Pulled the trigger on a Thinkpad X13 gen 6. I wanted something small and portable. Very happy with the feel of the keyboard. Specs are pretty decent. Having moved away from Apple ecosystem, everything seems great so far.
Videos
The newest generation of X13, with AMD CPU.
Ryzen AI 7 PRO 350
It's less than 1kg. No more USB-A port on the left side.
It's perfect with Linux. I installed arch and everything works out of the box. The only issue is the USB-C port can only output 4K at 30Hz. Not sure of it's configuration or cable issue.
Ask me anything you want to know about the device.
Intel core ultra 7 255H 32GB RAM 1TB SSD 54.7Wh battery 980g!
Present for the missus. No other thin, light AND powerful laptop comes close in terms of specs at the moment. Well pleased with it overall
For some reason (bad availability?) there are almost no reviews of the X13 gen 6 out there, even though tech publications were all over it with "hands on" reports when it was announced. So I decided to write down my experiences after about a month of use in case someone else is considering getting one.
tl;dr
It's good. Buy if you want an extremely mobile machine with good performance; avoid if you want a fancy screen, a dGPU, or >32 GB RAM.
Specs
CPU: Ryzen AI 7 PRO 350
Memory: 32 GB
Disk: 1 TB
Battery: 4 cell 54.7 Wh
WiFi: MediaTek MT7925
Camera: non-IR
Add-ons: no NFC, no WWAN
User experience
This machine is extremely light (just below 1 kg), and even though it's slightly thicker than many other 13" laptops it's still quite portable. The extra thickness comes with an upside: the thermals and acoustics are much better than usual for laptops of this size. On low power and balanced power profiles (with matching CPU performance hints), the laptop is completely silent for most tasks. When the fan does spin up it's very quiet, except on the performance profile where it gets a little louder during prolonged stress. The fan has a low-pitched, unobtrusive sound to it, and even when on full blast I would describe the sound as noticeable rather than loud. If you care about noise, it doesn't get much better than this unless you go completely fanless.
It's also quite power efficient. Idling on a Sway desktop, the power consumption is about 2½ W. Running Firefox and a bunch of inefficient Electron apps (VS Code, Discord, Signal) with Bluetooth headphones connected bumps that to around 3.5 W. Video conferencing using the Teams web client consumes 6-7 W. On power saving profile, you can expect 7 (video conferencing) to 14 (coding, browsing) hours of normal use on a single charge. (Obviously, gaming, long running builds, video editing and other similarly heavy tasks will give you significantly less.)
Suspend is also unusually power efficient. Power draw is below 0.2 W, which yields a standby time of almost two weeks. This is the best I've seen from any x86 laptop.
It's also worth noting that having a USB device plugged in does not measurably affect power consumption, unlike on many other systems (for instance, Z13 gen 2 and Dell's Lunar Lake XPS 13 both draw an extra ~0.5+ W with any USB device plugged in but idle). This is probably too niche for most people to care about, but it translates to about two extra hours of coding if you keep a Yubikey plugged in to sign your commits.
CPU performance is good: ~2900/13500 points in Geekbench 6 in performance mode, with a 1.5/11 percentage point drop in balanced mode and an 11/30 percentage point drop in power savings mode while on battery (i.e. absolute worst case).
The screen is a typical modern ThinkPad 16:10 1200p IPS: it can reproduce 100% sRGB, looks subjectively nice, gets bright enough and doesn't have a lot of back light bleed. Matte coating does its job without impairing sharpness or color reproduction. It would have been nice if it supported VRR and/or more than 60 Hz, but at least for me the difference is not really noticeable.
Input devices are pretty much standard for ThinkPads: keyboard blows most other laptops out of the water, the touchpad is just fine, and the trackpoint is... the trackpoint. I'm glad this model has the physical buttons above the touchpad, as the trackpoint on the models that have a "button zone" on the touchpad instead is completely unusable.
There are some annoyances however:
Attaching a power cable will wake the machine, and detaching it again will not put it back to sleep again. I worked around this by having a script put the machine to sleep after a few seconds of inactivity if the screen is locked and the lid is closed, but it's annoying nonetheless.
It's not available with more than 32 GB RAM. I can make do without, but I would have preferred to have some extra future proofing since the RAM is soldered.
Linux compatibility
In general, this machine works very well with Linux. I haven't run into any compatibility problems whatsoever on Fedora 42.
Works out of the box:
wifi
bluetooth
fingerprint reader
camera
touchpad, trackpoint, keyboard
thunderbolt and USB (including video output to multiple screens)
suspend (s2idle)
hibernate (as usual, requires secure boot to be disabled or kernel to have lockdown either disabled or patched to allow hibernation)
Not tested:
speakers
microphone
audio jack
HDMI port
The camera presents a plain UVC interface (i.e. the same as any standard USB webcam) so the sensor+ISP compatibility nightmare on recent Intel laptops is nowhere to be seen here.
Geekbench scores
ACPI platform profile and EPP set to 'performance': https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/13512212
ACPI platform profile and EPP set to 'balanced'/'balance_performance': https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/13818031
ACPI platform profile and EPP set to 'low-power'/'power' and running on battery: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/13818117