Lenovo has long been a name synonymous with business laptops. Most of us have either had a work-issued Lenovo laptop or know someone who has. The ThinkPad line of business workstations has been quite popular across the professional world for years. For 2024, the 16-inch ThinkPad P1 Gen 7 gets upgraded with an Intel Core Ultra CPU, bringing with it a dedicated NPU for AI tasks (and a Copilot key no one asked for). It’s not officially labeled as a Copilot+ PC — that designation is still exclusive to Snapdragon X-powered computers — but it does bring more of the popular AI features to professional-grade laptops.
The P1 is pretty much what you would expect from a Lenovo business laptop — solid, powerful, and reliable enough to keep up with all your work needs for years to come. However, it doesn’t quite have the flexibility or aesthetic appeal of the 2-in-1 ThinkBooks, and it’s quite expensive. But if you are looking for a laptop with professional-grade quality and performance, or it’s time to upgrade your company’s machines, the P1 is a great choice for most people.
About this review: Lenovo provided us with a ThinkPad P1 Gen 7 for this review. It had no input in this article and did not see its contents before publishing.
Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 7
$3369 $4619 Save $1250
Lenovo continues to deliver exceptional professional-grade laptops that power through even the most demanding tasks. This year, the popular P1 workstations include Intel’s new Core Ultra processors for even better performance and efficiency. Unfortunately, they’re still held back by one frustrating compromise.
- Plenty of power
- Excellent keyboard
- Solid webcam
- Performance drops significantly on battery power
- Base model display is underwhelming
- Lenovo’s pricing structure is always weird
Price, availability, and specs
Pricey, but quite configurable
As is always the case, Lenovo offers quite a few configurations of the ThinkPad P1 Gen 7. The unit I received is packing an Intel Core Ultra 7 165H vPro processor with 32GB of LPDDR5x RAM and 1TB of storage. My review unit has a 16-inch 1920×1200 IPS display running at 60Hz and 400 nits of brightness. You can upgrade that to a 2560×1600 165Hz panel at 500 nits, or a 3840×2400 OLED touch display. The OLED display drops you back down to 60Hz and 400 nits of brightness, however, so keep that in mind. If you want, you can max out the P1 with an Ultra 9 185H vPro, 64GB of RAM, and 8TB of storage (2 slots with 4TB each).
The base model of the P1 comes with a Core Ultra 5 135H with an integrated Intel Arc GPU, while upgrading to a Core Ultra 7 or 9 series processor allows you to select a dedicated GPU. The laptop I received has an NVIDIA RTX 1000 Ada GPU with 6GB of GDDR6 RAM. You can opt for an RTX 2000 or 3000 Ada GPU or an RTX 4060 or 4070 GPU if you so desire.
Pricing for Lenovo laptops is always a bit weird as the MSRP is almost never what you end up paying. As configured, the MSRP for the device I have is $4,565, but the actual list price is currently much lower than that. That’s still expensive for a laptop, but considering it’s targeted squarely at professionals and businesses, it makes sense. The best place to get it right now is directly from Lenovo’s website.
Design and ports
If it looks like a ThinkPad and works like a ThinkPad…
The design of the P1 hasn’t really changed much over the past few years, aside from getting a bit slimmer. The one notable change across Lenovo’s laptops happened a couple of years ago when they introduced the camera protrusion area just above the lid. It’s subtle and doesn’t get in the way of using the computer at all, but other than the ThinkPad logo on the lid (with the little red light in the “i” ) you couldn’t distinguish this computer from any other business laptop on the market.
It’s a matte black, slim laptop with not much going on visually. While it’s not going to win any accolades for being the thinnest and lightest laptop around, it does a pretty good job of being portable. It’s about the same size as most other 16-inch laptops in this segment, and at just over 4 pounds, it’s not very heavy at all. I never had any problem carrying it out with me when I worked away from the house.
As with most Lenovo laptops, especially its professional ones, it’s extremely well-made. The top and bottom aluminum covers help keep it cool and great to touch, even if they are fingerprint magnets. The bottom cover also includes 50% recycled plastic, as Lenovo uses a lot of recycled materials in the P1 series, including up to 90% recycled packaging which is nice to see.
There’s a fairly decent port selection for a productivity-focused computer and I didn’t really find myself missing anything. The left side houses the dedicated 170W charging port which is the only way to get fast-charging, two Thunderbolt 4 ports that support up to 100W charging and up to 40Gbps data speeds, a full-sized HDMI 2.1 port, and a 3.5 mm headphone/microphone port.
On the other side is a Kensington Nano lock slot, a USB-C port (up to 10Gbps), a USB-A port (5Gbps), and an SD card reader. There’s no 5G option on the P1, but it does have Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4, which is nice to see. And there’s an option to include an NFC reader if you need that. Since this is a workstation after all, you’ll be happy to know that you can use both Thunderbolt and non-Thuderbolt docking stations to hook up to all your accessories. I would say that the lack of a dedicated DisplayPort is a bit of a miss, especially on a professional-grade laptop, but I won’t lose any sleep over it.
Keyboard and touchpad
Lenovo’s keyboard continues to shine along with everyone’s favorite red track ball
It’s been a bit since I’ve used one of Lenovo’s business laptops, and coming back to it was absolutely one of those things that I didn’t know I was missing until I got it back. The keyboard on the P1, like most of Lenovo’s business laptops, is absolutely wonderful to type on. It offers plenty of click and key travel for fast, accurate typing, without becoming stiff or tiring after a while.
I’ve typed on dozens of different keyboards by now in my life, and this is one of my favorite laptop keyboards I’ve ever used. This shouldn’t be too surprising for anyone who’s been around Lenovo business laptops. The only odd thing is that while they finally swapped the left-hand Ctrl and Fn keys on the X1 Carbon laptops, they’re still reversed on the P1. Oh well.
The other important thing to note is that this is the first P1 series workstation with the new Copilot key built directly into the keyboard. It’s on the right-hand side squeezed between the Alt and Ctrl keys. Give it a press, and you too can have the power of Copilot right at your fingertips, even though there are already a dozen and a half other ways Microsoft is trying to force us to use it. Gotta have something to show for that $10 billion investment. But I digress.
As great as the keyboard is, unfortunately, I had an issue with the touchpad. It feels good, and the haptic feedback is tuned well with a nice responsiveness, but about a week or so into my testing, I noticed about a half-second lag whenever I laid my finger on it to start moving the mouse. This happened consistently for several hours. Online, I found others experiencing similar issues on other Lenovo machines, so it’s not unique to this model. There’s no such issue when using the TrackPoint or any external mice I tried. Thankfully, when I opened it back up the next day, it was working just fine again, so I’m not quite sure what happened there. It’s just something intermittent that could occur, I suppose.
Speaking of the TrackPoint, it still works great, and diehard fans will be happy to know that the left and right clicks for it are still alive and well, just integrated directly into the touchpad. They’ve also brought over the TrackPoint Quick Menu, which lets you access some customizable quick settings with a double tap on everyone’s favorite red trackball.
Display, webcam, and audio
Do yourself a favor and upgrade from the base display
The display on the laptop I was sent is a 1920×1200 LCD display with a 60Hz refresh rate. Thankfully, it’s a 16:10 aspect ratio with a matte, anti-glare coating, but it also only tops out at 400 nits of brightness. It’s perfectly passable as a generic display for browsing, writing, emailing, and the like, but if you need to do any sort of design or editing work, or if you want it to double as your entertainment machine, you’ll want to opt for either the 2560×1600 120Hz screen or even the 2.8K OLED panel (stuck at 60Hz though).
The webcam on the P1 is a surprisingly decent 5MP. I used it for a few video calls and I appreciated that I didn’t look super washed out or sickly. It’s not as high as the 9MP webcam on the HP Spectre x360 14, but it’s much better than the 1080p ones we’ve seen on many other business laptops. It’s a refreshing (and welcome) change of pace in today’s video-call-centric work environment.
The downward-firing speakers were impressively nice as well. Whether listening to music or watching movies on the P1, I was able to hear everything loud and clear with a well-rounded sound as well. There’s even Dolby Atmos support included. It’s nice to see manufacturers taking those things seriously in their business-focused offerings.
Performance
Plenty of power, as long as you’re plugged in
The P1 workstation has been upgraded to Intel’s Core Ultra 7 165H. It packs 16 total cores divided into 6 performance cores, 8 efficiency cores, and 2 low-power efficiency cores. The Ultra series processors provide some pretty decent performance improvements over the older Core series of chips, but the bigger focus is on powering all those fun AI capabilities most of us don’t use.
| Benchmark | ThinkPad P1 Gen 7 Core Ultra 7 165H RTX 1000 ADA | ThinkPad Z16 (Gen 2) Ryzen 9 Pro 7940HS Radeon RX 6500M | MacBook Pro 16, M3 Max | HP Spectre x360 14, Core Ultra 7 155H |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PCMark 10 | 6836 | 7616 | N/A | 6844 |
| Cinebench 2024 (Single/multi) | 95 / 852 | 100 / 823 | N/A | 100 / 745 |
| 3DMark CPU (Max threads) | 6841 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Time Spy | 8082 | 4955 | N/A | 3727 |
| CrossMark | 1,718 | N/A | 1,993 | N/A |
As powerful as the Core Ultra 7 and RTX 1000 Ada GPU are, there’s a pretty big caveat when using this laptop, and sadly, it seems to affect other Lenovo laptops as well. While plugged in (and using the included proprietary Lenovo charger) the P1 performs quite well. However, when you unplug it, the performance drops significantly.
While 6,836 is a respectable score on PCMark 10, when on battery power, the P1 eeks out a much less impressive 4,608. On Cinebench, the single and multi-core scores drop to 64 and 674 respectively. In truth, this didn’t seem to impact my typical workflow of emails, Slack, researching with 20+ tabs open, and writing, but if you mainly do any resource-intensive tasks, you won’t want to stray too far from a plug.
Even with those unimpressive benchmark scores, I was able to game comfortably on the P1 while on battery power. I ran Borderlands 2 and Modern Warfare 2 without any slowdowns while blissfully unplugged. Keep in mind though that this was on a 1080p display so the GPU didn’t have to work quite as hard, so if you opt for a higher resolution, your mileage may vary. And when I say “comfortably,” that doesn’t mean at a consistent 60fps. It simply means the game ran smoothly with no noticeable lag or hindered gameplay.
The RTX 1000 Ada is pretty comparable to the RTX 4050, just tuned a bit more specifically for AI tasks.
The same was true when connected to my docking station and dual 27-inch QHD 75Hz displays. I was able to edit video and even do some gaming on it. Again, you won’t see the sustained gaming performance you would from a gaming laptop, but it’s perfectly suitable for taking a brain break or three during the day.
The RTX 1000 Ada GPU powering the P1 is actually quite capable. It’s not going to blow you away with the performance, and if you need a dedicated machine for heavy graphics work, video editing, or gaming, you’ll want to upgrade to the RTX 3000 Ada or even the RTX 4070, but the RTX 1000 Ada handled everything I needed to without a problem. I did notice the fans kicking up under heavier workloads, but that’s to be expected and was never often enough to be an annoyance.
While the P1 packs plenty of power for most tasks, you can certainly upgrade it if you need more. A fully specced out model includes 64GB of RAM, 8TB of storage, an Ultra 9 185H, and either an RTX 3000 Ada or RTX 4070 GPU.
Should you buy the Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 7?
It’s a great laptop if you don’t need anything fancy
This is often a tough question, especially with business-focused laptops, and the answer almost always comes down to what you need it for. If your daily workflow mostly involves email, writing, browsing the web, or jumping between meetings, then this is a great workhorse. It’s got plenty of power, a fantastic keyboard, an above-average webcam, and pretty solid battery life.
You should buy the ThinkPad P1 Gen 7 if:
- You want a reliable, tried and true workhorse
- You don’t want anything fancy
- You plan to keep it plugged in most of the time
You shouldn’t buy the ThinkPad P1 Gen 7 if:
- You want something that looks cool
- You need something powerful and portable
- You need a DisplayPort
And even if you do use a lot of power-hungry apps in your workflow, as long as you opt for the higher-end specs, I think you’ll be fine. There’s not really much to dislike about the P1, except for maybe the price. If you need to save some money, there are lots of other great 16-inch laptops available, many for a lot less. But if your company is footing the bill, or you don’t mind spending more money on one of the best workstation laptops you can buy, the P1 is an easy choice.
Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 7
$3369 $4619 Save $1250
Lenovo continues to deliver exceptional professional-grade laptops that power through even the most demanding tasks. This year, the popular P1 workstations include Intel’s new Core Ultra processors for even better performance and efficiency. Unfortunately, they’re still held back by one frustrating compromise.