Lenovo X13 Gen1 - Post mortem.

 Ok, let's be clear here. This is not a review. The laptop in question is dead and gone, this is more a review of what happened with the device and my experience with the device over the two years that I was working with it. 

So, back three years ago I wound up getting a new device for work, this time around I picked up an AMD based Thinkpad X13 from Lenovo. The device had pretty much every option, and was a significant upgrade from the T480 that I was using previously.

And for the first couple of months it wasn't bad, I did have some oddities with putting the laptop to sleep and docking it, the biggest one was that anytime that you pulled it off a thunderbolt dock the device basically bricked itself and would require a hard reboot to come back, but I wasn't docking and undocking a lot during the day so while inconvenient it was not the end of the world. 

However about four months into the things the screen started developing bight spots that were distracting as hell. No worries since we did have a 3yr support contract on the device that included on site support. A quick phone call and a replacement screen was on the way and things were once again in order.

However about a month later a BIOS update bricked the motherboard. 

You can argue about why I bothered updating the BIOS but it was supposed to help some of the issues I was seeing with docking the device, and so that was motherboard one down the drain. At this point the display had started dying again, so another call, and motherboard and screen were swapped out again.

All in over the two years that I used the device it had three dead motherboards, four dead screens, and a dead set of speakers in two years.

To Lenovo's credit after the third motherboard died I asked for a replacement device and they swapped it out with completely new device without any real fight. 

And the frustrating thing is that this isn't something specific to the model, there are other units that I have sitting around that are exactly the same that work without issue even to this day. That being said, physically it was all you would expect from a Thinkpad, just a bit twitchy about what it was willing to do. I'd still look at another one in the series if I was looking for another work machine, or I didn't need to worry about it being docked. 

The one thing I will say, unless you have a requirement for it I would avoid the "privacy" displays that Lenovo and other vendors ship with these things. They sacrifice a lot of brightness for that privacy filter and honestly the trade-off isn't worth it. That would be the only thing that I would have changed if I was going to re-order the device.