ThinkPad P16 G3 not powerful enough: Lenovo, where is the ThinkPad P18?

Lenovo used to have two ThinkPad workstation laptops with Intel's most powerful HX CPUs - the Lenovo ThinkPad P15 Gen 2 and the Lenovo ThinkPad P17 Gen 2, which both came out in 2021. In 2022, Lenovo replaced them with a single model: The Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 1, which promised to simplify the portfolio - it had the same level of performance as the P17, but retained a much smaller size, more similar to the P15.

As of this article, it is 2026, and we recently tested the Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 3 - the first big redesign of this line since its inception. However, there is a problem: The performance has regressed; not so much on the CPU side, but the GPU is limited to a TGP of just 105 W. That is 10 W less than the last ThinkPad P17. Worse, due to the rather small 180 W power adapter, both the CPU and GPU get heavily throttled under combined load.

Overall, it just seems like Lenovo has abandoned the original vision for this product. It is more comparable to the a P15 now, just with a bigger screen and slightly better performance, as the P15 was limited to a TGP of 90 W. The new P16 Gen 3 (available from Amazon) is more mobile than the first generation of the P16, but it seems at the cost of a lot of performance.

Other workstation manufacturers, such as Dell and HP, have released 18-inch versions of their workstation laptops - the HP ZBook Fury 18 and the Dell Pro Max Plus 18. We do not see why Lenovo sticks with a single 16-inch model, when the performance clearly is not competitive anymore. So: Lenovo, where is the ThinkPad P18? There clearly is room for such a product, now.