Lenovo ThinkPad E15 & E14 G4: New budget ThinkPads use the Ryzen 5000 refresh Barcelo-U

Marketing money is a finite resource. It depends on the priorities of the manufacturer how much attention each product receives. In the case of the Lenovo ThinkPad laptops, the priorities are clear: The expensive X1 ThinkPad get huge CES announcements, while some other models do not even get a press release.

An example: The Lenovo ThinkPad E14 Gen 4 and its 15 inch counterpart ThinkPad E15 Gen 4. These new ThinkPad laptops arrive at the market without a formal announcement. This is somewhat sad, as the Lenovo ThinkPad E series is popular due to the comparably low pricing. On the other hand, the new models do not actually offer many new features.

Compared to the predecessors ThinkPad E14 G3 (available on Amazon, affiliate link) and ThinkPad E15 G3, the new models are small updates that keep the same 16:9 chassis design. Even the USB 2.0 port is still there - an anachronism in 2022. The only thing new about the E14 Gen 4 and E15 Gen 4 are the CPUs.

But even in that area, Lenovo is choosing the smallest possible upgrade by not used AMD Ryzen 6000. Instead of Rembrandt, the new Lenovo laptops use the Ryzen 5000 processors of the Ryzen 5000 "Barcelo-U" series. This Cezanne refresh lacks many of the functions that Ryzen 6000 includes, like USB 4.0 or the much faster RNDA2 GPU. The fastest processor featured in the affordable ThinkPads of the E series is the AMD Ryzen 7 5825U, with the lesser options Ryzen 5 5625U and Ryzen 3 5425U as options.