Lenovo X1 Fold discounted $500

Still pricey though. I wonder how well this has sold. I know of exactly one customer that purchased one (also has a Samsung Fold 3). I know he doesn’t use it as his primary system, regardless.

Lenovo’s Foldable-Screen Windows Tablet Is $500 Off | PCMag

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Probably goes without saying, but I’ve never seen one of these in the wild, and I spend a fair amount of time on airplanes.

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A while back, they were discounted all the way to $1399. I was very tempted and spent several weeks reading reviews. There were enough reports of poor performance and mediocre battery life to keep me from pulling the trigger. Also, it’s chucky. And I didn’t want to juggle yet another type of pen.

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$1399 should be “sale price” IMHO

That being said, we heard near launch that even at $2499 Lenovo was at break even on the device. Of course volume and time tend to reduce costs.

OTOH, Lenovo seems to have purchased the entire production of the panel used in the X1 as it shows as unavailable from the OEM

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You know what they say: $20M in the warehouse is better than $10M in the bank! Wait…

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So besides having literally one customer that has one, I finally saw the X1 Fold “in the wild” so to speak. It’s in the new movie “ambulance” and the EMT and doctors make use of it in several scenes.

I’ll leave it to you as to if Ambulance is a good movie. My family found it fun and entertaining, though certainly more than a bit silly.


Look what’s on sale again. My birthday is coming up and I’m sitting on a ton of amazon points…

ETA yes I got here because I was considering a duo again as a companion device for funsies.

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That’s getting tempting at that price though not quite enough yet. Now if it hit $999 my wife would be all over it

Meanwhile I’m comtemplating this purchase…

Alcoholic

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Looks like an improved version of this tablet is in the works. Lenovo’s next Thinkpad X1 Fold could have a 16.3 inch foldable display and Intel Alder Lake processor (leaks) - Liliputing Any chance the pen is EMR?

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Not if it’s lenovo. They aren’t exactly at public war, but there is some bad blood from what we hear between Wacom and Lenovo going a ways back including Lenovo’s backing of USI for Chromebooks

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So now I’m going to be major cynic for a moment. I’ve noticed in the last couple of days a flurry of articles about the new version, all saying more or less the same thing.

That this time might make this type of device “mainstream”. It just sounds way too much like the talking points we’ve from Lenovo

Hands On: Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Fold 16-Inch Is (Another!) Giant Foldable OLED PC | PCMag

And for the record. I’m neutral on this so far, though I’m always in favor of trying something new.

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I had missed your latest post here, I thought you were still talking about the discount! I had totally missed that a second version was announced. I made a thread for the new version in the “Slates and detachables” section:

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Thanks, I’ll continue my comments there as I’m almost certain that one of our customers will ask us to certify one. He bought the previous version as well.

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So, since the gen 2 is MIA, I did a bad thing.

I found a NIB gen 1 on fleabay for a steal. Even included the keyboard and pen.

One bump: seller was in Great Britain, so the charging adapter plug was Euro, but I had a spare that fit to replace the brick to the wall cord. Even including shipping, it was less than what I could find on Amazon w/o the pen and keyboard.

Unboxed it last night, but won’t have time to fire it up before the weekend. Gawd the hardware feels good, premium.

Will let you know how it goes.

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How can following one of the guiding principals of this board, new gear acquisition, ever be a bad thing? :grin:

Seriously though, looking forward to your opinions on it. That certainly is a great price and though they are a tiny group, there are some fans of the Fold in our customer base.

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Oooooooooo. I stalked listings for a while on several occassions, but could never find a deal that fit in my “budget” (as if I budget for these things). I can’t wait to hear/read your thoughts on it.

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Getting things charged. The supplied pen is the Lenovo Mod Pen (apparently no longer available from Lenovo). It is USB C rechargeable. The pen tip is softer and has a nice friction on the “plastic” (it’s not glass) of the fold screen. The manual indicates the Lenovo Pen Pro is also compatible; but be aware there are a multiplicty of pens on the Lenovo accessories page called “Pen Pro” which bear little to no resemblance to what’s shown in the manual.

Still haven’t booted it up. (Suspenseful, huh?)

Ok. Powered it up to get a black screen/BIOS looking message “Fan Error, press ESC key to continue at limited performance”. After 5 seconds on the error screen, the machine shuts down.

Since I had not yet had the chance to set anything up, the included Bluetooth Keyboard wasn’t going to connect. Dug out my old cabled keyboard, which was, of course, USB - A. The Fold only has 2 USB - C ports. Spent a while digging through my cable drawer until I finally found the correct adapter. The ESC key did in fact get me into the system, although I can’t yet determine what “limited performance” means.

Ran many Windows Updates. I had to sit right with it so that when it rebooted and produced the Fan Error message I could click ESC again. Battery reported 91% (almost 5 hours expected run time) when I started those updates. After they finished and I was running Windows Store updates, I get a low battery warning after about 2 hours.

The screen is beautiful. It does need to be at or above 60% brightness for me to be acceptable (vs. SP8 at about 40%). It does pick up fingerprints easily.

No Pairing is required for the pen.

Then I dug into the Lenovo Support site which identified the machine as follows:

  • Machine Type 20RL000YUK
  • Intel Core i5-L16G7
  • 8 GB
  • Win 10 Pro
  • 512GB SSD
  • Monitor 13.3 QXGA

Ran 15 or so driver updates and discovered the Pen drivers included Wacom WinTab.

Running the Lenovo site diagnostic troubleshooters now to see if it can pick up/remediate the Fan Error.

UPDATE: The diagnostic reports the Fan as “Not found on this device.”

Also, because the device was “sold” in Great Britain originally, it wanted to send me to the UK support page. I hope this warranty thing isn’t going to be a problem. Nothing I can do about that before Monday.

Since having to lug a mechanical keyboard around is sub-optimal, and I don’t want to over stress a system that, apparently, doesn’t have a working fan, I’m probably going to put it away until I can get something figured out.

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