The Lenovo ThinkPad T14s 2-in-1 is perfect for anyone who wants a laptop for work and only work – but it's expensive, and the display options are unimpressive

The ThinkPad T14s 2-in-1 heralds the arrival of a convertible-form-factor laptop in Lenovo's productivity T-series lineup. Granted, there have been touchscreen T-series machines before, but never one that lets you fold the screen back 360 degrees to use as a tablet.

The benefits of such a design are obvious if you want to use a pen to scribble or draw on your laptop screen, or if you want to place your laptop in a confined space like the seat back tray of an airliner, when putting it in a tent or A-frame mode means you haven't got a keyboard sticking out towards you.

Versatile the new T14s may be, but cheap it's not. Prices start at £1,830 inc VAT, though Lenovo is currently offering an 18% discount, but that's for a pauper spec machine. The model most users will want will set you back closer to £2,000, but you can easily pay much more if you want the maximum amount of memory and storage.

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Lenovo ThinkPad T14s: Design

ThinkPads have to be black and angular; it's the law at Lenovo. So it came as no shock to us that the new T14s were black and angular. Made from a combination of aluminium and magnesium, it's a very solid bit of kit wholly resistant to our efforts to twist or bend it.

It's not all mouth and no trousers either. The MIL-STD-810H military test pass should ensure it can shrug off excess vibration, temperature changes, particle ingress, and work on top of a 10,000ft tall mountain. At 1.4Kg the T14s isn't the lightest 14in laptop around, nor at 314 x 223 x 21.6mm is it the smallest, but carrying it around all day in a backpack really isn't a chore.

There's little design frippery in evidence other than the red LED that forms the dot over the i in ThinkPad on the lid, but that's as it should be. The matte paint finish on the palmrest and lid does show fingerprints, but it's also warm and pleasant to the touch, so that's a trade-off we're happy with.

The 360-degree hinges that link the screen and the base are very well engineered. There's just a little too much resistance to let you open the lid without holding the base down, but the hinges are strong enough to keep whatever angle you set them at, which is vital when using it in tent or A-frame mode.

On the left side of the T14s you'll find two Thunderbolt 4-spec USB-C ports along with a 3.5mm audio jack, HDMI 2.1 video output and the SIM card tray if you've opted for a cellular modem. On the right are two 5Gpbs USB-A ports and a Kensington security lock.

If we were being picky, and we are, a better layout would have been one USB-C on either side, so you can pick which side to connect the 65W rat-and-tail USB-C charger to, and one 10Gpbs USB-A on either side. Lenovo is having a laugh by fitting USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports to a machine costing this much.

At least you get the latest in wireless communications with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4, both supported by the Intel BE201 card. Given that the RAM is fixed in place and there's only one 2280 M.2 slot inside, taking the base off is something you'll only need to do if you want to upgrade the SSD, but it's a very straightforward operation.

Incidentally, the Kioxia PCIe 4 512GB SSD in our review machine proved a solid performer, recording average sequential read and write speeds of 4,159MB/s and 3,871MB/s respectively.

Lenovo ThinkPad T14s: Keyboard, touchpad, and webcam

There may be some strange parallel universe in which Carol Voderman is Pope, and you can download hummus where there's such a thing as a bad ThinkPad keyboard, but this is not it. In this reality, Lenovo can be relied upon to deliver an excellent keyboard, no matter what the form factor of the laptop it's bolted to, and the ThinkPad 14s is no exception.

The keyboard deck is solid; the soft-finish keys, with their trademark convex bottoms, are pleasant to the touch and have a perfectly calibrated 1.5mm of travel and a smooth end-stop. Typing on the T14s is something of a joy.

The layout is impossible to fault, but mention needs to be made in dispatches of the full-sized arrow keys and the power button-cum-fingerprint scanner, which sits above and apart from the keyboard proper in the top right corner.

All in all, the ThinkBook's keyboard looks and behaves much like that fitted to the ThinkPad X1, and that's quite an accolade. And there's a two-stage white backlight.

This being a ThinkPad, there's naturally a red TrackPoint nestling between the G, H, and B keys and dedicated mouse buttons at the top of the 115 x 60mm Mylar TrackPad. If you've ever had to use a laptop in a confined space, you'll know what a benefit these features are.

To make the TrackPoint even more useful, a quick double-tap opens a menu that lets you adjust the sound and microphone settings, launch Microsoft's Speech Services, and adjust some battery settings.

The 1440p webcam is excellent. Crisp, colorful, and very natural looking, it's one of the best laptop webcams around. It also comes with a manual privacy slider and supports Windows Hello facial recognition.

Lenovo ThinkPad T14s: Display and speakers

The T14s can be specified with two types of screen. Both are 14in, 1,920 x 1,200 multitouch IPS displays, and both refresh at 60Hz. The differences are in gamut width, brightness, and finish so that you can choose 45% NTSC and 400cd/m2, or 100% sRGB and 500cd/m2, with an anti-glare (matte) or an anti-reflection and anti-smudge (gloss) finish.

Our review machine came fitted with a gloss-finish 400cd/m2 panel. It's a bright enough panel, hitting 426cdm/2, but it's severely lacking in colour. Under our colorimeter, it registered just 56% of the sRGB colour space.

The high brightness level and a black luminance level of 0.36cd/m2 result in a strong contrast ratio of 1183:1, while the anti-reflection finish does a good job of keeping reflections, in door and out, in check. It is also impressively resistant to fingerprints, thanks no doubt to an oleophobic coating of some sort.

That all combines to make a display that's good enough for basic productivity but lacks the color to make watching video or looking at images anything other than a lacklustre experience. With so little color space coverage, any talk of color accuracy is superfluous. The alternative screen is a £70 option and offers 100% sRGB coverage, which is hardly stellar for a laptop with such a high price tag, but certainly a step in the right direction.

Despite it only being a FullHD panel, there's no visible pixelation, but that didn't silence the little voice in our head that said that for this sort of money, 2.5K or 2.8K really should be the least you expect.

Before we leave matters display-related, it's worth clarifying that Lenovo doesn't bundle a pen or stylus with the ThinkPad 14s, merely offering one as a £20 option at the point of purchase, which again seems rather parsimonious.

The upward-firing Dolby Atmos-certified 2 x 2W speaker system is altogether more impressive than the display. The sound they make is tight, punchy, and has a decent amount of low-end bass. There's plenty of volume too, our sound meter registering 77.8dBA from a pink noise source at a distance of 1 meter.

Lenovo ThinkPad T14s: Specs and performance

Lenovo's international product information for the T14s 2-in-1 lists 6 processor options, all Core Ultra S2 Arrow Lake chips. The complete list includes the Core Ultra 5 225U and 235U, the Core Ultra 7 255U and 265U, and the Core Ultra 255H and 265H.

At the moment, the U-series chips are the only ones available through Lenovo UK. That's really only an issue from a graphics perspective because only the H-series models have the Intel 140T GPU. All the U-series models make do with the comparatively flaccid Intel Graphics solution.

You can also choose from Windows 11 Home or Pro, Ubuntu, or no operating system, a 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB SSD, and up to 64GB of fixed RAM, though that last is CPU-specific, so for instance, if you pick the entry-level 225U CPU, you can't opt for more than 16GB of RAM.

Our review machine came fitted with the 12-core Core Ultra 7 255U processor, 32GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and Windows 11 Pro, and as noted above, the cheapest display. Buy the same machine, and you'll be out of pocket to the tune of £1,892 inc. VAT, though that is posted by Lenovo as a 19% saving on the regular price of £2,240.

For a productivity machine, basic performance is good. The CPU turned in GeekBench 6 scores of 2,472 single-core, 10,996 multi-core, and 255 in ITPro's bespoke 4K multi-media test. Compare that to 2,725, 10,937, and 245, respectively, from the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V-powered ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition, and it's clear the T14s has nothing to be ashamed of.

Graphics performance is less impressive. The SPECviewperf 3dsmax modelling benchmark ran at a stately 15fps, compared to an average of 25fps on the Intel Arc 140V iGPU and 35fps on the Intel Arc B390 iGPU you'll find in new Panther Lake machines like the Asus ZenBook Duo.

The 14Ts did, however, prove itself every bit a long-distance runner. Even under maximum stress, the CPU and GPU were both running at 100% after several hours, and the noise from the cooling fan never rose above a whisper. In all but the most funereal of environments, the fan is essentially inaudible.

In our standard run-down battery test, the 56Wh battery lasted 15 hours and 46 minutes, which is a decent enough showing even in this age of Windows laptops like the new Honor MagicBook Pro 14, which ran out of juice just a little shy of 19 hours, and the ThinkBook 16 Gen 7, which can run for over 27 hours on a charge.

Lenovo ThinkPad T14s: Is it worth it?

A quick hands-up in the ITPro office proved two points. Firstly, we'd all be quite happy being given a ThinkPad T14s 2-in-1 as a work laptop. Secondly, no way in Hades would we buy one with our own money.

As a practical tool for work, there's nothing much wrong with the T14s, though by 2026 standards. The keyboard is superb, the design and build-quality beyond criticism, the battery life is good enough to get through a full day's graft, and then some, and the webcam is class-leading. Performance is solid, too, and we like the way it runs cool and quiet.

The problem is the cost. Unless you are happy with the pauper specification of 16GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, Wi-Fi 6E, etc, you will need to spend almost £2,000 and still have to make do with a laptop with a FullHD IPS screen with at best full sRGB gamut coverage.

Lenovo ThinkPad T14s: Specs