Living With Lenovo's ThinkBook 13x G4: A Portable PC With 'Magic' Add-Ons (2024)

Lenovo's ThinkBook line is aimed mostly at small business users, but it also offers some of the more unusual aspects of Lenovo’s line. Case in point, the new ThinkBook 13x G4 IMH, which has a "Magic Bay," where you can attach accessories to the top of the machine, like an extra light to brighten video conferencing and creator recording.

I've been using the ThinkBook 13x for the past few weeks and it's a particularly nice travel machine. With a 13.5-inch display and measuring 11.53 by 8.07 by 0.51 inches, it’s unsurprisingly smaller and thus easier to carry than 14-inch notebooks.At 2.8 pounds (3.18 with the small 65-watt charger), it’s one of the lightest notebooks I’ve used lately, though not as light as the 14-inch ThinkPad X1 Carbon.

The small size doesn’t detract from its power. It's got an Intel Core Ultra (Meteor Lake) processor, is available with up to 32GB of RAM and 1GB of storage and has a IPS 13.5-inch 2,880-by-1,920 touch display, which goes up to 500 nits, with very narrow bezels, giving the machine a nice modern look.The ThinkBook 13x looks and feels solid with an aluminum case in the “Luna Grey” color that’s common to a lot of Lenovo’s line.It has a decent touchpad (at 70-by-120mm, pretty big for a 13-inch machine), and a communications bar (that holds the webcam) sticking up on the top of the machine.

Lenovo Magic Bay Studio 4K webcam and speakers (Credit: Brian Westover/PCMag)

There's a very nice keyboard with a Copilot key placed where the right-side control key used to be (the Cntrl key is on the left). As expected, it brings up Microsoft Copilot, which was recently upgraded to GPT-4o.One minor nit is that the mute speaker function key lacks an indicator light.

Like a lot of small laptops, the thin design sacrifices much in the way of ports. The ThinkPad 13x has one USB-C/Thunderbolt (used for charging) and a traditional 3.5mm audio jack on the left-hand side; with two more USB-C/Thunderbolt ports on the right-hand side, along with the power button and a switch to turn off the webcam.

On one hand, it is convenient to be able to power the machine through USB-C on either side; on the other hand, it means the machine doesn't have some of the traditional ports, such as HDMI or USB-A. While you could always get USB-C adapters, that's a pain. I'm seeing more and more consumer laptops with just USB-C these days, though.

It comes with an FHD 1080p +IR webcam, which I would judge as no better than adequate. It seemed better than the one on the X1 2-in-1 but still a bit fuzzy. Features such as facial recognition through Windows Hello worked well.The physical switch on the right-hand side to disable the camera seemed to work fine, though I prefer the more obvious physical shutter on the ThinkPad line.

The standout feature is the "Magic Bay," a Pogo Pin connector on the front lid that lets you easily attach a light bar. Lenovo introduced the concept a while back, and offers other models with different Magic Bay options, including an LTE connection or a 4K webcam.But each model just comes with one accessory—Lenovo says all US models of the ThinkBook 13x G4 incudes the light—and Lenovo doesn’t currently offer the accessories separately.

The light makes a big difference because it brightens things considerably.You control the light (switching it on and off or setting it to come on automatically) through a Lenovo Smart Meeting app, where you can also set its brightness or have it adjust automatically, which I found annoying when it changed repeatedly during a video call. Lenovo Smart Meeting also has some video-optimization choices designed to enhance clarity or soften your appearance, or to enable group or single person tracking. These are cool, though they do seem to use a fair amount of power. In addition, it comes with the now-familiar Windows Studio effects, which itself offers automatic faming and eye contact features.

Lenovo Magic Bay Light detachable (Credit: Lenovo)

It has four speakers, two woofers, and two tweeters, with quad-array microphones with noise cancelling. I thought the sound quality was quite good for a small laptop.

Other software includes Lenovo Vantage, which includes basic system information and updates, as well as a few software options, which agreeably are not as in your face on the firm's more consumer-oriented Yoga line.

One interesting option is that instead of pressing the power button, you can set it so that it automatically starts when you flip open the lid.

The model I tested came with an Intel Core Ultra 5 125H processor, 16GB of memory and 512GB of storage, although on Lenovo's website, you can configure it with an Core Ultra 9 185H processor, for another $432 as I write this.The Core Ultra 5 125H is a 28-watt processor with four performance cores (each of which can do multithreading), eight efficient cores, and two low-power efficient cores, for a total of 14 cores and 18 threads. The performance cores have a base frequency of 1.7GHz, with a maximum turbo speed of 4.5GHz.

It has Intel Arc Graphics with seven Xe cores at a maximum of 2.2GHz. It has more cores and cache than the Core Ultra 1 155U I tested in the ThinkPad X1 2-in-1 but runs at a lower speed.

For performance, my results were generally in line with what I've seen with other 15- and 28-watt Meteor Lake systems for typical uses.In my toughest benchmarks, it took almost 38 minutes to run a complex MATLAB model, notably slower than the X1 2-in-1 or X1 Carbon. It took an hour and 28 minutes to transcode a video in Handbrake, which placed it in between those two systems.And running a big data table model in Excel took 50 minutes, which was 3-4 minutes slower than on those systems. (All the Meteor Lake systems I've tested are notably slower running this Excel model than 13th Generation Intel Core – Raptor Lake systems.)

On AI tests, it was a bit slower on Procyon's Computer Vision test than the other systems I've tested, but a bit faster running a local copy of Stable Diffusion.

Battery life is very good; on PCMark 10's Modern Office test, it lasted 15 hours and 34 minutes with 100 nits of brightness and 16 hours and 33 minutes with 40 nits.It has a 74 watt-hour battery.Lenovo says the battery can get up to 80% charge with one hour of charging.

Lenovo’s website also describes the machine as having its “LA3 AI” processor, which isn’t visible to end users but apparently helps with managing system functions.

As tested, the ThinkBook 13x G4 sells for $1,580 on Lenovo's website as I write this, which seems a reasonable though not an exceptional price.For that, you get a 13-inch laptop that's solid, easy to carry, and offers good performance and excellent battery life, as well as the Magic Bay Light. I can see it appealing to small business users who do a lot of web conferencing or video capturing on the laptop and are looking for a very portable system.