted to buy a new Thinkpad by the prices of high end X1 devices dropping, this new Yoga has 16G of RAM and a 2560*1440 screen – that’s a good upgrade from 8G with 1920*1080. The CPU of my new Thinkpad is a quad core i5-8350U that rates 6226 [2] and is a decent upgrade from the dual core i5-6300U that rates 3239 [3] although that wasn’t a factor as I found the old CPU fast enough.
The Yoga Gen3 has a minimum weight of 1.4Kg and mine might not be the lightest model in the range while the old Carbon weighs 1.14Kg. I can really feel the difference. It’s also slightly larger but fortunately still fits in the pocket of my Scottware jacket.
The higher resolution screen and more RAM were not sufficient to make me want to spend some money. The deciding factor is that as I’m working on phones with touch screens it is a benefit to use a laptop with a touch screen so I can do more testing. The Yoga I bought was going cheap because the touch part of the touch screen is broken but the stylus still works, this is apparently a common failure mode of the Yoga.
The Yoga has a brighter screen than the Carbon and seems to have better contrast. I think Lenovo had some newer technology for that generation of laptops or maybe my Carbon is slightly defective in that regard. It’s a hazard of buying second hand that if something basically works but isn’t quite as good as it should be then you will never know.
I’m happy with this purchase and I recommend that everyone who buys laptops secondhand the way I do only get 1440p or better displays. I’ve currently got the Kitty terminal emulator [4] setup with 9 windows that each have 103 or 104 columns and 26 or 28 rows of text. That’s a lot of terminals on a laptop screen!
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