6 ms·

Lenovo ThinkPad X13s: The stealth Arm-powered laptop

47 points by lproven 4y ago

mdaniel 4y ago
> 13.3" WUXGA (1920 x 1200) IPS, anti-glare, 300 nits, 100% sRGB uh-huh, I knew there was a reason I had previously dismissed this, although I will give them a high five for 32GB of LPDDR4 even if it is soldered onto the MB
- lproven 4y ago
  The line you quote lists no less than 7 attributes of the screen: size, type, resolution, technology, finish, brightness, colour gamut. Which is the one you call "the reason"?
  - mdaniel 4y ago
    13" is for sure getting off on the wrong foot, but 1920x1200 is for "surfing the web" or other non-serious work, to say nothing of: really?! the manufacturer couldn't even find those extra 80 lines to even make it Full HD? get outta here with that crap I guess put another way: who do they think the target audience is for a laptop with 32GB but with a stupid resolution like 1920x1200?
    - lproven 4y ago
      > the manufacturer couldn't even find those extra 80 lines to even make it Full HD? Are you misreading or misunderstanding? "Full HD" is 1080P, usually pronounced "ten eighty pee". Ten eight means one thousand and eighty. One thousand two hundred is more than one thousand and eighty. It is one hundred and twenty more in fact. I do not know of any 1280 line screens in vertical resolution. 1280x1024 used to be considered large and this is much bigger than that. The X13s has a considerably higher than "full HD" screen by the normal definition of the term that I know. It is an ultraslim ultralight ultraportable with no cooling fans and no air vents. That's why it's a thirteeen inch screen. It's still a lot bigger than an iPad or something. It's bigger than an iPad Pro.
      - mdaniel 4y ago
        Ok, thanks for the bazillions of words to point out a simple mistake. Do you work for Lenovo and I hurt your feelings or something? I still stand by my assertion it's a stupid resolution for a laptop in 2023 Good for them making it "bigger than an iPad Pro" but I'm not shopping for an iPad, I'm shopping for a laptop that I can take on work trips that doesn't make me want to gouge my eyes out trying to use it
        lproven 4y ago
        6 lines is bazillions of words?! It is not only not less than HD, which you were complaining about, it's more than HD. It's not only not as bad as you were complaining, it is better than what you were complaining about. And not only is it better, it's also not 16:9, which loads of people complain about, it's 16:10. That is better too. Which is why I pointed it out. No, I do not work for Lenovo. I work for the Register. I wrote the article that you are complaining about. I wrote the story, and I posted it here on HN.
        mdaniel 4y ago
        Oh, that must be the misunderstanding; I wasn't complaining about your article, and I'm sorry if my comment came across that way. By "dismissing" I meant the Lenovo device, not the reporting upon it Although I will say it's super weird to have you defending the screen size of a vendor's laptop in a technology forum, but, hey, I think such passion about technology is great. Maybe one day Lenovo will acquire such passion, too
        lproven 4y ago
        Um. OK. I take your point, but the thing you were bitching about was based on you misreading something that you actually copied and pasted into your reply and still did not read correctly! I put real effort, and a lot of time, into these stories, and then someone starts complaining at me because they misread it... and angrily defends their misreading? I get that it's not the laptop for you, and that's fine and I take no exception to that at all. I didn't design the thing. But, y'know, this comment still stings...?
bradwood 4y ago
Asahi on this? Anyone?
- goosedragons 4y ago
  Asahi is specifically for Apple hardware. There has been work getting it to run Linux though: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-ThinkPad-X13s-Progress https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-ThinkPad-X13s-Progress
- key_stroker 4y ago
  Armbian?
  - lproven 4y ago
    Not yet, sadly. There are Debian and Ubuntu builds for it. Both have major gotchas. I am working on it. OpenBSD supports it, with the usual caveats of OpenBSD, e.g. no Bluetooth whatsoever.
kylehotchkiss 4y ago
It sounds like Microsoft almost has a chance to compete against the new Airs… and ruins it with poor OS. Is the professional edition of Windows this bad? Once more developers target ARM, this is a nice piece of hardware to compete with the new Air which will push apple even harder to build great laptops. I’m exclusively a Mac user but welcome competition in the space again. and paying for an office subscription? Why not just use edge on this to use 360 or Google apps online instead?
- csdvrx 4y ago
  > Is the professional edition of Windows this bad? Windows is great! It's only with arch+hyprland I've found something that could widthstand the competition on the linux desktop > new Air which will push apple even harder to build great laptops. Wake me up when they offer OLED + Touchscreen + ECC
  - darthrupert 4y ago
    > It's only with arch+hyprland Oh wow, that is pretty. https://hyprland.org https://hyprland.org
    - csdvrx 4y ago
      Not just pretty, the usability is fantastic I loved Window, I had a keyboard centric approach using AHK to tile windows/display them borderless and without decorations etc. Each year I tried ubuntu and the latest gnome but they always sucked for various reasons. Then comes hyprland and wow!! I don't do exactly the same as I did on Windows yet, but it's great enough to have made me leave Windows. The keyboard configuration alone (with the help of ydotool) makes it worth it. Give it a try!
      - lproven 4y ago
        > Each year I tried ubuntu and the latest gnome Ah, well that's your problem right there. GNOME is shonky. If you know your way around the Windows keystrokes -- and everyone should -- then lots of Linux desktops honour them, or most of them and the rest can be added. Xfce is a better desktop in pretty much every way. Smaller, faster, stabler, more customisable, more keyboard-controllable, more screen-space-efficient.
wtallis 4y ago
> We feel that the machine also needs at least one USB-A, a fold-down Ethernet socket, and a mini DisplayPort or micro-HDMI socket. I agree that a USB-A port would be nice. Ethernet, maybe, but it's a stretch to ask for that in a thin fanless form factor. But asking for mini Display port or micro HDMI is insane. If you're going to need a dongle to connect to your monitor anyways, then using Type-C for the display output makes way more sense. DisplayPort alt mode is way more common and useful than the miniature versions of dedicated DP or HDMI ports.
- temp2022account 4y ago
  > Ethernet, maybe, but it's a stretch Same delta as the engineers who insist smartcard on laptops is optional; yes it _is_, but only for a subset of cheaper customers.
  - wtallis 4y ago
    No matter how far up the price range you go, smart card slots in a laptop remains a very niche feature. Especially since many smart card capabilities are easily handled by USB dongles like Yubikeys.
- lproven 4y ago
  I really don't think so, no. The X13s is only a bit slimmer than my cheap-ass work Dell, and it has one. My £35 Raspberry Pi 4 (I got in early, OK) has not one but two mini-HDMI ports. So does my 2nd hand RP 400. It's why I own a mini-HDMI to HDFMI adaptor. This stuff is not hard, it's not expensive, and it's not difficult. It's standard in cheap laptops. If you only have 2 USB ports at all, using one for power and one for screen means that's it. You're out. No wired keyboard or mouse or network for you. You can't pass a screen or charging through a generic USB 2 hub, the sort of thing most of us have lying around immediately to hand. 4 USB-C ports, and I might say OK to this: one for power, one for screen, one for network, and one with a hub with the legacy kit plugged in. If it had plenty of ports, then OK, but it doesn't, it has two, and you can't use them both for non-USB type jobs like power or display and still use anything else.
jacooper 4y ago
Expected them to at least mention running Linux on it
- lproven 4y ago
  I wrote the review. I did not mention that for two main reasons: 1. No mainstream current Linux distro runs on the machine yet. 2. The original plan was to review it as a Linux machine, but as someone who rarely uses Windows any more, I found the experience of running Windows on Arm to be interesting enough that there was enough to write a fairly long article on the experience of using it as a Windows machine for a Linux user. So, the plan is that there will be a future article on what it's like to run FOSS OSes on this machine. Incidentally, it runs WSL very well, and I have Arm Ubuntu under WSL on the machine. It's fine and very usable, and makes the problem of accidentally running x86 binaries on Windows simply go away. However, saying that, quite a few normal Linux tools are not available in Arm versions. For instance, almost any proprietary Linux app won't have Arm versions available.
snvzz 4y ago
No point adopting this, when we know (RISC-V org CTO talks in December's summit) that Microsoft is working on Windows RISC-V support. I see no future for ARM powered laptops. They'll disappear before they reach any significant adoption.
- lockhouse 4y ago
  Maybe for Windows and Linux. Apple’s bet it’s future on ARM.
  - hdjrjrjdjdhrh 4y ago
    has it? Apple has used many different architectures over the lifetime of the company. in the last 20 years it has transitioned from powepc to x86 to ARM.... I do think it could change again if neccessary.... Edit:spelling and logical consistency
- lproven 4y ago
  This thing is a fast little computer. No it's not Apple M1 quick but it's only about 20% slower and you can't run Windows natively on an M1. (And it has a nicer pair of pointing devices than any Apple laptop.) RISC-V is dog slow. The absolutely top-end RISC-V kit is slower than a Raspberry Pi 3 was a decade ago, and the Pi3 was £25 and it had 4 cores, and it can run about 6-7 OSes natively. Not Linux distros, different OSes: Linux, all the BSDs, Plan 9, Inferno, RISC OS. If you were to buy one of these things -- and I wrote the review and I am not recommending it, not at this price -- you would probably wear it out and resell it off and buy the next gen device, and wear that one out in turn -- before any RISC-V laptop with this kind of performance comes on the market at any price. Don't kid yourself.

47 points by lproven 4y ago

> 13.3" WUXGA (1920 x 1200) IPS, anti-glare, 300 nits, 100% sRGB uh-huh, I knew there was a reason I had previously dismissed this, although I will give them a high five for 32GB of LPDDR4 even if it is soldered onto the MB

lproven 4y ago
The line you quote lists no less than 7 attributes of the screen: size, type, resolution, technology, finish, brightness, colour gamut. Which is the one you call "the reason"?
- mdaniel 4y ago
  13" is for sure getting off on the wrong foot, but 1920x1200 is for "surfing the web" or other non-serious work, to say nothing of: really?! the manufacturer couldn't even find those extra 80 lines to even make it Full HD? get outta here with that crap I guess put another way: who do they think the target audience is for a laptop with 32GB but with a stupid resolution like 1920x1200?
  - lproven 4y ago
    > the manufacturer couldn't even find those extra 80 lines to even make it Full HD? Are you misreading or misunderstanding? "Full HD" is 1080P, usually pronounced "ten eighty pee". Ten eight means one thousand and eighty. One thousand two hundred is more than one thousand and eighty. It is one hundred and twenty more in fact. I do not know of any 1280 line screens in vertical resolution. 1280x1024 used to be considered large and this is much bigger than that. The X13s has a considerably higher than "full HD" screen by the normal definition of the term that I know. It is an ultraslim ultralight ultraportable with no cooling fans and no air vents. That's why it's a thirteeen inch screen. It's still a lot bigger than an iPad or something. It's bigger than an iPad Pro.
    - mdaniel 4y ago
      Ok, thanks for the bazillions of words to point out a simple mistake. Do you work for Lenovo and I hurt your feelings or something? I still stand by my assertion it's a stupid resolution for a laptop in 2023 Good for them making it "bigger than an iPad Pro" but I'm not shopping for an iPad, I'm shopping for a laptop that I can take on work trips that doesn't make me want to gouge my eyes out trying to use it
      - lproven 4y ago
        6 lines is bazillions of words?! It is not only not less than HD, which you were complaining about, it's more than HD. It's not only not as bad as you were complaining, it is better than what you were complaining about. And not only is it better, it's also not 16:9, which loads of people complain about, it's 16:10. That is better too. Which is why I pointed it out. No, I do not work for Lenovo. I work for the Register. I wrote the article that you are complaining about. I wrote the story, and I posted it here on HN.
        mdaniel 4y ago
        Oh, that must be the misunderstanding; I wasn't complaining about your article, and I'm sorry if my comment came across that way. By "dismissing" I meant the Lenovo device, not the reporting upon it Although I will say it's super weird to have you defending the screen size of a vendor's laptop in a technology forum, but, hey, I think such passion about technology is great. Maybe one day Lenovo will acquire such passion, too
        lproven 4y ago
        Um. OK. I take your point, but the thing you were bitching about was based on you misreading something that you actually copied and pasted into your reply and still did not read correctly! I put real effort, and a lot of time, into these stories, and then someone starts complaining at me because they misread it... and angrily defends their misreading? I get that it's not the laptop for you, and that's fine and I take no exception to that at all. I didn't design the thing. But, y'know, this comment still stings...?

bradwood 4y ago

Asahi on this? Anyone?

goosedragons 4y ago
Asahi is specifically for Apple hardware. There has been work getting it to run Linux though: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-ThinkPad-X13s-Progress https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-ThinkPad-X13s-Progress
key_stroker 4y ago
Armbian?
- lproven 4y ago
  Not yet, sadly. There are Debian and Ubuntu builds for it. Both have major gotchas. I am working on it. OpenBSD supports it, with the usual caveats of OpenBSD, e.g. no Bluetooth whatsoever.

kylehotchkiss 4y ago

It sounds like Microsoft almost has a chance to compete against the new Airs… and ruins it with poor OS. Is the professional edition of Windows this bad? Once more developers target ARM, this is a nice piece of hardware to compete with the new Air which will push apple even harder to build great laptops. I’m exclusively a Mac user but welcome competition in the space again. and paying for an office subscription? Why not just use edge on this to use 360 or Google apps online instead?

csdvrx 4y ago
> Is the professional edition of Windows this bad? Windows is great! It's only with arch+hyprland I've found something that could widthstand the competition on the linux desktop > new Air which will push apple even harder to build great laptops. Wake me up when they offer OLED + Touchscreen + ECC
- darthrupert 4y ago
  > It's only with arch+hyprland Oh wow, that is pretty. https://hyprland.org https://hyprland.org
  - csdvrx 4y ago
    Not just pretty, the usability is fantastic I loved Window, I had a keyboard centric approach using AHK to tile windows/display them borderless and without decorations etc. Each year I tried ubuntu and the latest gnome but they always sucked for various reasons. Then comes hyprland and wow!! I don't do exactly the same as I did on Windows yet, but it's great enough to have made me leave Windows. The keyboard configuration alone (with the help of ydotool) makes it worth it. Give it a try!
    - lproven 4y ago
      > Each year I tried ubuntu and the latest gnome Ah, well that's your problem right there. GNOME is shonky. If you know your way around the Windows keystrokes -- and everyone should -- then lots of Linux desktops honour them, or most of them and the rest can be added. Xfce is a better desktop in pretty much every way. Smaller, faster, stabler, more customisable, more keyboard-controllable, more screen-space-efficient.

wtallis 4y ago

> We feel that the machine also needs at least one USB-A, a fold-down Ethernet socket, and a mini DisplayPort or micro-HDMI socket. I agree that a USB-A port would be nice. Ethernet, maybe, but it's a stretch to ask for that in a thin fanless form factor. But asking for mini Display port or micro HDMI is insane. If you're going to need a dongle to connect to your monitor anyways, then using Type-C for the display output makes way more sense. DisplayPort alt mode is way more common and useful than the miniature versions of dedicated DP or HDMI ports.

temp2022account 4y ago
> Ethernet, maybe, but it's a stretch Same delta as the engineers who insist smartcard on laptops is optional; yes it _is_, but only for a subset of cheaper customers.
- wtallis 4y ago
  No matter how far up the price range you go, smart card slots in a laptop remains a very niche feature. Especially since many smart card capabilities are easily handled by USB dongles like Yubikeys.
lproven 4y ago
I really don't think so, no. The X13s is only a bit slimmer than my cheap-ass work Dell, and it has one. My £35 Raspberry Pi 4 (I got in early, OK) has not one but two mini-HDMI ports. So does my 2nd hand RP 400. It's why I own a mini-HDMI to HDFMI adaptor. This stuff is not hard, it's not expensive, and it's not difficult. It's standard in cheap laptops. If you only have 2 USB ports at all, using one for power and one for screen means that's it. You're out. No wired keyboard or mouse or network for you. You can't pass a screen or charging through a generic USB 2 hub, the sort of thing most of us have lying around immediately to hand. 4 USB-C ports, and I might say OK to this: one for power, one for screen, one for network, and one with a hub with the legacy kit plugged in. If it had plenty of ports, then OK, but it doesn't, it has two, and you can't use them both for non-USB type jobs like power or display and still use anything else.

jacooper 4y ago

Expected them to at least mention running Linux on it

lproven 4y ago
I wrote the review. I did not mention that for two main reasons: 1. No mainstream current Linux distro runs on the machine yet. 2. The original plan was to review it as a Linux machine, but as someone who rarely uses Windows any more, I found the experience of running Windows on Arm to be interesting enough that there was enough to write a fairly long article on the experience of using it as a Windows machine for a Linux user. So, the plan is that there will be a future article on what it's like to run FOSS OSes on this machine. Incidentally, it runs WSL very well, and I have Arm Ubuntu under WSL on the machine. It's fine and very usable, and makes the problem of accidentally running x86 binaries on Windows simply go away. However, saying that, quite a few normal Linux tools are not available in Arm versions. For instance, almost any proprietary Linux app won't have Arm versions available.

snvzz 4y ago

No point adopting this, when we know (RISC-V org CTO talks in December's summit) that Microsoft is working on Windows RISC-V support. I see no future for ARM powered laptops. They'll disappear before they reach any significant adoption.

lockhouse 4y ago
Maybe for Windows and Linux. Apple’s bet it’s future on ARM.
- hdjrjrjdjdhrh 4y ago
  has it? Apple has used many different architectures over the lifetime of the company. in the last 20 years it has transitioned from powepc to x86 to ARM.... I do think it could change again if neccessary.... Edit:spelling and logical consistency
lproven 4y ago
This thing is a fast little computer. No it's not Apple M1 quick but it's only about 20% slower and you can't run Windows natively on an M1. (And it has a nicer pair of pointing devices than any Apple laptop.) RISC-V is dog slow. The absolutely top-end RISC-V kit is slower than a Raspberry Pi 3 was a decade ago, and the Pi3 was £25 and it had 4 cores, and it can run about 6-7 OSes natively. Not Linux distros, different OSes: Linux, all the BSDs, Plan 9, Inferno, RISC OS. If you were to buy one of these things -- and I wrote the review and I am not recommending it, not at this price -- you would probably wear it out and resell it off and buy the next gen device, and wear that one out in turn -- before any RISC-V laptop with this kind of performance comes on the market at any price. Don't kid yourself.