Review: Lenovo’s ThinkPad Z13 is a little weird, but Ryzen 6000 is fantastic

From the basic boring E series to the premium X series, Lenovo ThinkPad laptops rarely surprise you with their design. By and large, they’re intentionally unremarkable, with simple (and sometimes rectangular) bezels and unassuming black trim.

So when Lenovo moves away from that basic template, as it did with the new ThinkPad Z13 Gen 1, it’s worth talking about. The Z13 is recognizable as a ThinkPad, but it has eccentric touches like matte gold accents and a vegan leather lid. There’s also a less flashy gray aluminum version, if the business laptop with its gold accents and vegan leather seems less “stylish”and more “paternal midlife crisis”to you.

By far the most impressive thing about the Z13 is the Ryzen 6000 processor and integrated Radeon GPU. I started testing the Z13 around the same time that I was unimpressed by the 12th gen Intel processors in the Framework laptop and Lenovo’s own X1 Carbon Gen 10, and the Ryzen processor is simply better than Intel’s in just about every metric imaginable. But my reaction to a laptop based on this chip is more restrained.

See and feel

The Z13 is less dogmatically similar to the ThinkPad than something like the X1 Carbon, and that starts with the materials. The recycled aluminum palm rest and bottom of our review model are familiar enough, but they lack the soft-touch finish that the Carbon has – overall I don’t mind that because the Z13 doesn’t pick up fingerprints as much. like carbon. The bronze accents and faux leather lid are more reminiscent of HP laptops. But it doesn’t look or feel bad, and the soft leather material doesn’t scratch or scratch as easily as I feared (at least in the short term).

But once you get rid of the solid construction, some of the handy extras we like on other ThinkPads are either missing or blurry here. There is no webcam shutter on most ThinkPads, and you only get a pair of USB 4 ports, one on each side (along with a headphone jack). It’s not a lot of ports, but it’s in line with what you get from a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, and actually better than what the latest Dell XPS 13 models (9315 and 9320) offer; they both ditch the headphone jack for reasons that defy explanation.

But by far the biggest disappointment is the keyboard. It certainly looks a lot like a standard ThinkPad keyboard, but compared to the X1 Carbon keyboard (and most others I’ve used over the past few years), its key travel is much shorter and the keys are much more secure. This “hard but superficial”combination isn’t as bad as Apple’s failed butterfly keyboard experiment, but it’s the keyboard that reminds me the most. As with this keyboard, I’m used to typing on the Z13 but never really liked it.

The Z13 is a physically smaller laptop than the X1 Carbon, so I could forgive it for a worse keyboard in the interest of saving space, but the tiny ThinkPad X1 Nano also manages to fit a nice, more traditional keyboard. small laptop. That’s too bad, because better input devices would have lifted the Z13 from “mostly good”to “really excellent.”