Lenovo ThinkPad T14s G4 review: Business laptop is better with AMD Zen4(notebookcheck.net) |
Lenovo ThinkPad T14s G4 review: Business laptop is better with AMD Zen4(notebookcheck.net) |
I just bought this a couple of days ago. I went with the ryzen, OLED version and 32GB RAM. I ordered without an OS and run Ubuntu on it. The decision was between T14 , the carbon x1 and the framework.
My previous laptop was a x1 gen 3. The laptop hinge broke :/ I absolute love this machine.
Impressions so far:
* Ubuntu 23.04 and Gnome runs so good that we even setup a donation on behalf of our company to the Gnome foundation. Ubuntu 22 will keep locking up.
* Everything works - camera, video recording, qualcomm wifi, all function keys etc. Even fingerprint login works!
* Gnome tweak tool is your friend. Especially to adjust those font sizes. I switched to noto from the default ubuntu.
* Keyboard is great but x1 carbon is still the best :-)
* Maybe my eyesight is failing me but I find no great difference between the FHD of x1 carbon gen 3 and OLED with 3 times more resolution.
* Batter is like 5 hours of so when I am working full time. I suspect OLED has something to do with this low battery life.
* Love that the camera has a physical switch
Some other tips:
* When you order be sure to not order the computer vision camera. This doesn't work on linux and there is a post on LKML saying it won't work for the next 2 years atleast.
* I am based in berlin, so ordered from Germany. You can order the "Beleuchtete Tastatur, schwarz – Englisch (EU)" keyboard for the US keyboard. Only practical change is euro sign instead of dollar in number 4 key.
* In the penultimate order screen, lenovo will sneak in a support option. But there's actually a basic support option which will save you some money. I think only difference is you might have to mail in your laptop for fixes, not sure.
AMA.
Have you tried running powertop for a bit? It would be interesting to see if the screen was consuming most of the power, or if the draw can be attributed to a particular device (maybe it is something useless like a Bluetooth radio that you can shut off!)
I wonder, if you can’t see the difference, maybe try halving the screen resolution? No reason to render all those extra pixels if you don’t need them, right? Plus, I guess it is rare in 2023, but any UI elements that are badly coded and not scalable would be sort of “normal sized.”
As for resolution, I wanted to try to run it lower res but Ubuntu crashes in lower res :/ Will have more time on the weekend to investigate.
Thankfully modern kernels have turned a bunch of settings on by default. But for a while a bunch of pretty simple power saving measures like iirc the sata link wouldn't go into low power states by default.
1. Can you expect to watch Netflix, fandom video services like F1tv without tinkering with some tunables in the OS?
2. What is the sleep/wakeup situation like? Can it do MacBook style - shut your lid when you go away from desk for a coffee and come back and open the lid for instant ON(back to work)? Reliably?
3. Also, does x86 laptops have the sane sleep state back? Or does it still keep sipping power and heat up while stashed in the backpack?
1. I no longer watch Netflix, but AFAIA, 1080p/4k is still a no go, as that requires proprietary DRM which isn't present in Linux/Linux browsers (Widevine L1 and PlayReady). But you can still watch Netflix in "SD", if you're okay with that. Not sure about fandom services, but if they don't use DRM it should be fine, for instance, YouTube 4K plays without any issues, and so do other sites like Piped/Invidious etc.
2. Sleep/wakeup works fine on AMD, MacBook style. I also use an M1 MBA, so when I say that the resume speeds are identical, I mean it. The default sleep mode btw is suspend-to-idle, which resumes instantly compared to the old method (S3/suspend-to-RAM).
3. By "sane" did you mean S3? If so, at least on AMD laptops and Linux, you can pass `mem_sleep_default=deep` to the kernel and it'll use S3 mode instead of s2idle. However, a couple of things: at least on my setup, s2idle drains very little battery and doesn't cause your backpack to heat up. But if you're still concerned about battery drain over longer periods of time, you could enable the suspend-then-hibernate option, which will cause your laptop to automatically hibernate after it's been in standby for a while (exact timeout period is configurable). So IMO, there's no need to use S3/deep standby.
The alarmingly priced usb-c dock works. Three monitors around laptop, no problem. The LTE modem works out of the box on windows and works with some arguing on Linux (I built a driver from GitHub, but that's probably improved since).
An not-obvious benefit of the Lenovo ones is they're on the approved list for AMD's employees, so broken stuff is pretty immediately apparent to lots of people with internal paths for reporting bugs to Lenovo.
That said, the spec sheet MobileMark benchmark says battery life is as good as 14.3 hrs in max battery setting on WUXGA Low Power (non-touch), Win 11, 52.5Wh battery, versus a performance mode getting 5.0 hrs on 2.8K OLED (non-touch), Win 11, 39.3 Wh battery. With 'local video playback' lasting longer. So I guess it's very hardware and use-case specific. (https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_T...)
Lenovo learns tho; the trend is that issue-y lines are followed by stable lines. ex:Some early X1 gens had a small % with issues and later were fine. ex:We just redid the thermal compound on a 2yo P15 this week (thermal shutdowns). Ours seemed to be an outlier and was clean + lightly used.
Lenovo absolutely honors warranties tho and will even allow purchasing an extended after expiration (tho w/ a 30day 'cooling' period).
Like other Intel laptops I've had, the fans do come on occasionally but not very often. I do have some qualms about this laptop but I'm happy with it and the tradeoffs I chose.
The main competitors here is the HP EliteBook 845 G10 and the MacBook Pro 14 M2 Pro.
- Design: classic ThinkPad look, a bit brutalist. Lighter than MacBook Pro 14 since it uses carbon fiber instead of metal.
- Networking, keyboard: great
- Display: 16:10 Full HD IPS, 400 nits with very good contrast ratio 1800:1, though the MacBook Pro and laptop with OLED screens will still have the edge here
- Performance: Ryzen 7 7840U is currently the flagship low-power laptop CPU from AMD. Comparable to the i7-1370P and the M2 Pro 12-core, especially in terms of multi-core and efficiency. It completely slaughters any U-variant from Intel. The iGPU Radeon 780M is currently the fastest iGPU in the x86 world, leading Intel's Iris Xe Graphics G7 by around 50% in most games and tests.
- Emission: fan noise and heat are no issue, around the same as MacBook Pro 14.
- Battery: same as MacBook Pro 14, i.e., really good.
In short, a true Windows alternative to the MacBook Pro. The main factor for this is the stellar Ryzen 7 7840U and its Radeon 780M. Ever since it appears in Windows handheld gaming consoles, it has shown to be a capable balance between performance and power consumption, asymptomatic to the M2 Pro. The only problem is AMD not making it available widely enough, with laptop options trickling down quite slowly compared to Intel. (There was rumor laptop makers have to restrict the use of the 7840U since its iGPU means a cut to their gaming segment.)
I used a ThinkPad X1 Carbon G9 before, and while it's great, the Intel CPU really handicapped it. Now I'm on a MacBook Air M1, but damn the Windows offerings are more and more attractive now (thanks to macOS ruining an otherwise good laptop).
Switched to Dell and couldn't be happier.
I actually refused a new dell to remain with an older thinkpad just because how uncomfortable they are.
All in all, it was a bad experience and didn't even last 2 years for me. I don't think I'll be buying another Thinkpad soon.
Lenovo went down the route of trying to chase the MacBook Pro crowd and ended up compromising on durability, repairability (soldered components) and keyboard quality (traditionally the USP of ThinkPads).
The Thinkpad I had previously had some wonky wifi chipset. Got it working, but it was a pain.
I'm not buying anything else from Lenovo.
I wish I could say it is 100% stable. It's close, and close enough for me to rely on it. Occasionally when I plug in to the dock the external monitors do not activate. Also if I plug in power while suspended, it powers on. I have face unlock working, which is nice. I have problems with connecting my Samsung bluetooth earbuds, but I haven't tried very hard to make that work well.
Idles at around 5 watts, which is nice. Real world use is around 6-8 hours battery, which is just about good enough for me. I had an X1 Extreme gen 3 before and it was the battery life that made me change. Before that a P51s which I do miss because of the clunky docking station and numeric keypad. It was too heavy though, and battery only just ok, even with two batteries including extended at the rear.
How the image relates to upstream... I have no idea.
For starters the return key are different widths, which is a deal breaker if you’re a touchtyper used to wider return keys.
Programming also uses tilde and other symbols that are different between the two.
Overall they’re similar for typing alphabets, but symbols and enter key are different.
Order them from the Netherlands, Romania or other EU countries that use the US-INT layout.
Do you use your laptop to work, or just watch video all the time?
Because if you actually do work, 16:10 or 3:2 is much better.
I was almost fooled by their 'Full HD' description, but glad to see 1920x1200 in the specs that followed.
They both handle gigabytes of data, and typically bottlenecked with memory throughput.
If a dev machine I'd get it, but biz users are email and a few small spreadsheets. I don't get why biz users need multicore anything.
To run crapware/spyware installed by their corporate IT, of course! And I'm only half kidding since I distinctly remember how I couldn't even listen to Youtube Music without stuttering on my corporate Lenovo laptop on my previous job.
That's a fairly narrow view of what a business user might do. The spreadsheets aren't necessarily small, there's usually a messaging tool or two open, and several web browsers open to line of business apps, etc. (This is before even considering OS overhead and the like.)
Have you opened a Chrome or Electron app recently? And many biz users need to run those apps while on Zoom with a virtual background for the camera.
Based on your logic, all most biz users really need for email and spreadsheets can be done using Lotus Notes / 1-2-3 on a single-core IBM 5150 with 5 MHZ and 256KB of memory.
BTW My home machine is a decade-old dual core and it runs email, web and all of Libreofffice just fine, and with 90% of its mem unused.
When line of business apps like email use 1GB of memory each you need a faster machine than if you use mutt.
The i7-1355U version takes pretty big hit, starting from 1500 units going quickly down to 1000. Probably due to thermal throttling.
Also as an x86 based anything, the battery life is already going to be poor and the fan is going to make noise. Using the modem is going to make it worse.
And it’s only LTE in 2023?
But on the other hand, I do always buy the cellular version of iPads even though I could just as easily tether those to my phone.
Two cool things that TLP does is allow you to set battery charge thresholds for better battery longevity (I limit mine to 80%), the other being automatically changing the energy performance preference (EPP) in the amd-pstate driver, so if you're on battery you could get it to automatically switch to power saving or balanced powersaving etc. I get an 8-10 hr battery life even with the 80% cap capacity, with several MS webapps running in Edge (Wayland), including Teams and Outlook, VS codium and Firefox running in the background.
Ubuntu was a nice base in that it provided all the drivers and stuff like that built-in (I had a desktops with Arch for about a decade, and my previous memory of laptops was hunting for drivers on Arch in like 2011. It was kind of a pain, so I switched to Ubuntu for this laptop. I’m not sure whether that was the right decision, though).
Good luck with the crash! FWIW, there’s an Xorg and a Wayland version of Ubuntu’s desktop environment, maybe try flipping over to the other one just to see if that does anything.
Lenovo makes missteps occasionally, but I think whatever the Thinkpads reputation is, Lenovo is more responsible for it than IBM.
Maybe I need to map a new key in my window manager: rfkill unblock wlan on keydown, rfkill block wlan on keyup, hahaha.
https://geizhals.de/lenovo-thinkpad-t14s-g4-amd-deep-black-2...
You can compare it to Apple laptops quite easily e.g.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/index.php?id=127065&specs[]=34...
I've seen issued laptops coming with cellular data + persistent tunnel as the default connection method over allowing use of client/public/site WiFi networks.
>The moment that Chrome, Slack, Docker and PyCharm are up and running, it gets quite loud :(
It sounds like you're at least cruising on the highway. Not to mention, you may be experiencing other bugs, either with the software or OS. Maybe try toggling windows defender and see if the issue persists.
https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-293604/IntelliJ-is...
How about you stop making personal attacks?
That was a ridiculous interpretation of what I asked so how about not strawmanning people asking questions. And BTW I gave you the spec of my current machine which you ignored.
So probably he hits what on my keyboard is "ù" when he wants to enter.
I own a laptop with a USA keyboard and I dislike that, because no amount of mapping can change the fact that USA layout has 1 key less.
Dell has a few models with keyboards that accept both layouts, but in most laptops the "grid" above the keys prevents switching between them, which makes it really annoying if you ever buy one with an ISO layout, hoping to be able to just buy an ANSI keyboard later to replace it...
I think that's it.
I've used both, and the switch from 16:9 to 16:10 was a regression. Way too much vertical cramping (and other dumb stuff, like fat bezels). I've switched back to 16:10 to the greatest degree possible.
4:3 to 16:10 was an actual improvement, because it gave more space for sidebar stuff. I'm curious if 3:2 would be a better compromise than 16:10, but I haven't had the chance to use a monitor like that.
Unfortunately there was only one monitor made by Huawei that appears not in production. Panels still are available on aliexpress iirc.
What do you get out of 16:10 for "working"?
Most devs would probably prefer an ever taller aspect ratio than 16:10 but laptops with those screens that fit other needs are hard to come by.
It’s one of the reasons why I think the notch was actually a net positive on MacBooks: Apple added a strip of vertical pixels to 16:10 which acts as a “nook” for the menubar and notch to live in, making it effectively taller than 16:10.
Yes, I am old.