This Lenovo ThinkPad laptop we reviewed is surprisingly repairable

Long battery life, strong performance, AI features, an OLED screen, haptic touchpad and six speakers - Lenovo touts many of the advantages of its Lenovo ThinkPad X9-15p Gen 1 Aura Edition on the product page. Notably, repairability is not among them, which is in stark contrast with some other Lenovo ThinkPad laptops, like the ThinkPad T14 Gen 7, where repairability is a big topic.

We recently reviewed the Lenovo ThinkPad X9-15p Gen 1 Aura Edition, and while it did offer many of the things that Lenovo promised, it also offered a surprisingly high amount of repairability. Of course, there are some disclaimers to make: Not everything is repairable, and Lenovo has made some sacrifices. The LPDDR5X RAM is soldered, as is the Wi-Fi module. And to change the keyboard, the whole palmrest has to be changed, which is less than ideal.

Lenovo ThinkPad X9-15p: Repairable charging ports surprise us

On the good side, the M.2 2280 SSD is modular, unlike for the Apple MacBooks the ThinkPad X9 is made to compete with. The battery can be easily changed too, as it is merely screwed down. More surprising for us: The fans and the heat pipe are separate parts. This allows users to clean the fans without having to repaste the CPU with fresh heat paste.

Most importantly: All the ports are not actually part of the motherboard. Lenovo has fitted them on two separate daughterboards, which means if one of the ports fail, like one of the three Thunderbolt 4 ports that are used for charging, only the small daughterboard has to be changed. On many other ThinkPad laptop designs, the charging ports are soldered on the motherboard, making a repair much pricier and the device less sustainable overall.

Due to the soldered RAM, the ThinkPad X9-15p Gen 1 Aura Edition is definitely not as upgradeable as it could be - but the modular daughterboards for the ports make this powerful 15.3-inch ThinkPad surprisingly repairable-