Lenovo ThinkPad E14

9owners with an opinion

56%of verdicts positive

3/4positive/negative since 2024

0happy after 3+ years

Praised for battery and performance; criticized for ergonomics and reliability.

What owners wrote

Doesn’t like itOwned 2 years

I had a X250 who died less than a month after the warranty, now got a E14 since ~2 years and it got keyboard issues

Likes it

I've been using ThinkPad E14 (AMD Ryzen 7, 16GB RAM, 512 SSD) - very happy with it. No problems with performance, battery, etc. at all. The new Dell XPS 13/14/16 is also good. Just get one with Windows and wipe it clean when installing Linux. In fact, I was going to buy a $4K M4 MacBook before I saw Omarchy and decided to give it a try with a new $730 ThinkPad. Exceeded all my expectations. Omarchy literally saved me thousands of dollars.

Doesn’t like it

I recently had to turn in my work Macbook and started using personal Lenovo Thinkpad E14 -- last or second to last gen. I have to say that everything, aside from keyboard and hardware (ie CPU, storage etc) on it is bad. Screen is bad, sound si horrible, webcam makes me look like I died a couple of days ago -- all gray and blurry, battery is obviously have nothing on Apple silicon laptops, fans are noisy, touchpad is bad, all is bad. But what impressed me the most are USB-C ports. They are somehow bad too. There's no grip, there's no feedback, you just kind of put a cable somewhere in them and hope it doesn't arc -- because sometimes it sounds like electrical arcing in there. Not quite pencil in a bucket, but not far off. And the thing is new, how do you manage that on a new business laptop? I'm very impressed, in the worst way possible.

Doesn’t like it

I was assigned an E14 once. Compared to a T14: The case is all thick ABS. It weighs like 2.4 kg, and the weight is unbalanced. The USB-C charge only works at 20V, nothing less. While charging it overheats and spins up the fans. It came with a TN screen with terrible viewing angles, that could not be used in a brightly lit room. I didn't use the laptop for two months while I waited for a replacement screen from aliexpress. Keyboard is much thinner, the trackpoint drifts easily. Camera quality is worse, somehow it cannot handle sun-lit scenes. Microphone and speakers are similar to the T14. It stopped receiving firmware updates after two years. It uses about 0.5 W while suspended, so its tiny 48 Wh battery typically doesn't last the weekend with the lid closed. The motherboard has design issues, a missing protection diode in the headphone jack microphone input ended up frying the CPU due to a ground loop. Meanwhile the T14 has eaten the same ground loop and even a 48V passive PoE in an accident and dealt with it by rebooting. A T450 from 2015 is still running.

Likes it

> You can't change the RAM on laptops now. > You can't change the SSD on laptops now. > You can't easily repair the screen on laptops now. I can do all of that on my Thinkpad E14.

Likes it

One of my favorite machines was the MacBook Air 11 (2012). This was a pure Intel machine, except for a mediocre Broadcom wireless card. With a few udev rules, I squeezed out the same battery performance from Linux I got from OS X, down to a few minutes of advantage in favor of Linux. And all this despite Safari being a marvel of energy efficiency. The problem with Linux performance on laptops boils down to i) no energy tweaks by default and ii) poor device drivers due to the lack of manufacturer cooperation. If you pick a machine with well supported hardware and you are diligent with some udev rules, which are quite trivial to write thanks to powertop suggestions, performance can be very good. I am getting a bit more than 10 hours from a cheap ThinkPad E14 Gen7, with a 64 Wh battery, and light coding use. That's less than a MacBook Air, where I would be getting around 13-14 hours, but it's not bad at all. The difference comes mainly from the cheap screen that is more power consuming and ARMs superior efficiency when idling. But I prefer not to trade the convenience and openness of x86_64 plus NixOS for a bit more battery range. IMHO, the gap is not sufficiently wide to make a big difference in most usage scenarios.

Doesn’t like it

i have an E14 for work and its trackpad is garbage same with the keyboard layout

Likes it

I think the Thinkpad E series might be considered cheap junk here, but my Ryzen 7 E14 with 40GB RAM runs Windows 11 and Ubuntu great. I am using the extra SSD slot for Linux so I didn't have to partition anything. All the hardware works (though I haven't tried the fingerprint scanner yet). The only issue I've had is it doesn't love waking up the DisplayPort through the hub I bought, but that's likely a hub problem, and it actually works better in Linux than Windows.

Likes it

Since you were seeking laptops I imagine you're fine with the computing power laptops usually offer. I recently purchased a ThinkPad E14 gen 3. It has a 6 core 12 thread Ryzen 5 5600U, with 24 GB of memory (8 GB soldered + 16 GB I installed later). I run Linux exclusively. No Windows or dual boot or anything like that. I currently run the latest Fedora 36 Beta. On this particular OS I have none of the usual Linux problems. - Wifi works on both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz. - Bluetooth works seamlessly. Picks up my wireless mouse and headphones right after boot/wakeup. Couldn't say the same about my older Linux laptops. - Sleep/suspend/wakeup etc works. - Camera works. Btw it has a shutter. - Screen resolution is full HD. - Battery life of about 6 to 7 hours on moderate usage. I think you might be able to customise your order with a bigger battery and faster charger. What doesn't work: - Fingerprint sensor Note that I did not have to do any workarounds on my machine with Fedora 36 Beta. YMMV. Some general thoughts on the ThinkPad E14: - Material quality of the E series is definitely not as great as the T, P, and X series of ThinkPad. But then again, it was much much cheaper, and I think the quality is okay for the price. - You can upgrade memory, storage, and a few other things by opening up the bottom panel. - Keyboard is great. Trackpad isn't as good as the ones on the Mac. I personally like the 3 physical buttons above the trackpad. - Choose your display wisely. There are TN displays

Likes itHasn’t owned it

In the US, cheap ThinkPads like E14 sometimes sell for a bit less when you factor in all typical discounts. They are good machines that run Linux well and can be repaired. In EU, and I imagine other markets, there's nothing remotely close. I hope this puts some pressure on Lenovo and the rest of manufacturers to be more competitive.

Likes itHasn’t owned it

MacBook Neo with 512 gigabytes of storage configuration costs 1,200,000 KRW (Approx. 810 USD for reference) in my nation. I can get ThinkPad E14 with a decent lunar lake CPU and 16 gigabytes of memory, at a slightly lower price. So I'm not as hyped as others...

Doesn’t like itHasn’t owned it

Yikes. Has iFixit jumped the shark? An AI generated press release on behalf of Lenovo, who is (from my perspective) essentially paying them for good PR? And this paid relationship - Lenovo paying iFixit - isn’t disclosed until the very last line of the article, so you have to first read 1500+ words of AI slop? That made me start looking into their scores. The Thinkpad E14 Gen 7 gets a 9/10 despite soldered ports, a pile of easily breakable plastic clips, a flimsy plastic case, and a riveted keyboard/top case assembly. To me that sounds _worse_ than the M5 MacBook Pro, which scores 4/10 (soldered storage unlike the E14, easily replaceable ports, and a riveted keyboard/top case assembly.) I would personally rather have replaceable ports than non-soldered storage, but putting my personal preferences aside, I think it’s hard to argue that difference between the two is worth going from a 4/10 to a 9/10.