ThinkPad L14 Gen 2 & L15 Gen 2: Lenovo's budget enterprise series updated with Tiger Lake & Thunderbolt 4

Slowly but surely, Lenovo is renewing its ThinkPad business laptop portfolio for the year 2021. At CES, a huge update of the high-end series ThinkPad X1 was announced - the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9 being an example. This is now followed up by an update of the much more affordable ThinkPad L series.

Just like the more expensive ThinkPad T series, the Lenovo ThinkPad L series is focused on serving big corporate customers and their laptop fleets. Since Lenovo has updated the design of the ThinkPad L series only last year, the new models Lenovo ThinkPad L14 Gen 2 and Lenovo ThinkPad L15 Gen 2 are built upon their 2020 predecessors.

Thus, there are not really that many differences compared with the Lenovo ThinkPad L15 and ThinkPad L14 Gen 1 (available from Bestbuy) - apart of course from the new Intel Tiger Lake platform. In this case, it is represented by UP4 CPUs like the Intel Core i7-1165G7. Part of the update are also Intel Xe GPUs, HMDI 2.0 and Thunderbolt 4, which making its debut on the L series this year.

Lenovo not making huge changes might not be too bad though, as features like the two SO-DIMM slots, microSD card reader and RJ45-Ethernet stay in place, just like the easily replacable keyboard.

Since the two new models are already listed in the Lenovo product database, it should not take too long til they are available. While the Intel models are out, there is no sign of the AMD variants. This is expected however, as AMD has not yet announced their new AMD Ryzen Pro 5000 series for business laptops.