I'll vouch for multiple X1C gen 9's being super quiet. No whine; fans rarely kick on, but are almost unnoticeable. Can't say the same for the Extreme/P1 series...
I don't understand this comment. I'm a programmer and my X1 Carbon is the finest computer I've ever used. I don't have any noise issue with it. I can hear the CPU in a very quiet room but I've never used a computer that didn't have it, and I'm quite sensitive to noises too. Many people in my company have Lenovo X machines.
And why marketing types should not care about comfort / noise? Is this a "Real men [...]" thing?
He is probably referring to x1 extreme. I have a 3rd gen and it’s like a jet engine and space heather had a baby. Even after undervolting in bios, limiting cpu frequency in windows and only using it for very light jobs it’s super noisy. Not to mention the max 5 hour battery life…
This chassis with an AMD cpu and no dedicated GPU would be perfect, but I’ve had enough and a M2 MacBook Air is on its way from Apple.
Nah, I had an older X1 Carbon as a PM for work, 2nd or 3rd gen. It one of the periods that Intel was screwing up thermal management: between the fan, the coil whine, and the CPU clock throttling, it was a _terrible_ laptop. And by no means did I need a hardcore machine, (too) much of my job was email, docs, spreadsheets, and GitHub. So it really had no excuse.
It also coincided with some _terrible_ decisions that Lenovo made as a half-assed response to the touch bar, among other things. The "touch bar" was essentially just backlit capacitive buttons hardcoded to a couple different functions, they nerfed the red mouse pointer thing in the middle to the point that it was too squishy to use with any accuracy; and they merged the click buttons into the touchpad and used terrible software heuristics to try and figure out what you wanted. Oh, and it would wake up and burn its battery out for no reason.
BUT I played with a 5th-ish gen a couple years later, and they'd rolled everything back. The owner really liked it, I expect in large part because Intel tocked back to a CPU that wasn't overheating by design.
On paper, they're spec'd out pretty well, but if you need the "real juice" I still know people that swear by their older T series. But I don't know how much the newer ones have sacrificed the vision.
Not sure if this is the CPU, or something in the motherboard, or the integrated GPU, but yes, you can somehow hear activity outside the fan and the rotating disks. I clearly hear some quiet clicks when hovering messages or folders in Thunderbird both on my X1 Carbon Gen 9 and my HP Elitebook 640 G6. It's more obvious on the HP. It sounds like a silent HDD writing something, except I don't have HDDs in these computers. Possible related bug: [1]
I remember hearing activity on a Pentium II laptop (which had a Silicon Graphics graphics card) and I think on a Pentium II tower with a Voodoo 2 card too, years ago. The noise was quite obvious to me, it was more similar to the Coil Whine noise from a GPU recorded by LTT [2]
I hope I'm not cursing you if you hadn't noticed until now.
The constant noise makes it really difficult to use these machines for any kind of focused work.