Specs at a glance: Lenovo ThinkPad T450s Entry level Top spec As reviewed SCREEN 1600×900 TN at 14" (131 ppi), 250 nit 1920×1080 IPS at 14" (157 ppi), multitouch, 264 nit/

1920×1080 IPS at 14" (157 ppi), 300 nit 1920×1080 IPS at 14" (157 ppi), multitouch, 264 nit OS Windows 7 64-bit, Windows 8.1 64-bit, Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit CPU 2.2-2.7GHz Core i5-5200U 2.6-3.2GHz Core i7-5600U 2.3-2.9GHz Core i5-5300U RAM 4GB 1600MHz DDR3 12GB 1600MHz DDR3 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 GPU Intel HD Graphics 5500 HDD 500GB SATA 7200rpm 512GB SATA SSD 256GB SATA SSD Opal 2.0 WIRED NETWORKING Intel Gigabit Ethernet WIRELESS NETWORKING 802.11 b/g/n 2x2, Bluetooth 4 802.11 ac/a/b/g/n 2x2, Bluetooth 4 802.11 ac/a/b/g/n 2x2, Bluetooth 4 WWAN None 4G LTE None PORTS 3x USB 3.0, mini-DisplayPort, VGA, SD, headphone/microphone dual jack, dock BATTERY Integrated 3-cell 23Wh + external 3-cell 23Wh Integrated 3-cell 23Wh + external 6-cell 72Wh Integrated 3-cell 23Wh + external 3-cell 23Wh

Integrated 3-cell 23Wh + external 6-cell 72Wh SIZE 13.03×8.90×0.81" 13.03×8.90×0.90" (multitouch)/

13.03×8.90×0.81" (no touch) 13.03×8.90×0.81" WEIGHT 3.26lb 3.2lb (multitouch)/

2.9lb (no touch) 4.02lb/

4.42lb WARRANTY 1 year depot 4 year onsite 1 year depot PRICE $818.10 $2,576.40 $1,592.10 OTHER PERKS TrackPoint, optional fingerprint reader, 720p webcam, optional smartcard reader

As a technology writer, I have the luxury of not needing to care much about legacy technology. I'm never faced with the all too common business scenario of needing to hook up my laptop to a projector that only has a VGA port. While wired Ethernet is occasionally useful—it has a robustness and reliability that Wi-Fi just can't match in busy hotels or conferences—it's not something I need day to day. I don't have a corporate LAN that I need to connect to.

As such, I've welcomed the Ultrabook trend with open arms. Portability and battery life combined with decent performance are both important to me; old analog connectors and wired networks are not. Shedding these legacy ports produces a better laptop as far as I'm concerned. In the unlikely event I need to use any of those things, there's always a dongle to fall back on.

But I recognize my needs are not universal. For plenty of people, these port needs aren't occasional wants; they're bread-and-butter needs. A laptop without a VGA port is a laptop that's a pain in the ass.

The other thing that Ultrabooks increasingly forfeit is user serviceability and options. Instead of socketed SO-DIMMs for memory and mini-PCI or M.2, they integrate components onto the motherboard and use solder instead of sockets. This saves space, but it rules out any kind of end user replacement or upgrades. The integration tends to mean that manufacturers select just a few different options for storage, memory, and so on in order to simplify their manufacturing.

ThinkPad's gonna ThinkPad

The Lenovo T450s is an Ultrabook-style take on the business laptop. Instead of shaving off every last millimeter and squeezing out every extra gram of weight, the T450s tips the balance toward expansion, servicing, and business connectivity. It still manages to be reasonably thin—0.81-0.90 inches—and reasonably light, starting at 3.26lbs.

The look is classic ThinkPad. Magnesium alloy body; carbon fiber lid, all finished in matte black. If you're a ThinkPad die-hard like me, you'll recognize this as being the way a laptop should look. As much as I liked the HP Spectre x360 and Dell XPS 13, the ThinkPad remains the pinnacle of laptop aesthetics.





The port selection is wider than you'll typically find on an Ultrabook. In addition to the de rigueur USB 3 (three of 'em) and mini-DisplayPort, there's a 1987 vintage VGA port and an RJ45 port for gigabit Ethernet. On the one hand, it's utterly absurd that a machine built in 2015 should retain this 28-year-old analog relic. On the other hand, I recognize how useful this is, because VGA is still distressingly abundant, especially when you're hooking your system up to a projector. The VGA port is an ugly anachronism, but it's also one that, for plenty, will be invaluable.

There's an SD card slot and, somewhat unusually, an option to have a smart card reader. I suspect at the moment this option is hypothetical, however; the space clearly exists, and the maintenance manual describes how to swap out the card reader. But it doesn't appear to be available as a build-to-order option, nor do any of the predefined configurations listed in the current (February 2015) version of the ThinkPad Product Specification Reference. Intriguingly, the spec reference mentions a discrete NVIDIA GPU option that seems presently to be unavailable.

For business users wanting even more ports, there's a dock port on the underside of the machine, and Lenovo has a somewhat pricey dock that sports three USB 3.0, three USB 2.0, two DisplayPort 1.2, DVI-D, and an HDMI 1.4 port. You can leave this plugged in to a stack of monitors and peripherals, turning the laptop into a full on workstation whenever you're at your desk, if you choose.

Open it up and you're greeted with a truly first-rate keyboard, a TrackPoint with physical buttons, and a large glass touchpad, without buttons. The backlit keyboard appears very similar to the one I enjoyed so much in the current X1 Carbon. It remains extraordinarily comfortable to type on. The key action is crisp and defined, the key travel is reasonable for a laptop, and the layout is, while not quite perfect, competent with a full set of page navigation keys.

The TrackPoint, with its separate buttons, continues to be a precise and comfortable pointing device. The touchpad, in common with other Lenovo devices, is Synaptics-driven. It uses Synaptics' custom drivers rather than the integrated Microsoft Precision Touchpad capability. It's accurate, with a comfortable surface, and it handled basic gestures reliably.

The screen is the weak point, as it's merely adequate. My review unit had a 1920×1080 IPS multitouch screen. While this isn't a retina resolution, it's high enough to offer both crisp text and a large working area. As expected on an IPS unit, viewing angles were fine. The problem is that it lacked punch. It wasn't particularly bright—though the non-touch version is better in this regard—and colors looked a little flat.

Don't get me wrong; the screen is not horrible in the way that the screens Apple continues to use in the MacBook Air line are horrible. But these days I'm being increasingly spoiled by laptops with extremely high resolutions and enormous brightness to boot. I suspect some of the issue lies within the pragmatic trade-offs that Lenovo has made. The T450s' screen is not gloss, so it's somewhat less prone to glare and reflections, but the use of an anti-glare finish robs the screen of some of its contrast and crispness. This is a contentious issue. While there are many who swear by gloss screens, there are just as many who swear at them.

The fingerprint reader on the keyboard and 720p webcam in the lid both performed as expected.

Old-school on the inside

Unlike so many of its Ultrabook peers, the T450s is quite boxy. Although the edges are beveled, it retains a broadly rectangular profile, with none of the tapering or curves of slimmer devices. It's not quite as thin as competitors, it's not quite as light as competitors—and it's not quite as unserviceable as competitors.

So there's a RAM socket. 4GB is soldered onto the motherboard, but there's a socket to let you add up to 8 more gigabytes for 12 in total. It's not the 16GB that I crave, but it's certainly better than the 8GB that socketless systems top out at. Both the Wi-Fi card and the SSD use M.2 connectors, opening the door to replacement later in the machine's life. There's room for a 2.5-inch spinning disk.

Moreover, the system is assembled in such a way as to facilitate self-replacement of easily damaged parts. Lenovo provides excellent hardware maintenance manuals for its ThinkPads. These show how to break down the laptops to access and replace all the individual components.

Lenovo divides the field replaceable units (FRUs) into three categories: self-service Customer Replaceable Units (CRUs) for things that are so trivial to swap that the end user can do it easily; optional service CRUs, for things that can be done by the customer or a repair technician (at the customer's choice) but which are a little more involved; and everything else. Lenovo will generally sell any of the parts, even the parts that aren't CRUs at all.

So for example, the T450s deems the (spillproof—it is a ThinkPad, after all) keyboard to be an optional-service CRU. If you ruin your keyboard with an upended Frappuccino then you can easily enough replace it without having to disassemble the entire machine. The more compact X1 Carbon, however, doesn't designate the keyboard as a CRU at all. Most of the T450s' major components that are either susceptible to failure (storage, keyboard, firmware backup battery) or good candidates for upgrade (RAM, storage, Wi-Fi, WWAN) are in one of the CRU categories.























Performance held few surprises. Our review unit had the i5-5300U processor, the middle option of the range of processors that Lenovo offers. As one would expect, this is a touch faster than the i5-5200U we used in the XPS 13 and a bit slower than the i7-5600U we used in the X1 Carbon. At the time we tested the X1, we noted that its GPU performance was lower than we expected due to aggressive reductions of the clock speed in order to keep the system cool and quiet. Since then, Lenovo has updated the X1's firmware, and the company tells us that this should improve the GPU performance (we're hoping to test soon). The T450s remained cool and quiet even under load, but still achieved good benchmark scores.





Its SSD uses SATA and delivered results in line with our expectations for SATA disks. PCIe units clearly take performance up to a whole new level, but it's nonetheless unlikely that you'll be spending much time waiting for the SSD in the T450s.

The battery configuration of the T450s is a little unusual. As shipped it has two separate battery units. Both are 23Wh 3-cell devices, for a total battery capacity of 46Wh. One of the batteries is internal and not readily replaced. The other, however, unlatches and can be swapped out. It can be replaced with an identical unit or one of two high-power batteries: a six-cell 48Wh unit, or a six-cell 72Wh unit.

We tested two configurations: 23+23Wh, and 23+72Wh. The former configuration was unexceptional in our battery tests. At 531 minutes, it's a middle-of-the-road performance. The latter configuration was, unsurprisingly, a battery life monster. In our Wi-Fi browsing test that loops through a handful of pages, the T450s ran for just over 17-and-a-half hours. In our WebGL test, it went for just over 10 hours.

The 72Wh battery does add a little extra bulk. It no longer lies flush with the machine's base, instead bulging slightly, raising the rear of the keyboard (which, if anything, enhances the typing experience). But if monster battery life is what you want—something that'll run a full working day when working on tasks that are more substantial than basic Web browsing—this is the way to do it.

The T450s continues to have more pre-installed software than I feel is useful or desirable. While it includes the (legitimately beneficial) Lenovo update tool, which is useful for ensuring drivers and firmware remain up-to-date, this is joined by an extremely naggy 30-day trial of some Norton software and the Pokki store and Start menu alternative.

My suspicion is that this kind of software is more likely to confuse and annoy more than to ever prove useful. When the 30-day Norton trial ends, the messages it shows look honestly like the online scams and malware that are so abundant.

The ideal Ultrabook for business types

I would not buy the T450s. I have been living without VGA for years, and if I must, I'm content to use an Ethernet dongle. I'll complain about only having 8GB RAM, but for my uses, the marginally smaller size and lighter weight of, say, the X1 Carbon has the edge over the T450s. I'm happy to pay the price premium that the X1 Carbon incurs. Thin and light are still good things.

But the T450s is a fine machine, and if I needed any of the things it has—VGA, docking station, integrated gigabit, maybe even the smart card—I'd pick it up in a heartbeat. It's a ThinkPad, so it's never going to be super cheap, but the pricing isn't awful; it's certainly nowhere near as stratospheric as the X1's pricing. The keyboard is easily best in class. That matters tremendously.

And in some ways it's eye-opening. The T450s makes some compromises in terms of size and weight in order to increase modularity and maintainability, but those compromises are not actually as big as I thought they'd be. Yes, the extended battery adds some bulk and weight, but it delivers monstrous battery life. I'm sure the RAM socket adds a little extra size and weight, but it's not back-breaking. And I'm never going to want a VGA port. It's too anachronistic. Too ugly.

It makes me wonder, now that thin and light are the norm, how far could we swing the balance the other way to recapture some of what the MacBook Air and its Ultrabook offspring have given up. For example, my understanding is that to fit 16GB into a laptop you need to use socketed RAM; the soldered kind for whatever reason doesn't go that big, which is why so many Ultrabooks are limited to 8GB. And if I could have a machine that was 0.1 inches thicker than an X1 and 0.2lbs heavier than an X1, but it had a pair of RAM sockets for up to 16GB and an RJ45 port? I'd grab one in an instant.

The Good

That keyboard, that TrackPoint

Perfect for someone who lives on the road, in the airport, and in the conference room

Up to 12GB RAM

The Bad

The screen is only OK

No PCIe SSD options

The Ugly