As a longtime ThinkPad user, I’d always stuck with the X1 Carbon series, and I’d always felt the Carbon deserved its flagship status. But as time went on and the nature of my work changed, my demands for performance kept climbing. The thing is, the X1 Carbon is fundamentally a thin-and-light, so its performance ceiling is very limited — and, absurdly, the battery capacity isn’t great either. That eternal 57Wh (I hear they bumped it to 58Wh in 2026) means that aside from being light and thin, both battery life and performance are pretty mediocre. It just wasn’t meeting my needs anymore. So after watching and waiting for nearly a year, I finally saw off the absurd MTL architecture and welcomed the TSMC-powered ARL-H. I picked up the ThinkPad T14p Gen 3 with integrated graphics — the so-called “China-exclusive pocket rocket” — in the U285H + 6400 high-frequency DDR5 64G memory configuration. I ran the numbers and buying the RAM myself would actually cost more than paying the upgrade premium, so I just went all the way. I’ve been using the machine for nearly a year now. Feels like if I don’t say something soon, Panther Lake will be out. So let me just jot down some impressions here.

Last year, while I was replacing the battery in my Switch, my hand slipped and the screwdriver flew off and hit the screen, leaving a nice little pit right in the middle. That’s when I remembered that almost a year ago, I still had insurance on the screen — you can read the details here. So I thought, isn’t this the perfect time to get the screen replaced? While I was still hesitating, the next day the machine obligingly developed a new problem: the TrackPoint’s right-click button popped out, and it wouldn’t go back in. Looks like I had no choice but to go to the service center.

My old laptop was gone, so I decided to buy a new one. And since I was buying new, I figured I’d stick with the X1 Carbon line—especially since around Chinese New Year there were rumors that this generation would bring a ton of great changes. Sure enough, right around the holiday, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon 9th was officially announced: a brand-new 4K screen, a new 16:10 aspect ratio, better speakers, a bigger battery, a beefier Iris integrated GPU, and a shorter key travel. Overall it still looked way better than the old versions—at the very least, that screen alone was worth bragging about. So I decided to go for it.

As everyone knows, one of the ThinkPad’s biggest draws is the TrackPoint, and newer ThinkPads have been caring less and less about it — not only has the height been cut way down, but it keeps getting shorter and harder to use, again and again. Maybe the TrackPoint just doesn’t fit with the mainstream Windows laptop push toward touchpads these days, but it’s still the last stubborn holdout for ThinkPad fans. The obvious fix is to swap the stock cap for a third-party one. I swapped mine out before — a 3D-printed piece by Mr. Saoto in Japan. My impression back then was that it felt great: it fit the finger nicely and was easy to use. The only downsides were that the color was a bit ugly and the material seemed pretty ordinary — not very durable. A while back I saw on Etsy that Mr. Saoto had released a new version of the 3D-printed TrackPoint, made with a composite material and with better colors, so I decided to grab one. Getting it, though, was a real ordeal.

So I upgraded to a 2K HDR screen a while back, used it for a bit, and honestly the colors are a little too vivid, and even with 500 nits I never use the brightness. But the biggest thing: 2560 x 1440 is just stuck in an awkward middle ground. I’m a Linux user, and Linux has always been terrible at fractional scaling. People say Wayland supports it now, but one, my discrete GPU has no Wayland driver, and two, Wayland performance is a joke — the mouse stuttering in particular is absolutely maddening. Word is Wayland mouse handling goes through libinput, which shares a single thread with gnome-shell, so high system load equals stutter. Fucking stupid. In the end I couldn’t stand 2K’s nonsense scaling anymore and chose to “throw money at the problem” — went 4K.

As a ThinkPad X1C 5th user, there’s actually one problem that’s been bugging me. The laptop is so thin that the screen hits the keyboard when the lid is closed, leaving keyboard marks. That’s also why I recommend a screen protector. But a screen protector isn’t a real fix, and putting one on a laptop is honestly pretty dumb. So I thought of another solution.

I bought the Lipstick Power Adapter last year, and a while back it started acting up — it wouldn’t charge my ThinkPad X1 Carbon anymore. Actually, this problem is really annoying. First off, the adapter still charges: it charges phones, it charges a New MacBook, it charges a Switch, it can even charge a MacBook Pro. It just won’t charge the ThinkPad. Personally I figure it probably doesn’t support the PD protocol anymore. Thought about it for a bit, realized it was less than a year since purchase, so sending it in for repair was the only option.

Generally speaking, putting a tempered glass protector on a laptop is a dumb idea, unless your laptop is a tablet 2-in-1 or has a touchscreen. After all, the laptop screen doesn’t really come into contact with anything, and closing the lid protects it too, so why would you ever need a protector? Even if it gets dirty, just wipe it off, right? Well, lately I’ve come to feel that was naive of me. After more than a year of using mine, I personally strongly recommend putting a tempered glass protector on your laptop, especially if it’s a ThinkPad X1C series. Don’t laugh, I’m serious.

Intel recently released the AX200 series of Wi-Fi cards. A batch showed up on eBay too, and surprisingly cheap — pretty friendly compared to the old 7265 and friends, which used to run close to 200. And after the ThinkPad X250, ThinkPad products no longer have a whitelist. Still, even though by conventional wisdom Intel wireless cards and Linux get along just fine, I have to say this product is an exception.

Starting with the ThinkPad X240, the TrackPoint got thinner, and the feel got worse too. It lost that “point where you want, go where you point” convenience of the original ThinkPad X230. Honestly there’s not much to be done about it — laptops have to get thin, and this is hard to balance. By the time the ThinkPad X1 Carbon 5th came along, the TrackPoint’s size got even more awkward. Still, the TrackPoint’s advantages are irreplaceable, so I just put up with it. Naturally, a Japanese guy named さおと (saoto) wasn’t having it, and decided to solve the problem with 3D printing. I found out about saoto from a Taiwanese friend’s blog. He made his own little TrackPoint cap to replace the stock one, and it’s said to greatly improve the feel, so I decided to give it a try. saoto has released the 3D-print files for his cap design, but you can also buy one from him, and the price isn’t especially steep. What arrives is a plain envelope from Japan. When you open the envelope, be careful not to just tear it apart — there’s an instruction sheet inside… The sheet explains the design concept behind the cap in detail, plus the various versions included, covering both the old-style and new-style TrackPoints.