ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 (Snapdragon X Elite) review: Not quite as quiet as you hope it is

TL;DR

The ThinkPad powered by Qualcomm’s new ARM processor performs great and feels nice but is plagued by power management issues.

Introduction

Exactly five years ago, due to work requirements, I tried switching my daily computer over to a Windows laptop after using macOS exclusively for over ten years. Frankly, it was a complete disaster: The computer took months to deliver and then finally arrived with a broken display. Because I could not wait another six weeks for a replacement computer, I decided to get the screen replaced using Lenovo’s “Premier” support. Alas, the machine needed to be shipped to the next repair center, where it disappeared for three weeks. Communication with the vendor was so bad that a colleague tasked with organizing the repair threatened “If I ever have to speak to these people again, I’ll quit.”

When the laptop was finally repaired, things did not get better: Windows 10 still felt sluggish, working with WSL 1 was a hit-and-miss, and the overall developer ecosystem left a lot to be desired. I quickly went back to the Mac.

Yet, the X1 Carbon (Gen7) I bought at the time had a great keyboard and got lots of time as a machine to test all kinds of Windows software on and to work on our native app’s integration with PowerPoint on a regular basis. After all these years, Windows 11 with WSL 2 makes for a quite nice Linux desktop.

So, with Qualcomm’s X Elite processor getting rave reviews everywhere, maybe Windows on ARM will finally be a thing? I bought a ThinkPad T14s G6 to give this a try. I’ll be comparing the machine to the X1 Carbon and my “daily driver” – a three-year old MacBook Pro with M1 Pro processor.

Specifications

The machine in question is a Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 (Snapdragon), model number 21N1-CTO1WW:

• 14” WUXGA (1920x1200, 162 ppi) anti-glare, low power screen with 400 nits
• Architecture: ARMv8 (64-bit)
• CPU: Qualcomm “Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100” with 12 cores, 42 MB cache, max. Frequency of 3.4 GHz
• RAM: 32 GB LPDDR5x
• GPU: Qualcomm “Adreno X1-85” (with 3.8 TFLOPS)
• NPU: Qualcomm Hexagon with 45 TOPS
• Disk: 1 TB Western Digital PC SN740 NVMe SSD
• 1080p webcam, IR camera, presence detector, fingerprint reader
• OS: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro

Order process

Like usual with Lenovo, the price on the website fluctuates daily, so if you’re happy with one of the pre-built configurations, get one of those – preferably from a local dealer.

Alas, laptop keyboards nowadays are not interchangeable and to get a ThinkPad equipped with ANSI layout in Germany you have to order a custom built one. In my case, this option was around 600 Euros more than the comparable pre-built option sold on the website, which would have been delivered a day later. I gave Lenovo’s sales department a call and they were able to bring down the cost to nearly match the offer on the website. Exactly three weeks later the machine was delivered by UPS.

Hardware overview

The laptop weighs around 1.2 kilograms. You can hardly feel the weight difference to the X1 Carbon, which is a little more than 100 grams lighter, but the Mac (1.6 kg) definitely feels a bit heavier. I did not measure them, but the T14s has roughly the same footprint as the X1 Carbon and the MacBook Pro, it’s just a bit thicker than both other laptops. This is mainly due to the way the screen is integrated into the case and while the laptop’s keyboard cover and case bottom seem to be of a soft to touch plastic material (much like the X1), the back of the screen feels very cheap and plasticy as it’s of a somewhat harder polymer. Next to the noise (see below), this might very well be the only downside this machine has.

As usual with ThinkPads, the case is a fingerprint magnet. The overall build quality is very good, though, and the device delivers exactly what you would expect from Lenovo’s T series lineup: A sturdy, but not overly hefty, workhorse.

The screen has a rather thin bezel on the sides, but a slightly wider one up top that also features a “reverse notch” which houses the webcam (with a closable lid and a white indicator LED), a Windows Hello IR camera & presence sensor, and two microphones. This notch is not distracting and looks fine when sitting in front of the computer but is a bit bulky on the back and adds to the cheap feel when the laptop is closed. The screen’s hinge is too tight to open it with one hand, but there is no noticeable wobble when typing on the keyboard. It can be opened completely flat, but, again, due to the screen’s thickness, the base of the notebook will lift slightly when doing so.

On the left side of the device, there are two Thunderbolt 4 enabled USB-C ports, and a tiny (protruding, what the heck?) LED to indicate the charging status, a HDMI 2.1 port and a 3.5 mm headphone jack. On the right, you find a Kensington lock port and two USB-A (5 Gbps) ports. I’d love to have at least one additional USB-C port on the right (like with the MacBook Pro) and would give up one of the older Type A ports for this. On the bottom, next to the large air intake, a small pinhole indicates some kind of reset functionality that I never tried.

Display

Lenovo uses a simple, matte 16:10 WUXGA (1920x1200 pixels) IPS display which is not too bright. With a pixel density of only 162 ppi there are certainly sharper options available, but I’m pretty happy with it. It gets the job done and I don’t see a reason why I would want to trade it for a more power hungry model.

Keyboard

Like the X1 Carbon, the T14s comes with a 6-row fulls-size chiclet style keyboard with 1.5 mm of key travel. The layout used is misleadingly called “English (EU)” by Lenovo and is actually the only ANSI layout option which can be ordered from the European Union – even if the computer is built to order for you in China. Lenovo sales staff usually does not know about the differences between ANSI and ISO layouts, so make sure that the order specifically says “English (EU)” not just “English” or “English (GB)” if this is important to you.

While I do appreciate newer scissor switch keyboards on the Mac (compared to the butterfly ones they used before), using a ThinkPad keyboard after a while is always a pleasure. It’s not on the level of earlier T series laptops, but the T14s feels fantastic – a little more tactile than the X1, but equally as good.

The two-stage keyboard backlight is nice and even, but still not on par with Apple: Too much light is emitted from underneath the keys (especially the function key row) which can be a bit distracting when working in the dark.

The layout is well thought out: multiple keys contain “home dots” to help orient without looking at the keyboard, the page up/down keys are slightly chamfered so your fingers don’t accidentally slide off the cursor keys while using them, and the function lock, caps lock, mute, and microphone toggles have small indicator LEDs integrated into the keys. Talking about this, microphone toggles should be standard on any keyboard and headset by now, and I don’t know why not more vendors are adding this functionality.

Lenovo decided to swap the Ctrl and Fn keys compared to older revisions and I do not think that this makes sense. Thankfully, this setting can be reversed in the BIOS and both keys seem to be of the exact same size, so I might switch them at some point. If I was granted a wish here: Throw away the caps lock key altogether, and move the Ctrl key into its place. This way there’d be a clear position for the Fn key, Space would be a bit wider and I’m setting up CapsLock as additional Ctrl on all my computers anyhow.

The keyboard also contains a new “CoPilot” key or something, but thankfully the designers did not shrink down the space bar any further, but just replaced the Menu key with it.

Also, the keyboard contains two screenshot buttons. One starts the Windows screenshot functionality (as in Windows-Shift-S), the other one starts “Snipping Tool” … what’s going on here?

Touchpad, TrackPoint

The glass touchpad feels nice but there’s a great difference between the force necessary to click it on the top versus the bottom of the area. By default a “natural” scrolling direction is configured. Usability of the trackpad is still not nearly on par with any Mac built in the past twenty years.

The TrackPoint works perfectly fine and pairs nicely with the three physical buttons below. In contrast to my X1, the new one does not seem to drift.

Webcam, microphones, speaker

The Full HD webcam does a decent job and is the first ThinkPad webcam I’d use in a professional context. While the quality is still not as good as my simple external Logitech C920 from 2012, it is comparable to the camera of the MacBook Pro and this is apparently quite the achievement. I happen to like the image quality of the Mac’s camera way better but I am not sure if this is due to better optics or only because of a better implementation of portrait mode and studio light by Apple. In comparison, the X1 Carbon’s camera is so bad, you just don’t use it.

The two microphones in the ThinkPad do a commendable job, but the ones in the Mac sound clearer and seem to have a way better noise cancellation: With the T14s would sometimes pick up hands moving on the palm rest or desk, which did not happen with the MacBook.

In contrast to the X1, the T14s is only branded with “Dolby Audio” instead of “Dolby Atmos” – but sound quality is the same for both laptops. The Carbon is a tiny bit louder than the newer laptop, but both ThinkPads are just no match for the MacBook in terms of audio quality and volume.

IR camera, presence sensor, fingerprint reader

The “Windows Hello” login functionality seems to work very well, much better than on the X1. I have yet to experience an issue where the system would not quickly log me in automatically. Great!

The presence detection system works most of the time, but seems to rush things a bit. Throughout the past week, it happened a few times that the system started to dim the screen – as if I had left the computer, even when I was currently typing.

I did not set up the fingerprint reader (which is integrated into the power button), yet, and frankly do not miss it.

Software / Firmware

Some notes on the system’s firmware. This is an UEFI laptop which will easily support other ARM64 operating systems, like OpenBSD, once “Secure Boot” is disabled. It does not seem to ship with an UEFI shell, but a traditional BIOS-like setup. Most of the devices (camera, wireless, …) can individually be disabled in the there.

When configuring multiboot, one must create an entry for the pre-installed Windows system manually, then the firmware boot manager can be used to switch between operating systems.

The laptop is quick to wake up from sleep (on Windows) and has the traditional “breathing” red LED on the top to indicate sleep state.

For some reason, the firmware is extremely slow (as in “it takes 10 minutes to boot”) when a USB gigabit network adapter is connected. Not super annoying, but a bit frustrating, if you have a desk setup where you typically use wire ethernet.

I did not experience any software incompatibility issues due to this system being ARM. WSL works fine, too.

Existing x64 software was emulated seamlessly, just like I know it from the Mac.

“AI”

The ThinkPad is a so-called “CoPilot+” computer that has a few “Artificial Intelligence” features powered by the system’s “Neural Processing Unit” which is prominently marketed by Qualcomm. Apparently, this chip is able to run some machine learning tasks which currently only is used by the webcam’s Studio effects” functionality. Based on which features are enabled (reframing, portrait light, portrait blue, etc.) the NPU will be utilized 30-50% which will make the fan spin all time time …

I’d love to see Microsoft offer some offline LLMs to improve the computing experience (text, code completion, photo editing), but, honestly, at the moment this whole AI branding looks like a sham.

Performance

Generally, I am happy with the performance, as the system is snappy and there is really nothing to complain about for my specific use-case. The SSD delivers read and write speeds of nearly 5 GiB/s and the CPU speed feels on par with my MacBook Pro.

I don’t really want to get into processor benchmarks and stuff like that, but to put my experience into numbers, I thought I’d compare the build time of some Vizzlo projects using hyperfine on the three machines. All of them were connected to the power supply during these tests, but I added a fourth option running the T14s on battery (with Energy saver mode enabled) to see what difference this would make.

Go project compile time:

Machine / CPU	Time	Fan noise
T14s / Snapdragon X Elite	14.138 s ± 2.114 s	loud
T14s (battery)	29.183 s ± 3.797 s	loud
X1 Carbon / Core i7	41.225 s ± 0.850 s	loud
MacBook Pro / M1 Pro	12.832 s ± 0.221 s	no fan

TypeScript web app bundling time:

Machine / CPU	Time	Fan noise
T14s / Snapdragon X Elite	45.988 s ± 0.556 s	loud
T14s (battery)	120.327 s ± 2.873 s	no fan
X1 Carbon / Core i7	101.266 s ± 9.083 s	loud
MacBook Pro / M1 Pro	38.112 s ± 0.514 s	no fan

As you can see, the T14s from 2024 is nearly able to reach the performance of the M1 Pro from 2021.

Alas, the fan is spinning at full speed when running the benchmark while plugged in. The Mac was the only machine staying completely silent through these tests.

Battery life

Seeing how I can easily get more than a full work day of battery life on the M1 Pro MacBook, I came to expect a lot from the ARM-powered ThinkPad and it surely does not disappoint – at least comparing it to Intel-based Windows laptops I got to work with in the past. As a battery life test, I used the laptop for light office tasks after disconnecting the charger at 100% in twelve sessions until the operating system forcibly shut it down. While I expected to be able to run it down to 1%, this happened pretty unexpectedly at 5%.

During this test, Windows’ “Energy saver” mode was turned on all the time and the screen brightness was set to 70%. By light office tasks I mean this: Writing emails, some light coding, editing simple text documents & spreadsheets, browsing the web, joining a few short conference calls.

As the test was stretched out over multiple days, some battery depletion was to be expected even when the system was not in use. Luckily, throughout a total of 44 hours and 23 minutes the laptop spent in standby mode, the battery only lost around 10% of charge.

The remaining (as reported) 85% battery was enough to power the system through a total time of active use for 8 hours and 39 minutes. All in all, a great result and this laptop will not have any issue making it through a full working day.

Heat and noise emission

In contrast to all other Lenovo laptops I can compare it with, this machine does not seem to have any coil whine. Bravo! Update 2024-11-07: A slight coil whine is now audible on the left side of the device while the laptop is charging or when a non-static image is displayed on the screen; i.e. when scrolling through a simple text document. What a bummer.

When not plugged in (and especially in “Energy saver” mode) the machine stays completely silent and neither the keyboard nor the bottom get more than lukewarm, even when stressing the CPU for a minute or less.

As soon as you start using the NPU or GPU though (i.e. you join a Google Meet call and use the system’s “Studio effects” or Meet’s own visual effects), the fan will start spinning and emit a constant white noise at viewing distance. The same happens with full CPU usage after around one minute, for example in the Go compilation test described above (the codebase including the standard library was recompiled 10 times in row). It’s not annoying and the machine really generally is a silent workhorse when on the go.

All this does not matter anymore, once you start using the ThinkPad connected to a charger. Regardless of the chosen power mode, the fan is either running all the time (light coding, attending video calls) or constantly turns on and off (web browsing). There seems to be no power management setting which can force the laptop to use less energy, so it stays silent.

The fan speed will now vary, too, so it might be faint at times, while at other times we are talking about a noticable hum with only 4% CPU, 0% GPU, 0% NPU utilization. This issue worsens while the computer is charging, suggesting that the thermal management of the battery system and CPU throttling need adjustment. Lenovo should address this in an upcoming firmware update.

Alas, the system’s air outlet is positioned right below the screen which then will reflect any fan noise directly towards the user. Compare this with the X1’s case design where air is let out on the right, or the MacBook where … I don’t know where the fans are, because they are essentially off all the time.

On Oct 17, 2024, Lenovo released a firmware update (“Lenovo Power and Battery Driver v10.1.10.0”) which improved the fan noise situation a bit – or so I want to believe. All these tests were performed after installing this update. So, yes, it was worse before.

Edit 2024-11-04: Further updates provided by Lenovo did not improve the situation: “Qualcomm Integrated System Software and Firmware Package v1.0.0.11” (released 2024-10-31), “UEFI Bios v2.13 and ECP v1.24” (released 2024-10-31).

Verdict

So you’re looking for a new, light laptop to work on the road? Is the T14s a good deal? Hell no, get a MacBook Pro or even a MacBook Air. If it has to be a Windows laptop though, the ThinkPad T14s is a great choice, as soon as Lenovo fixes the power management issues.