Thinkpads Forum

I've decided I want an X1-Carbon. I'm going to be doing some heavy traveling in the coming months and lugging my W500 or my T61 is not going to work.

Superfast multicore CPUs will be wasted on me, fast Ram and HDs on the other hand are helpful for the music notation software that I use (Avid Sibelius). But this will be more of a utility machine for me rather than a daily workhorse. There will never be enough screen real estate in a laptop for 43 staves of music!

That said, I need a computer to run the software and allow me to make edits etc.

I'm okay with new, used or refurbished. For my needs what would you recommend?

Also I need it kind of soon (I'm in the US)...

Thank you!

I did some researching on Carbon.
There are six gens
Gen1 (Ivy Bridge) has 1600x900 resolution - this sucks as many sites and apps are built for higher resolution now.
Gen2 (Haswell) has crappy function bar and 5-row keyboard layout and Tx40 style click touchpad - avoid unless you can buy it cheap
Gen3 to Gen6 are good but only Gen 5 and 6 don't use PWM for brightness modulation.

RAM is soldered on in all generations but 8GB is available in all gens and 8GB is enough for travel machine.
Compare reviews on notebookcheck.

The Gen6 WQHD HDR screen is glossy but it's really really nice - just used one today briefly (but the price is also high). Closed it's thinner than keyboard base of HP EliteBook ultrabook which is thin already.