Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold 16 review: setting the bar for foldables

Early into testing Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Fold 16 Gen 1, I briefly regretted purchasing its dual-display Yoga Book 9i. I bought it months ago, and it improved my day-to-day life in so many unexpected ways, I told myself I’d never buy another single-screen laptop. But then, the X1 Fold showed up with its folding OLED screen and tried to turn me into that Distracted Boyfriend meme as I transformed it from a 12-inch netbook to a 16-inch drawing tablet while shouting to my partner from downstairs, “Come look at this laptop!”

We spent some time folding and unfolding the laptop, sticking the curved centerfold close to our eyeballs so we could see how smooth the seam was. We quickly forgot that it folded in half as we played games and watched movies with it unfolded. I ultimately realized I had already bought the right laptop for me, but the ThinkPad X1 Fold is a folding laptop done right, so hell yeah, I wanted it.

Lenovo released its first X1 Fold in 2020, but it was too ahead of its time. Its well-built and beautiful OLED display couldn’t make up for a host of issues: short battery life; a small and dim display; an underpowered processor; a $2,500 starting price sans stylus or keyboard; and the fact that it didn’t always recognize whether it was being used as a tablet or as a laptop. Lenovo fixed almost all of those issues with its 2024 Fold. 

The display is much bigger and much brighter. The battery life has doubled. The processing and integrated graphics performance have shot up like a puck hitting the bell atop a strongman carnival game. The design is even more gorgeous. Lenovo also threw in a stylus, and thank goodness it did because this laptop is as good a drawing tablet as it is a netbook. It is a better laptop in every way, except in price. 

Lenovo is still asking for $2,500, minimum, but the price is more justified this time around. The one caveat being it wants another $300 for a Bluetooth keyboard and kickstand folio, which are both crucial to the Fold experience. Its virtual keyboard works fine, but it’s not ideal for typing anything more than a few search phrases into Google. Plus I needed the folio to prop the ThinkPad Fold up next to my 27-inch monitor, which is how I use my Yoga Book.

Sure, I could drop $20 on a tablet stand big enough to accommodate the Fold’s 16-inch display, but it wouldn’t double as a keyboard cover, and it most certainly wouldn’t be as portable. I spent about an hour searching for a third-party magnetic keyboard but couldn’t find something suitable. Even if I did find one (I’m convinced they don’t exist) and it precisely covered the Fold’s bottom half, it probably wouldn’t tell the device to switch into laptop mode when attached. (I tried this with the Yoga Book’s included keyboard — no dice, and it’s too big for the Fold.)

So not only is it annoying that I’d have to buy Lenovo’s “optional” keyboard and folio to get the most out of this foldable laptop, but also the trackpad was frustrating to use. I had to clean my finger oils off the trackpad frequently or else it would miss too many swipes. That’s disappointing since typing on the keyboard is as nice as you’d expect from a ThinkPad or any other Lenovo laptop.

Lucky for me that I most often used the ThinkPad X1 Fold the same way I use my Yoga Book 9i: connected to my monitor with a standalone keyboard and mouse. In that mode, the Fold worked better than my Yoga Book in some ways. Unlike the Yoga Book, which has two separate screens, the Fold’s hinge is behind its display and doesn’t create a gap in the middle of a paragraph, and I cannot emphasize enough how nice it was not to have to deal with any kind of screen gap during my time with the Fold.

However, my Yoga Book 9i’s two 13.3-inch physical displays do provide a larger workspace than the Fold, whether oriented horizontally or vertically. I also prefer how I can adjust the angle of the Book’s top screen to match my external monitor. Because the Book’s dual displays are connected with a visible center hinge, it doesn’t warp what’s in the center of the display like the ThinkPad Fold when I have one or two windows open. So I had to keep the Fold tilted at a similar angle to the Yoga Book’s bottom display, which was sort of awkward, but I forgot about it after a while.

And that’s where my issues with the Fold end. One of my favorite Fold features is the fluidity of opening the laptop into desktop mode. When the keyboard is wrapped inside the folio cover, which attaches to the keyboard via a magnetic hinge, you simply open the ThinkPad Fold like a book until it’s totally flat, prop it up against the stand, and ta-da! All you need is a Starfleet uniform and a LCARS background, and you’re ready to go where not many laptops have gone before. (No? Just me?)

The outside surfaces of the laptop are adorned with finely woven strips of black recycled synthetic fiber (PET), and the texture is pleasantly tactile. Running my fingertips over it felt like a fabric-woven tote bag but smoother. It’s an elegant surface that hides fingerprints in its tiny crevices, too. Forget flat laptop lids, forget fun colors — I want more fun, classy textures in black! (Sorry, Yoga Book!) Those crevices do catch crumbs, so eating around the Fold is a no-go. The smaller the crumbs, the harder they are to pick out with your fingernail, but a small brush, about the size of a kid’s toothbrush, works to get them out if you have to get your snack on.

The Fold’s dimensions are well-balanced, which makes it feel lighter than it is while carrying with one hand or tucked into the crook of your arm. It’s only 0.68 inches thick and weighs 2.82 pounds (without the folio keyboard), which makes it one of the lightest laptops on the market — as light as a MacBook Air. I also liked how the magnetic stylus conveniently attaches to the bottom-right side in laptop mode.

I’m glad Lenovo ships a stylus with this laptop because, as a drawing tablet, this device is marvelously massive. Unfolded, it’s over 16 inches of OLED canvas that didn’t make my desk feel cluttered. 

I’m not an artist, but I gave drawing and painting a go with the Fold and didn’t find much to complain about. The experience felt nearly identical to Lenovo 2-in-1s and convertible laptops from other brands I’ve tested over the years, and the 2560 x 2024 display covers 96 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut, so whatever paints Bob Ross decided to mix in the video, I could create a close digital version of his colors.

I could sometimes feel long, slender bumps spanning the length of the centerfold, which is not uncommon for folding displays. But once the entire device warmed up, it evened out, so that didn’t affect my ability to write and draw. The stylus itself was what gave me the most trouble.

Well, most styluses give me trouble (thanks, dysgraphia), but the extra-pointy tip made it less fun to oil paint with Bob Ross in Adobe Fresco than it was to sketch an eye because it was difficult to find the right angle to mimic painting with a two-inch brush. To be fair to Lenovo, oil painting with any stylus feels totally different compared to the real thing, for obvious reasons, but once I figured out how to tweak the Fresco settings to get as close to Ross’ tried-and-true flat brushes as possible, I felt mostly good about my happy digital clouds.

Watching movies and cloud gaming with ray tracing on was *chef’s kiss* thanks to the display’s color gamut, too, despite the 4:3 aspect ratio. Cyberpunk 2077 (I’m finally getting around to playing Phantom Liberty) looked better on the Fold than my Gigabyte M28U gaming monitor, although I did have to mess around with the in-game resolution settings so everything didn’t look so squished.

Overall, Lenovo did a phenomenal job balancing the ThinkPad X1 Fold’s design with its hardware needs. I never had an issue with drawing applications lagging or running too many browser tabs (within reason). Its 12th Gen Intel U-series processor is miles ahead of the original’s Intel Core i5-L16G7, which was a sluggish five-core, five-thread processor designed to handle about 7W of power. (That’s right, no Hyper-Threading.)

In contrast, the Intel Core i5-1230U’s two performance cores are hyperthreaded (10-core, 12-thread), and its eight efficiency cores immensely helped with doubling the new Fold’s battery life; I was able to play Cyberpunk 2077 on GeForce Now with the display brightness maxed out (446 nits, as tested) for an average of five hours but averaged about nine to 10 hours at about 50 to 60 percent brightness if I was only using my computer for work-related tasks.

Even with the stylus covering one of the three vents in laptop mode (there’s only one spot where it can magnetically attach, and that’s it), the Fold never got hotter than a lukewarm bath. The CPU’s power draw is capped at 26W, even though it’s designed to draw up to 29W. The chassis never went above 31 degrees Celsius, either, so I could comfortably leave it flat on my lap for an hour while Bob Ross helped me brush up on my digital painting skills.

Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Fold 16 Gen 1 has set the bar as the foldable laptop to beat, even if the keyboard and folio are critical add-ons to an already not-cheap laptop. The only other folding screen laptops that could provide a comparable experience are the HP Spectre Fold and LG Gram Fold, but the latter is only available in South Korea, and we have not tested the former — not to mention that the Spectre Fold is twice the price of the ThinkPad Fold. 

Still, if this Lenovo foldable is a sign of where more laptop designs are headed, I’m all in. If the company can make a folding laptop the same size as its Yoga Book and include a keyboard and folio in the future, even if the price were still $2,500, I’d buy it.

Photography by Joanna Nelius / The Verge