Hey everyone,
this is a quick follow-up to a previous post I made about the X9 vs Slim 7. It took quite a long time for Lenovo to process my return of the Slim 7, so I was thinking: should I get last year’s X9 now or wait for the X9 15p? Do we even know when it’s going to get released (in Europe)? It’d be great if its around April or earlier. Will the pricing be different and by how much? I also think that the promised performance boost of the new chips will be a very welcome addition.
Thanks to all the drama happening expect the laptops to be a more expensive than last year. 20% increase in prices is expected. Although even i don’t know when will the newer laptops would release. Do some research on other laptops you will find a better choice than the ThinkPad X9. I specially liked the yoga 7ultra and the yoga 9i but my favourite is the dell XPS 14.
I’m going for the Thinkpad because lenovo doesn’t offer the other models with a US keyboard here in Germany, and instead you get those ISO keyboards with the fat enter key and other keys jumbled around. That was also one of the reasons I returned the slim 7
I would probably wait, given Panther Lake does seem to be a massive update over both Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake, especially in the GPU department and also CPU performance should be greatly improved from Lunar Lake. Also, the ThinkPad X9 15p is getting an additional SD card slot, can have up to 64 GB of RAM
(up from 32 GB on Lunar Lake), and can now take M.2 2280 SSDs and gen 5 SSDs, up from M.2 2242 SSDs and gen 4 SSDs, which were limited to 2 TB at most until very recently and still are limited to 4 TB at most, compared to 8 TB M.2 2280 SSDs, and 2280 form factor SSDs also cheaper). It will likely be more expensive, but if Panther Lake can actually bring Lunar Lake battery life with Arrow Lake performance and one of the best iGPUs, I’d probably wait for March (when they’ll be releasing) and save up your money if you can afford the likely additional cost.
TL;DR, wait if you can afford the additional cost, don’t worry about one more month, as it’s an investment, and one month really isn’t that much longer to wait for something you’ll probably keep for around 3 - 5 years. If you aren’t able to afford the additional cost, I’d only consider the Lunar Lake model at at least a 20 - 25% discount, given it has much weaker performance for CPU heavy tasks and is missing a bunch of features the newer model has.
@crimsonSage You’re asking the same question I’ve been asking myself!
It really seems to me that, based on all that I’m seeing, the X9p is not a direct successor to the X9. Rather, it seems to me like it’s more of a “Pro” version, a la the MacBook Pro compared to the MacBook Air. I forget where I saw the quote, but I believe Lenovo had said that the “regular” X9’s will remain on-sale next to the X9p, which further led to me that conclusion. I do not know whether they will eventually update those models to the lower wattage Panther Lake chips.
You might have noticed the redesign of the black grill along the bottom (I believe Lenovo calls it the “engine hub”). It’s larger on the X9p, likely 1) for the greater thermal capacity for the higher wattage chip and 2) for the extra ports that @cameron pointed out. They also milled out speaker grills on the X9p for better audio.
It’s supposed to ship with a 45W CPU, which is quite a bit higher than the 25W (sustained) 258V in my X9 here. It is my ASSUMPTION (as I have not tested the unit) that it’s probably going to have somewhat worse battery life than the regular X9 just due to that higher wattage chip alone, in spite of its slightly larger battery (88Wh vs 80Wh). But again, I have not tested it. These Panther Lake chips are indeed very efficient.
It looks like it’s set to launch at $2,000.
By the way, while I’ve been shopping around myself, I found that you can actually get some pretty killer prices on refurbished laptops on Lenovo’s Outlet site (I don’t know what country you’re in, just Google “Lenovo Outlet” and make sure you click through to the official site; for me here in the USA it is https://www.lenovo.com/us/outletus/en/). I can’t vouch for them myself because I haven’t bought anything from their outlet site, but it looks like anything from there comes with a 1-year warranty, so… kind of tempting. The X9 is on there right now.
