My personal beef with Thinkpads is the screen. Most of the thinkpads I’ve encountered in my life (usually pretty expensive corporate ones) had shitty FHD screens. I got too spoiled by retina screens, and I can’t comfortably use anything with lower DPI.

FWIW if you buy new from Lenovo, getting a more high-res display has been an option for years.

I'm on the other side where I've been buying Thinkpads partly because of the display. Thinkpads have for a long time been one of the few laptop options on the market where you could get a decent matte non-glare display. I value that, battery life and performance above moar pixels. Sure I want just one step above FHD so I can remote 1080p VMs and view vids in less than fullscreen at native resolution but 4K on a 14" is absolute overkill.

I think most legit motivations for wanting very high-res screens (e.g. photo and video editing, publishing, graphics design) also come with wanting or needing better quality and colors etc too, which makes very-highly-scaled mid-range monitors a pretty niche market.

> I got too spoiled by retina screens, and I can’t comfortably use anything with lower DPI.

Did you make a serious effort while having an extended break from retina screens? I'd think you would get used to it pretty quickly if you allow yourself to readjust. Many people do multi-DPI setups without issues - a 720p and a 4k side-by-side for example. It just takes acclimatizing.

I just learned on Reddit the other day that people replace those screens with third party panels, bought from AliExpress for peanuts. They use panelook.com to find a compatible one.

If you buy a X1 from Lenovo the screen is definitely going to be better. if not, you can simply change the screen from most of the other models.