ThinkPad X1 Nano: Lenovo drops the mic with its light, fast, and long-lasting ThinkPad

This ThinkPad hits the sweet spot between power and battery life.

- BEN PATTERSON

The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano is just the kind of powerful, light, and long-lasting laptop you’ll want to take with you on post-pandemic business trips—and it’s handy even now just because it’s so easy to take all over the house.

It also performs right there in the ballpark with other 11th-gen Tiger Lake competitors, and at a hair under two pounds, it weighs less than almost all of them.

Equipped with an IR camera for facial recognition, a presence-detecting radar, a 2K display with Dolby Vision HDR, and a premium keyboard, the X1 Nano covers the most bases for corporate users, and we haven’t mentioned the superlative battery life yet. But with only two available ports (Thunderbolt 4, at least), you’ll need to invest in a USB-C hub to connect legacy accessories.

CONFIGURATION

Lenovo offers nine versions of the ThinkPad X1 Nano (go.pcworld.com/9vrs) on its retail website. The least expensive model comes with a quad-core i5-1130G7 processor, 16GB of LPDDRx RAM, integrated Iris Xe graphics, and a 512GB SSD, for a web price of $2,919 that you can slash to $1,150 using a prominently listed “eCoupon.” On the upper end is a quad-core Core i7-1180G7-powered version with the same integrated Iris Xe graphics, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. As with all the other Nano X1 SKUs listed on Lenovo.com (go.pcworld.com/9vrs), the price of the higher-end model can be substantially chopped with an eCoupon—in this case, from a lofty $3,719 to a more reasonable $2,231.

The particular X1 Nano that we’re reviewing (20UN000EUS) is sold only through third-party retail channels (such as on Amazon (