As the new year gets underway, it’s time to reassess our relationships — including the one with our technology. Are you still getting what you need from your computer, or have your needs (or the demands of work) changed? If your PC has slowed down, or you have a laptop that doesn’t last long enough on a charge anymore, those are good reasons to move on.

For those of you in the market for a new PC or laptop, we’re super excited about what Lenovo’s been doing. Lenovo has long enjoyed its well-deserved reputation as the king of productivity, with superior battery life and great usability. Now, for the second year in a row, Lenovo has earned the number-one spot in Laptop Mag’s ratings of the Best & Worst Brands. In all, Lenovo notebooks received 10 Editor’s Choice awards, three more than their nearest competitor.

While former champion Apple appears to be phoning it in on design and topples to seventh place in the ratings, Lenovo has steadily gained ground on the strength of its world-class business systems like the ThinkPad X1 Carbon and sophisticated laptops like the Yoga 920.

Choosing the wrong workstation can be costly when it comes to productivity

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon (6th gen) is the only laptop to earn a perfect 5-star score from Laptop Mag in the past year, and there are lots of reasons why:

Weight and Battery Life: Why even own a laptop if it’s too heavy and bulky to travel or keeps you tethered to a wall because it won’t hold a charge. With its slim profile weighing in at just under 2.5 pounds (as opposed to 3 or 4 with other 14-inch laptops), the X1 Carbon is a perfect traveling companion. And, with over 11 hours of endurance (2.5 hours above the premium-laptop average) and fast-charging capability, it can follow your lap just about anywhere.

Typing Experience: X1 Carbon’s springy, responsive keyboard is a dream for touch-typers. Plus, you can opt to use the TrackPoint pointing stick to navigate around the desktop without moving your hands from keyboard to touchpad.

All the Ports: The X1 is also one of the few super-thin laptops that incorporates ports for both new and old technology. It offers two full-size USB ports, plus dual Thunderbolt 3 connections and HDMI out. So you can plug in flash drives and charge and connect to external monitors with a single cable. By contrast, MacBooks (aside from Air) offer Thunderbolt 3 / USB Type-C connectors as their only ports. So you have to be willing to pay well over $1,000 for an outdated typing experience and carry a bag full of dongles.

Resolution and Color: Most of us multitask with two windows side-by-side, so we need at least 1920 x 1080 resolution. The X1 Carbon’s base model screen delivers 1080p with 300 nits of brightness and great color reproduction. It’s also available with an amazing 2560 x 1440 display that supports HDR and reproduces 200 percent of the sRGB color gamut.

We’ve chosen to highlight the X1 Carbon, but Lenovo also won accolades for the stunning Yoga 920 2-in-1 with its iconic watchband hinge and 10-hour battery life, as well as the Legion Y920 gaming laptop, which offers powerful performance and a mechanical keyboard.

Whether you know for sure that you’re ready to upgrade, or you’d rather talk through it first to see if that’s the right move for you now, shoot us an email at sales@libertytech.net. Our goal is always to find just the right solution for you!