Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Fold Available for Preorder: Hold onto Your Wallet | Hacker News Reader

Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Fold Available for Preorder: Hold onto Your Wallet

anandtech.com

57 pointsrbanffy74 comments

I'm really apprehensive of any folding screens, mostly because of their durability. I don't see a need for it. Innovation is great, but does this really help with anything? Can anyone please tell me why this would be great a choice over a Thinkpad Carbon or something equivalent?

I worked for Motorola back in the Razr days and I remember that the failure rate on folding phones was far higher than "candy bar" phones. I image that a screen will be far more fragile than the hinges that folded in those days.

There aren’t many choices for sub-A4 laptop that aren’t netbooks, so if your requirement is something more toward hardcover book form-factor for use on a side folding tray tables than B5 or A4 on fold down tables ... just like a good old ThinkPad 3xx ... priced at same ranges as well

That's a very specific requirement. But yes it does make some sense.

If people buy it than yes.

People said same things about iPhone and tablets.

Now those have their markets. So only future will tell (though I am not seeing this stick mainly due to price).

I don't want to have a separate desktop, but 95% of the time I use my laptop at home. I'd love to have a decent screen size when unfolded and use it like that (docked with external devices) every day, but still have the possibility to throw it into my backpack when needed.

If you'd use that thing in full screen mode then you don't have access to the keyboard. If you start docking keyboards and such then it defies its portability factor.

The best of both worlds would be to have a wrapped screen instead of a foldable one. I'd like a screen that extends when needed and wrapped away when not, eating as less space as possible.

The keyboard is detachable so you can use it next to the unfolded screen if I understand the description correctly.

Not sure why you think docking defies portability. As long as you have a usb-c port, you can attach display+peripherals with one cable when you're at the desk. Nothing is sacrificed.

If it's mostly reading something or media consumption on the move, even an 11 inch screen is good enough. I'd rather have an iPad pro or the new Air. Granted the iPad OS is sort of restrictive and still doesn't allow any interpreters or compilers etc. But it's still very functional and compact. But that's just me. Although I must admit that the higher end Lenovo laptops are very well built.

Never had one of those, but wouldn't a Surface or something alike be the right tool then?

I don't see a TrackPoint in the photo, my number one reason to always buy ThinkPads...

Yes, same here.

Trackpoint has a steeper learning curve - but it's so worth it.

I hope Lenovo are not going to phase it out.

Yeah? I always find it too sensitive, and only use it if i have a problem with my touchpad driver (something that hasn't happened in years). I have seen a few comments like yours recently, maybe its time to try to get used to it.

You can change sensitivity of it in mouse settings. If anything, I find the default settings on Debian too insensitive and had to nudge them up quite a bit.

I don't see the great keyboard either. My almost only reason to buy them.

don't dells have them as well?

Those are useless. The Thinkpad ones actually work.

They are nowhere near as good.

Not since the 90's I believe.

The Latitude "Business laptop" has it, but not the XPS. It's good enough.

I don't understand who this product is for. Even folded it's still too big to pocket so you have to either carry it in hand or in a bag that could already accommodate the unfolded screen. Does it only exist to be something for tech journalists to write about?

Well, it is kind of a tech demo. It's one of the first products based on foldable screen technology, launched to try out the market. Chances are people will find interesting uses for it, and then Lenovo can cater to those uses.

But I think it's wrong to see this as a replacement for a laptop. It's more big tablet than tiny laptop, I think. If you're not interested in the tablet functionality, then this isn't for you. I think the biggest problem is that it's a bit thick. If it was closer to tablet thickness, it would be more useful.

Maybe that it fits in a purse and I don't know who is this for. Rich fashion snobs is this for you?!

I was excited about the early announcements, but completely expected it to be 13" on one side, not when unfolded. This way, it seems to be an expensive showcase gadget only - can't think of who would legitimately want it as an improvement. I hope they iterate on it - I'd love a 2*13" version.

Exactly. I'd love to have a compact package that unfolds into a big screen. Although a 13 inch tablet is still cool. But, you know, it's a tablet, not a laptop. $2500 is pretty steep for a tablet.

But let's see where this technology goes. I hope that it eventually leads to a 28" screen that I can carry around like a 17" laptop.

I see many people here trying to explain why/how some other non-similar products are better.

Well, it's a first of a kind thing. You cannot say that MacBook Pro (which I love and use) is better/worse/cheaper.

You pay for innovation. I am pretty sure they'll be sold out as well.

When laptops were bulky I wished that the keyboard would lift out. At the time I did not imagine that the PCMCIA slots, the hot-swap DVD/CD-ROM, hot-swap batteries, full set of ports, docking station port, ethernet socket, IrDa receiver or the fans on the back would go.

We were left with tablets and Ultrabooks and no need for a 'lift out' keyboard.

This Thinkpad has one. But I think the design needs more work to be useful.

The screen needs to be larger so you have a manageable laptop screen on the bus or train, 13" or so. Then on the desk in the office it needs to be double that, unfolded to 21" or so.

The power brick could be the stand for the desktop use with the brick also being a minor docking station for a second monitor, a real ethernet port and legacy USB devices such as mice dongles and USB sticks.

The keyboard needs to be backlit and able to be stored in the middle when folded. With these improvements I think I would have my ideal mobile workstation.

I'm ready to purchase a product like this one given 2 constraints:

1. Price comes down a bit, for an ultraportable this is a little expensive for my budget.

2. The software stack has very few bugs and enables intelligent switching between 2 screens and 1. My hopes here are on the Surface Neo even though there is a gap between the screens. Windows 10x may provide some help here.

To give some background here, there are weeks where my work takes me to many locations in one day, and having something kind of pocketable which weighs 1.4 lbs and allows desktop functionality on a 13 inch screen would make a big difference for me. The key thing I cannot get from an ipad is a full unix stack, and they are not pocketable at a size which can work with my older eyes well. I've seen linux tablets, but I need a higher level of consistency in my other apps and touch interface than the ones I've read about can provide.

This is the point at which a product goes from done to overdone. The point something becomes overdone is the point at which usability declines and cost increases. Nice knowing you Lenovo.

It seems like a product nobody asked for, but maybe it's just me who doesn't sees the usefullness.

You know what Henry Ford said about that, right? There needs to be room for innovation. Not every experiment will be successful, but I think this one has potential.

I thought the same about the iPad when it first came out. (I still wouldn't buy one, but lots of people do).

In my opinion, it's a solution in search of a problem.

If it had a stand and video input, it could be a portable second monitor.

8 GB of memory seems rather unpowered for such a high-end device.

Also: What is it with the keyboard? Is that attached to the back or where do I put that, when in folded mode?

It's a separate thin keyboard that's sitting on half the screen. There's another picture with the separate keyboard in the other Anantech article. https://www.anandtech.com/show/15280/lenovos-thinkpad-x1-fol...

> It's a separate thin keyboard that's sitting on half the screen. There's another picture with the separate keyboard in the other Anantech article.

I can't quite tell... Can it be folded without removing the keyboard?

After looking at the images, I think so, yes.

When folding it pretty much behaves like a normal notebook, where the screen folds onto the keyboard, only that there's more screen under the keyboard.

So, does it seem like it also foldspp without the keyboard without leaving an awkward gap?

Flexible OLED can’t fold flat anyway so there’s gap, and keyboard fits there.

If you half open it like reading a hardcover book sideways on a desk, the keyboard stays attached to the bottom half, and you can use this like a miniature laptop.

One side is full screen, the other is half screen half keyboard, like in a laptop.

Or for less than one third of it you can get a One Mix Yoga or GPD Pocket, I personally have the Yoga 2S, it's as small as a 7" tablet AFAIK it uses the same screen as the Nexus 7 2013 used to, the newer ones use eight-something inch screens, I suspect all these mini notebooks just piggyback on the demise of Android tablets.

The older Core m3-8100Y has a 809 single core benchmark vs the Lakefield Core i5-L16G7 is 797, so that's the same, in multicore Lakefield has a 25% advantage which is certainly something but not a hell of a lot. To quote https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-lakefield-cpu-benchm...

> While the results look good, real-world gaming told another story. The difference between the two Intel processors was less than 1 frame per second.

And the Yoga, as the name suggests, is also a tablet albeit obviously not 13".

Possibly a dumb question but why has RAM plateaued in high-end laptops? Very expensive laptops these days seem to have either 8 or 16GB of memory, and it seems to me as though this has been the case for about 8 years. Is there some reason that you don't see a benefit beyond that? Is it to do with using SSDs?

What would you use more ram for?

Unless you do heavy processing over 8 seems like over kill.

And if you do heavy processing (rendering, photoshop or audio) then why do it on a laptop in a first place?

> Unless you do heavy processing over 8 seems like over kill.

I'm not doing heavy processing at the moment, and 8 seems too small for my light reading.

I have a 16 GiB MacBook and at the moment the built-in Activity Monitor say it's using ~14.5 GiB.

Firefox shows as ~9 GiB, and Safari as ~4 GiB.

I also have a VM running Linux, most of my work (other than reading and editing files) runs inside it. It's currently showing as using less than the browsers, about ~4 GiB.

There are some other tools running, such as terminals and Emacs. But they take much less.

None of this is heavy processing.

Those figures don't add up to < 16 GiB. There is obviously some sharing taking place and/or compression, or other misleading aspect to the figures. So is it using a lot of RAM really? Yes: recently I noticed serious slowdowns while reading. It's because the system was swapping to SSD under high memory pressure when I had Word, LibreOffice, Preview (for PDFs) open as well, and after some video conferencing tool was still active but not doing anything. It was not a busy CPU, it was memory pressure.

So my next laptop might need more than 16 GiB.

> And if you do heavy processing (rendering, photoshop or audio) then why do it on a laptop in a first place?

Because it's your main and only decent computer, and you need it to be portable sometimes.

Admittedly all this working from home is changing the equation temporarily. But even at home, I don't want to sit in the same place all day every day.

Back before Covid, I didn't work at a fixed location so needed to take my work with me. In future, I hope to do that again, so getting another laptop when I'm ready seems like the smart choice again.

I'm a fullstack dev, and I routinely fill up the 16GB in my laptop. I generally have two full IDEs, SSMS, Illustrator, Outlook, OneNote, Excel, Visio, a bunch of browser tabs, and now Teams or Zoom. I tend to be more constrained by core count than RAM though.

I try to use my desktop as much as possible (which has 64GB and 16 cores), but I can't always be tethered to my office.

8GB RAM is minimum for Win10 basic computer. It works for some use cases but I need more future-proof spec for such expensive device.

I put the blame squarely on the consumer. It's partly the reason why these screens rarely hit above 400nits of brightness. Market forces simply don't drive manufacturers to make 16GB the base because consumers continue to settle for the 8GB models available.

For general browsing, light workloads and watching videos, it's enough for most people.

I do programming and gaming on 8GB and don't see that becoming a problem anytime soon.

While there are workflows and software requiring a lot of resources (my work PC has 64GB and frequently uses more than half of that), most "common" uses do not.

> It's partly the reason why these screens rarely hit above 400nits of brightness

Can you give a use case for brighter displays? I usually keep my Macbooks at 3-5 bars of brightness. The only time I turn them up higher than half is when I'm in direct sunlight.

I believe it's the Intel chipset constraints

Model differentiation.

Enough where they can use the 8gb to grab the cheaper market and then upcharge bigly for the 16gb model.

There are plenty of nice 32GB laptops out there on the market. I was issued one for work as early as 2017.

Will this thing run Linux and can the keyboard be attached via a cable?

I am thinking about getting a tablet that can run Linux and an external keyboard. Then I can put the tablet on something and use it like a monitor. And the keyboard in front of it. What does the HN crowd think about this approach?

How about a surface? https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface

I want Linux from a trusted source. So one of the big distros. Preferably Debian. As far as I know, those do not support the Surface.

I want Linux from a trusted source, so I compile it myself :P

If you can get the kernel building (that repo), you can use any distro; that repo even has packages bundled for Debian, Arch, and Fedora.

That you compile it yourself does not make it more trusted.

This exact setup works for me, I use an X1 Tablet with an external keyboard. It is a 2nd gen, so Linux-support is not great (no webcam, no real suspend-to-ram), but for 3rd gen it seems to be good.

Sounds good. Which keyboard do you use? And which Linux distro?

ThinkPad Compact Bluetooth Keyboard with Trackpoint, part number 4Y40U90598 to be precise.

And Debian :-)

I just use an Samsung Tablet for it, then again Android native apps are enough for my on the go workflows.

Has anyone had experience with the folding screens? I think they look pretty futuristic (and I really want a Donkey Kong Game n Watch emulator running on one) - but do they look as good in real life?

I was watching a Korean tv show that was basically a long ad for the Samsung folding phone, and I noticed several times I could see a visible crease in the center. Have you found "creasing" to be an issue?

So it's ~500 money more expensive than the samsung foldable phone while providing superior performance and a real operating system.

Personally, if i would need a big screen to do real work on it, that screen will have to be BIG like a desktop monitor. For anything else the regular size tablet screen will be sufficient.

I'd rather have a MacBook for $2500

Dimensions in inches for US folks:

  11.79 x 9.29 x 0.45 (Open)
   6.23 x 9.29 x 1.09 (Closed)

Nobody in their right mind uses inches anymore. Please adapt SI units asap. ;-)

The article gives the dimensions in only mm, your parent was trying to help those people who are more familiar with inches.

I believe it was a friendly joke.

Indeed.

This isn’t running Windows 10X. I wonder why Microsoft let them release it, my understanding was that normal Windows couldn’t deal with a folding device (not surprising, considering the 40% of the time my Surface gets spooked when I unplug the keyboard).

>2020

>ram is cheapest component

>8Gb

Ok, one more useless shot from lenovo.

This feels like it would show up in a sci-fi movie from 20 years ago. I haven’t had that kind of futuristic feeling in a while. Even if this is objectively not an improvement.

Where is the Nano?

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