Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen 4 without standout features: Are 13.3-inch laptops still needed?

Roughly fivteen years ago, it seemed like small laptops would dominate the market in sales volume. Everyone was talking about netbooks and compact, expensive subnotebooks with 12-inch screens like the Lenovo ThinkPad X220 (2011) were some of the most popular units in the market.

Today, the situation is completely different. Netbooks are pretty much wiped from the map and the expensive 12-inch segment is long extinct. Even 13.3-inch laptops are disappearing slowly, as they are losing the spotlight in favor of 14-inch models. What happened here?

As far as netbooks are concerned, the answer is easily found. Tablets and smartphones that got ever bigger have taken that market over. 

It gets more complicated when it comes to the smaller subnotebooks, which did offer the full functionality of a big laptop, different from netbooks. Here, two developments came together: Bigger laptops got ever thinner and lighter after the ultrabook revolution starting in 2011, and screen bezels shrunk. Thus, a 14-inch laptop now is often as mobile, if not more, thn 12 inch laptops in the past. The single most defining feature that did set small laptops apart, the mobility, was lost to the bigger models - which still offer many other advantages over small laptops.

A good example for this is the Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen 4 AMD, which we recently reviewed. The ThinkPad X13 (available from Amazon) is small and lightweight, but the difference to the bigger ThinkPad T14s is minimal now, especially for the weight. Buyers of the X13 have to accept disadvantages when it comes to the keyboard size, battery capacity, performance and screen size. At the end, there are not too many arguments for the small model, different from the past. When the X220 was new, the X ThinkPad had a huge advantage in terms of mobility over the bigger ThinkPad T420s.

In the end, it seems like the trends in the laptop market mirror the smartphones: Small is out, big is in.