Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4

**The Ugly**. 1 - The gimping continues. Even though the current 2021 model stack all feature Intel 11th gen CPUs, which natively support PCIe 4.0 on-die, Lenovo continues to reserve this performance for only the X1 Carbon gen 9 and X1 Extreme gen 4.

In the meantime, I need another laptop running Ubuntu 20.04 so I went with the Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen 4. Got it yesterday and I liked it so far!

Having said that, Lenovo do seem to be getting close to my ideal computer with Thinkpad Extreme Gen 4, so we'll have to just wait for reviews and see if I can get away with only selling a single kidney to buy it. Thinkpads are already quite repairable, but it's nice to see a company that really makes sure that the average user can swap out components with an included screwdriver and not have to take it to a "genius bar" or send it off for weeks only to be told that the repair will cost literally more than a new laptop. The port dongles are a great idea, since you can configure them to be what you want and *where* you want it, and if you don't need tons of USB ports you can have more storage etc. Kinda hope they make thicc version that stacks GPU, another nvme slot and a big battery and makes it a wee bit thicker in the future.

Still waiting on my P1 Gen 4 shipping notification, but meanwhile, it looks like two reviews of the X1 Extreme Gen 4 came out, both configured with the 2560x1600 display, 11800H CPU, 3060 GPU, and 16GB memory. Tom's Hardware:

Out of all these systems, I'd say the closest realistic fit would be either the Lenovo X1 Extreme Gen 4, or the new 2021 Dell XPS 15 running 11th gen Intel. Both offer remarkably similar WQUXGA (3840 x 2400) 16:10 IPS displays. I would ordinarily lean towards the Lenovo since I owned a T530 back in the day and have always had really good experiences with them.