ThinkPad X9 14: A good AI laptop, but surpassed by ARM competitors.
The Lenovo ThinkPad X9 14 Aura Edition impresses with its robust design, 120Hz OLED display, and excellent keyboard. However, the performance of the Intel Core Ultra chip is a major weakness when compared to more powerful and competitively priced ARM competitors.
The Lenovo ThinkPad X9 14 Aura Edition is a business laptop positioned as a Copilot+ PC, equipped with an Intel Core Ultra CPU. While it boasts many advantages in design, display, and typing experience, its performance falls significantly short when compared to competitors using ARM architecture, especially Apple products with more competitive pricing.
Familiar design and valuable improvements
The ThinkPad X9 14 retains the signature ThinkPad aesthetic but with a more modern refinement. The 14-inch screen bezels are thinner, and the top frame is raised to house the webcam, microphone, and sensors, adding a stylish touch and convenience when opening the laptop. Weighing approximately 1.36 kg (3 lbs), it is both lightweight and sturdy.
One notable feature is the side-firing speaker system, which ensures unobstructed sound when typing or placing the laptop on various surfaces. The sound quality is considered detailed and clear, surpassing many other ultra-thin laptops.
A leading input and display experience.
The ThinkPad X9 14's keyboard continues to be a highlight, offering a responsive, comfortable, and accurate typing experience. The spacious touchpad is responsive to swipes and gestures. The 8MP webcam provides sharp images and supports facial recognition login via Windows Hello, alongside an integrated fingerprint sensor.
The device is equipped with a 14-inch OLED screen with a 2.8K resolution (2880 x 1800) and a 120Hz refresh rate. This screen delivers vibrant colors, high fidelity, achieving 121.7% of the sRGB color gamut, and an average brightness of 443 nits. However, the touchscreen version has a rather glossy surface, which may cause reflections when used outdoors.
Performance battle: Intel Core Ultra vs. ARM
This is the biggest weakness of the ThinkPad X9 14. Despite being a powerful machine for office tasks, the Intel Core Ultra 5 CPU proves to be weaker than ARM-based chips in both performance and energy efficiency. Performance test results clearly show this difference.
In battery tests, the device achieved 10 hours and 9 minutes of web browsing, sufficient for a workday. However, with more demanding tasks such as image processing or running local AI models, the actual battery life may drop to 5-6 hours.
Performance Comparison Table
To illustrate the difference, here are the performance comparison results between the ThinkPad X9 14, ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 (also using ARM chips), and Apple MacBook Air M4.
| Index | Lenovo ThinkPad X9 14 Aura Edition | Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition | Apple MacBook Air M4 |
|---|---|---|---|
| GeekBench 6 (single-core) | 2545 | 2,762 | 3,751 |
| GeekBench 6 (multi-core) | 10,049 | 11,131 | 14,947 |
| Handbrake (video transcoding) | 7:46 | 7:36 | 5:34 |
| Battery life (hours:minutes) | 10:09 | 11:28 | 14:51 |
The results show that the MacBook Air M4, with its lower starting price, completely outperforms it in terms of performance and battery life. This puts the ThinkPad X9 14 in a difficult position in the price/performance competition.
The promise of AI: Marketing beyond reality?
The ThinkPad X9 14 is heavily promoted as a Copilot+ PC with a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) delivering up to 48 TOPS of performance. However, in reality, leveraging this AI power locally remains limited. Most AI experiences still rely on cloud connectivity and applications like Office 365. With only 16GB of RAM, the machine struggles to handle large language models (LLMs) on-premises. Therefore, the Copilot+ badge is not currently a deciding factor when choosing this product.
Conclusion: A solid choice, but not the optimal one.
The Lenovo ThinkPad X9 14 Aura Edition is an excellent business laptop in terms of build quality, keyboard, and display. It meets the needs of office work well and has a durable design. However, at around $1,459 for the review unit, its performance cannot match ARM competitors like the MacBook Air M4, which are more powerful and have a more attractive starting price. Unless there is a mandatory requirement to use applications that only run on Intel's x86 platform, users should consider other options to get better performance at the same price.
