My new laptop: ThinkPad Z13 Gen 1. this is replacing my 14" MacBook Pro.

This is my new primary laptop, a ThinkPad Z13 Gen 1. I have had this for a couple of weeks now and I absolutely love it! Has an AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 6850U (8c/16t), 16GB LPDDR5-6400, 512GB NVMe SSD, and the 13.3" 1920x1200 IPS screen. This is the silver aluminium version, not the bronze/pleather version seen in all the reviews when it came out. Those are incredibly hard to find it seems, at least in Australia.

This is replacing a 14" MacBook Pro w/ the M1 Pro 10-core chip and 32GB of RAM. Might seem like a weird upgrade, and in some ways it's a downgrade, but my life circumstances have changed, and I really don't need something as beefy as that MacBook. I needed something compact and small, but also decently powerful and this fits those criteria nicely.

I had originally bought the MacBook to solve two issues. First one was to have a laptop that was suitable for editing videos on my 90-minute train commute home from work, something the brand-new P14s Gen 3 Intel I had just bought in 2022 was not capable of doing due to its excessive thermal throttling and battery life issues, as well as my desktop PC was getting quite old and I wanted to replace both my laptop and desktop with one device. I also did not need to travel with my work-issued L14 Gen 3 at the time, so the MBP was fine to carry around on its own.

However my circumstances have changed, I started a new job about 6 months ago, which is going to enable me to move a lot closer to work, as well as I am giving my desktop tower some upgrades to get back into PC gaming, so I don't need the MacBook's power to be my one and only system. The new job provides me with a work-issued T14s Gen 3 which I need to carry around due to on-call work and the occasional WFH, so this caused me to have to carry around the MacBook and the T14s. Both are light enough laptops on their own, but combined it gets quite heavy especially with the other items in my backpack. The MacBook is kind of a beefcake and is quite dense for its size so one of them has to go and it can't be the T14s as much as I dislike it (it has the same throttling issues as my old P14s did as it's also an Intel one).

I'm also not a Mac guy. For the majority of 2024 I only used the MacBook Pro as my primary personal system. I had a previous Intel MacBook before this as well, however it never saw the same level of use as the M1 Pro does, but tbh macOS is kind of dumb in a lot of ways and maybe I'm just too used to Windows, but I felt myself missing it and getting annoyed at Apple's Apple-isims. I just feel more productive on a PC and wanted to go back to one.

I considered some ThinkPad models like the X1 Carbon, X1 Nano and the X13, but really wanted an AMD processor due to my dislike of Intel's 12th and 13th gen garbage processors (I've dealt with a lot of them in my current and previous jobs and they all suck), and tbh the X13 is almost identical to my work-issued T14s and I wanted something different. Then I remembered the Z13 existed with an AMD chip, I was very skeptical about the new Z-series ThinkPads when they came out in 2022, however after taking a chance on a used one, I have grown to love it. It's different, but that is not a bad thing at all.

I love its size and how small it is, yet it packs a fast CPU that easily outperforms the old Ryzen 1700X in my old tower, let alone any of the Intel 12th gen stuff from when it was new, and battery life is fantastic, without any real throttling I've noticed. The I/O is very minimal, but tbh the only real port I use these days is USB-C, having come from MacBooks as my last two personal laptops, I switched all my things to USB-C versions a good while ago, so other ports are not needed and if they are I have a mini USB-C hub anyway. My only other gripe is the TrackPoint and trackpad. I like the trackpad a lot, it's haptic like a Mac and is done super well, probably the best trackpad on a PC, just as good as Apple's one. The downside is the lack of physical TrackPoint buttons. I don't like it but it's usable, it's not T440 clunkpad level bad, but the real buttons on something like my T14s are still better. Though maybe I should just suck it up and be happy I even have a TrackPoint still lol (the new ThinkPad X9 is dead to me).

Anyway, that's my long-winded mini review of my absolutely lovely new Z13. My first laptop was a ThinkPad, that being an R51, and I used them almost exclusively until 2018 when I got a good deal on a MacBook Pro TouchBar. However, I also work with ThinkPads professionally for work as my company's IT support, and I've missed having one as my personal laptop, so I'm glad to be part of the club again. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.