T460s, X1 Carbon or Thinkpad Yoga 460

I could use some help picking a machine. We already have one of the Best Buy exclusive Yogas, and overall it's a really nice machine. I learned that for me the tablet mode and the stylus is almost useless, even though I use OneNote all day for work purposes as well as general note-taking (writing with a pen doesn't help me at all here).

A potential couple of bonuses that the Thinkpad Yoga has over the competition, are the dedicated GPU as well as a 2.5" SSD drive slot (I think). I do a lot of design work with Adobe products, so the GPU might be beneficial there but I'm not sure. I also definitely need 1TB of hard drive space. I could live with a smaller drive for now and replace it later with an m.2 or PCI-E when they're available in 1TB.

Something that bothers me about the Yoga is the space bar. It allows you to press it down most of the way without registering a button press... so the actual button press registering isn't quite in sync with the keyboard key snap.

I've been interested also in the T460s as well as X1 Carbon, and I think I would prefer a matte screen with no touch-screen. I'm not totally clear on the differences between these machines, except for a slight size/weight difference as well as available ports.

Generally this is what I'm going for:

• Good IPS screen for design work
• 1TB hard drive
• At least 12GB RAM
• Thin, light and great battery life

 

This site has a review up for the T460s and battery life has suffered in the latest evolution of the T4x0s series.

 

Personally I would look at the T460 before the T460s. The 's' is a little lighter but the T460 is still only 3.78 lbs and has the dual battery power-bridge system. Long battery life and swappable batteries while the system is running to keep you going for a long long time. It will blow away the battery life of the 's' or the 'carbon'. If light weight is #1 then the carbon wins.

 

This leaves out the T460s and Carbon unless you want to go SSD, which is usually expensive. The T450s might still be worth a look cause you the battery bridge and M.2/1TB HDD option.

 

Glad I got T450s last year. I have 256 GB M.2 ssd and a 2TB HDD for storage and backups. Battery life with 72mah battery and internal battery is excellent.

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