1. The list in brief
2. Best overall
3. Best workstation
4. Best foldable
5. How to find the right laptop
6. How we test
7. Why trust Laptop Mag
The best ThinkPads are not just spreadsheet workhorses.
They're your all-day hustle and after-dark chill companions. Sure, they conquer the corporate jungle with ironclad security and remote management that makes your IT department sing, but their magic goes way beyond board rooms.
ThinkPads are some of the best laptops overall thanks to their stellar performance and battery life. In fact, our current top battery life record is held by the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6, which lasted over 21 hours in our benchmark test!
So, forget laptops that quit when the clock strikes five. These ThinkPads are built for a life lived beyond the cubicle walls.
There are dozens of ThinkPads you can choose from, but you don't want to waste your money on a subpar model when there are a few shining stars well worth considering. After hundreds of hours of testing, these are our top picks for the best ThinkPads of the year.
Momo Tabari graduated with a bachelor's degree in Journalism & Media Studies at Brooklyn College and has been covering tech for four years. She has written around fifty reviews and has plenty of experience testing and critiquing laptops.
The Quick List
Best overall
The Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 is the best ThinkPad for most people thanks to its record-breaking battery life, fantastic performance, and lightweight design.
Best workstation
The ThinkPad P1 Gen 7 delivers the performance power users need in a surprisingly lightweight design. Plus, it boasts impressive battery life at over 17 hours!
Best foldable
The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold 16 is the top foldable ThinkPad, featuring a gorgeous 16.3-inch folding OLED display and competitive productivity performance.
The best Lenovo ThinkPad in 2025
Why you can trust Laptop Mag Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
Best overall ThinkPad
The ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 is an all-star business laptop that goes above and beyond in the ways that matter most: battery life and portability.
This lightweight ThinkPad lasted a record-breaking 21 hours and 3 minutes in our battery life test, longer than any other laptop Laptop Mag has tested (at the time of writing). That's more than enough to get you through two full workdays. If you travel often, you won't have to worry about the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 dying on you.
The ThinkPad's lightweight also makes it fantastic for traveling and commuting. It's 14-inch display means it's compact enough to easily fit in almost any laptop bag and it weighs just 2.72 pounds so you'll barely notice it's there.
While the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 falls short on graphics and gaming performance, it showed strong overall performance in our benchmark tests. The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 processor kept up well across the board. It's worth noting, though, that since Snapdragon-powered laptops are still relatively new, there may be some apps that aren't natively supported on them yet. So, it's a good idea to double-check that all of your must-have apps are compatible before buying.
See our full Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 review.
Best workstation ThinkPad
The ThinkPad P1 Gen 7 is a powerhouse business laptop that seriously delivers on pro-level performance. It has the specs and performance needed for resource-intensive tasks in fields like 3D design, video editing, and data analysis. While it doesn't come cheap, it's tough to beat if you're looking for the most powerful ThinkPad.
The ThinkPad P1 Gen 7 kept up well in our benchmark tests with an especially high SSD transfer speed, impressive graphics performance, and a fantastic battery life of 17 hours and 23 minutes.
That's especially noteworthy considering workstation laptops tend to struggle with battery life, often lasting less than 8 hours per charge. So, the ThinkPad P1 Gen 7 is an especially good fit for power users who commute or travel often and rely on strong battery life. The ThinkPad P1 Gen 7 is also more portable than many other workstations. It weights just 4.3 pounds, while many similar laptops weigh over 5 pounds.
The only area where the ThinkPad P1 Gen 7 really lags is display quality. The display is perfectly fine for everyday work tasks, but is noticeably less vibrant and color-accurate than most other workstations.
See our full Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 7 review.
Best foldable ThinkPad
The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold is a rarity among laptops, and while its unique foldable design might become commonplace with time, it's unlikely you'll find a better one on the market right now. "What is a foldable laptop," you ask? It acts as a standard laptop in its base mode, but you can detach the magnetic keyboard, unfold the display, and pop out the stand to create an easy-to-use, on-the-go desktop (or a massive tablet)
If you're thinking, "I don't need that," then a different ThinkPad on this list will be better suited for your tastes. If the idea of a foldable laptop excites you, we highly recommend considering the X1 Fold. The model we reviewed comes built with an Intel Core i7-1260U, 32GB of RAM, 1TB of SSD storage, and a 16.3-inch OLED display at 2560 x 2024-pixel resolution. It's shockingly thin and light, coming in at just 2.9 pounds in tablet mode and 4.3 pounds with the keyboard and stand attached.
However, while we love its all-in-one use case, it's important to remember that Lenovo made a few sacrifices in its design, likely to accommodate the novelty of a foldable foundation. Its Intel Core i7-1260U processor is a couple of generations old now, and we wouldn't recommend it over other products on any other laptop.
But it still performed decently on the Geekbench 6 overall performance test, with its multi-core score of 7,953 offering enough juice to perform moderate workloads. If you view this as more of a tablet that can double as a laptop, that's outstanding performance. It's still worth remembering that other laptops are faster, though.
Its battery life is less than we'd like, coming in at 8 hours and 44 minutes in laptop mode and 7 hours and 22 minutes in tablet mode. If you can look past these flaws, it's an excellent foldable laptop and perhaps the best today.
See our full Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold 16 Gen 1 review.
How to choose the best ThinkPad laptop
Lenovo's ThinkPad line is designed for business, and while they've evolved past that in some cases over the years, you're likely looking for a solid station to get work done.
Budget: What you get for your money
You'd be hard-pressed to find ThinkPad laptops available under $500, and since these are often reserved for business professionals, you'll spend up to $1,000 or more. If you have no issue with that and are already committed to the ThinkPad brand, you can save some money with our best budget pick. If you'd like to go above and beyond, you can spend anywhere from $2,000 to $4,000 on some of our other picks.
Design: 2-in-1 or Clamshell?
More and more of today's laptops are 2-in-1s with screens that either bend back 360 degrees or detach so you can use them as tablets. If you like using your laptop in slate mode for drawing, media consumption, or just using it standing up, a 2-in-1 could be for you. We even have a foldable laptop on the list for those who want to get particularly fancy. However, you can often get better features or a lower price by going with a traditional clamshell-style laptop.
Battery Life: 9+ Hours for Portability
Battery life matters unless you plan to use your laptop only on your desk. Even in the home or office, having plenty of juice enables you to work on the couch or at the conference table without being chained to the nearest outlet. For the best portability, we recommend getting a laptop that lasts more than 9 hours on the Laptop Mag Battery Test. The longest-lasting laptops endure anywhere between 10 and 15 hours.
How we test the best ThinkPads
In order to make our best ThinkPads list, the system needs to score at least 4 out of 5 stars on our reviews and deliver on the things shoppers care about most. In our evaluations, we focus on design and comfort, display quality, the keyboard and touchpad, performance, battery life, and especially value.
Our expert reviewers also test each product to see how it looks, feels, and performs in everyday situations. Because we see so many different notebooks, we can compare each to its direct competitors and give you an idea of how it compares to the average laptop in its price band.
When we bring a laptop into our laboratory, our goal is to see how it would work if you brought it into your home or office. While we use a number of industry-standard benchmarks, such as Geekbench and 3DMark, we focus heavily on real-world tests that we have developed in-house.
To test endurance, the Laptop Mag Battery test surfs the web at 150 nits of brightness until the system runs out of juice. To judge pure processing power, we use a giant spreadsheet macro that matches 65,000 names with their addresses, a video transcoder that converts a 4K video to 1080p, and the Geekbench 5 synthetic test. We measure graphics prowess with both 3DMark Ice Storm / Fire Strike and a series of games, including Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, Metro: Exodus, Grand Theft Auto V, and Red Dead Redemption, just to name a few.
We use a colorimeter to measure screen brightness and color gamut, while other instruments help us determine a laptop's key travel and ambient heat. See this page on how we test laptops for more details on our benchmarking procedures.
Why Trust Laptop Mag
Laptop Mag reviews over one hundred different laptops every year, from paperweight ultralights to everyday workhorses to lumbering gaming notebooks that scorch the frame rates of even the hottest AAA games. We're not just experts in the laptop field, as we go one step further by meticulously testing smartphones, tablets, headphones, PC accessories, software, and even the latest in gaming.
We are 100% independent and have decades of experience to help you buy with confidence. In fact, Laptop Mag has been testing and reviewing products for three decades and continues to deliver trustworthy reviews you can rely on.
Our experienced team of writers and editors scour the available information about the laptop and put it through its paces to determine which is best for you. But before they start, the testing team subjects each system to a rigorous regimen of synthetic and real-world tests to see how a system handles the type of work and games you’re most likely to throw at it.
One of the world's largest technology publishers, Future Publishing, enforces our editorial trustworthiness. As a company, we have unrivaled experience across every tech sector — and we're the group's specialist for all things mobile tech.
