Lenovo ThinkPad X9 Aura: Premium laptop lineup goes on sale with up to 2.8K OLED display and Core Ultra 7 CPU
Update: Although Lenovo had hinted at a February release, it appears that the laptops have already reached customers in recent weeks. The orginal, unedited article follows.
The Lenovo ThinkPad X9 Aura was unveiled at CES 2025, powered by Intel's Lunar Lake chips. Much to the dismay of ThinkPad fans, the X9 Aura abandons the beloved trackpoint in favor of a giant MacBook-style trackpad with haptic feedback. The laptop is now available for purchase, starting at a cool $1,349 for the 16-inch and $1,239 for the 14-inch variants.
The entry-level 14-inch ThinkPad X9 Aura sports a 1200p OLED display without touch support, which can be upgraded to a 2.8K, 120 Hz OLED touch display. Both the panels sport a claimed 100% coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut, and the same applies to the larger 15.3-inch variant as well, which is only available with a 2.8K, 120 Hz OLED panel. Both the laptops can be equipped with up to an Intel Core Ultra 7 "Lunar Lake" chip with vPro, paired with up to 32 GB of onboard LPDDR5X memory. Unlike the memory, the storage is user-upgradeable, thanks to the M.2 2242 slot that can accommodate up to 2 TB.
Other features of the ThinkPad X9 Aura include a 180-degree hinge, an 80 Wh battery for the the 15-inch and a 55 Wh battery for the 14-inch variant, dual Thunderbolt 4 ports, dual- and quad-speakers for the 14 and 15-inch variants respectively, as well as WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. There is no option for discrete graphics, unsurprisingly, although Lunar Lake's Iris Xe2 iGPUs should be plenty performant for non-intensive workloads and some occasional lightweight gaming.
It is clear that Lenovo has the MacBook Air (currently $1,004 on Amazon) in its crosshair, which is also expected to be updated with the M4 SoC sometime in this quarter. That said, the ThinkPad does pull ahead of the MacBook Air in a few key areas - OLED display with touch support, upgradeable storage, and active cooling. The rest, of course, will boil down to individual preferences and workflows.
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