X1 Gen6 typical issues

[dandreye]

Hi All,

X1 Gen6 series is looking optimal for my needs. Are there any typical issues with it that I should be aware of? I had no complaints whatsoever on my corporate 20KG-S3Y80N one while using it for a couple of years until the mobo died all of a sudden one day. The Lenovo tech swapping it by warranty said it's not a typical issue but it's not a single occurence either. Wondering if they can be expected to last much beyond those ~3yrs since their release with moderate office use (no gaming).

Noisy CPU fan @ near max RPMs is not a concern.

Thanks in advance!

[dr_st]

The Lenovo tech swapping it by warranty said it's not a typical issue but it's not a single occurence either.

Motherboard failures are like that. They happen, but unless it's a serious design flaw (which you would hear about by now), you can expect it to last 5 years at least. I wouldn't worry about that.

Haven't used an X1 Gen6 myself, so I cannot answer as to what typical issues may exist; just saying that I wouldn't worry specifically about that one.

[dandreye]

Motherboard failures are like that. They happen
...
just saying that I wouldn't worry specifically about that one.

Yeah it seems to be a lottery. I hear warranty extension is an option, perhaps that's the way to go assuming reasonable pricing.

[terry_mccann]

I have the Yoga variant of the gen 6, I am working for my company's IT department.

Last year we bought 40 of them. Up to now 10 of them have new mainboards under warranty. They stop charging randomly an remain dead after that. That is a quota of 25% which we never had before. And the displays have that angle protection filter (or what is it called) causing the displays to be clouded darkly on the lower left and right corners eben when that filter is disabled via FN-D.

These are by far the worst Lenovo Notebooks we ever had, and we had them from T-60 onwards all the time.

Just saying, I think those 25% speak for itself.

[mikemex]

Thing with modern laptops is that everything is super thin, light and flexible. If you have a chance, see an old laptop motherboard and compare it to one from a recent X1 Carbon and you'll understand. It's stripped down to the bare minimum and that ain't good for durability. If you keep bending the metal it fatigues and the electric tracks just break. A price to be paid for such thinness and lightness.

My ancient X301 still works and it's 15 years old now. I bought it second hand. But surely, no component of it is as flexible.

I'd say, there is no hope for getting back to the time they built things to truly last. So just live with that uncertainty. Get the machine you like second hand. Try to spend little and repeat if something breaks.

Spend the rest of the money on a good NAS to keep your data safe.

[mikemex]

X1 Carbon Gen 6 is affected by the Thunderbolt firmware bug.

Someone either at Lenovo or Intel (most likely) screwed it up and wrote some firmware routine that kept writing over the ROM chip, eventually wearing it out. When that ROM chip fails, some features of the motherboard aren't configured properly and they cease to function. The most obvious consequence is that you have charging issues but the same chip was used to configure the HDMI port as well.

Problem is, the issue was so obscure they took probably months if not years to figure it out. Initially, it was believed to be a hardware issue, so they didn't suspect it was a faulty update package. By the time they figured out, a lot of people had already installed the update and had it running long enough to have developed the issue.

There are a lot of damaged machines floating around, so be careful.

[terry_mccann]

Can one identify if that update is installed?