Lenovo: ThinkPad A285 / A485 will likely be released in the third quarter

Last fall, Lenovo made a relatively surprising announcement with the new ThinkPad A series. The special thing about the ThinkPad A series: Its completely AMD based. Unusual for ThinkPads, as they were mostly powered by Intel processors till now.

Different from what one might have suspected, the the first ThinkPad A models, the A275 and the A475, were announced with the older Bristol Ridge processors. With the upcoming Ryzen Mobile CPUs that certainly seemed like a curious decision – a decision that created a new question: When will there be ThinkPads with Ryzen processors?

In a document published by Lenovo, which also included the first hint at two cheaper Ryzen-powered ThinkPads named E485 and E585, we found some information on the release-date of the next generation of the ThinkPad A series. The included roadmap mentions a "refresh" of the A275 and A475 in the third quarter of the year 2018, which hints at a release in the July-September time-frame.

Unfortunately, the document isn't much more detailed. Fortunately though, we already know the names of the two new A series ThinkPads from a prior leak: ThinkPad A285 and ThinkPad A485. The current A series models are based on the ThinkPad T and X series (A275 = X270, A475 = T470). We can only speculate at this point, but it seems logical that the same will be true for the upcoming models – which would mean that the A285 would be based on the ThinkPad X280 and the A485 would be based on the ThinkPad T480.

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