ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 vs ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED: Is the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Worth £550 More?
ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 or ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED? We compare price, measured performance and real-world trade-offs to work out which is the better buy.
Tom Halvorsen
The short answer
ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 11h 30m mixed use, ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED 12h 10m mixed use — the same test, run the same way. Where they part company is who they suit: the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 is the one to get if you are people who type for a living, the ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED if you are Windows users who want the MacBook Air experience.
Price difference: The ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED undercuts the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 by £550. That gap only matters if the extras below are ones you will actually use.
Specifications side by side
| Specification | ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 | ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED |
|---|---|---|
| Price | £1649 | £1099 |
| Our score | 4 / 5 | 4 / 5 |
| Display | 14in IPS, 1920 x 1200, 60Hz | 14in OLED, 2880 x 1800, 120Hz |
| Chip | Core Ultra 7 165U | Core Ultra 7 258V |
| RAM | 32GB | 32GB |
| Storage | 1TB | 1TB |
| Battery | 57Wh | 75Wh |
| Weight | 1.09kg | 1.2kg |
| Runtime | 11h 30m mixed use | 12h 10m mixed use |
How we tested
Every figure quoted above comes from the same protocol, run on every unit in this category. This one spent two working weeks as a primary machine, on battery wherever possible. Display at 150 nits, keyboard backlight off, the manufacturer’s balanced power profile, and the same browser profile with thirty tabs restored on every machine.
| What we measure | How |
|---|---|
| Battery life | A looped workday script — document editing, video calls, browsing — run to shutdown, three times, averaged. |
| Sustained CPU | A thirty-minute all-core render, reporting the settled clock speed rather than the boost figure. |
| Fan noise | Measured at 50cm from the display hinge during that render, in a room with a 28dB floor. |
| Chassis heat | Palm rest and underside temperatures after the render, since that is where it is actually felt. |
| Display | Brightness and contrast from a colorimeter, at the panel’s native setting rather than a boosted HDR mode. |
We deliberately do not report single-core burst scores, which almost nothing outside a benchmark actually produces.
The honest caveat: Sustained figures depend on ambient temperature. A warm room costs most thin laptops several percent.
Where the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 wins
- The best keyboard on any laptop
- A full port selection including USB-A and HDMI
- Excellent Linux support
It also has the edge on the intangibles: it passes military drop testing at 1.09kg.
Where the ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED wins
- A superb OLED panel for the money
- The best battery life of any Windows OLED machine we have tested
- A full port selection
And in day-to-day use, a 3K 120Hz OLED at this price undercuts everything comparable.
The trade-offs
Neither is flawless. The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 has one clear weak point — a merely adequate display — and the ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED has its own: a shallow keyboard. Weigh those against how you actually work rather than against the spec sheet.
The value case
Both scored 4 out of 5, and the ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED costs £550 less. Unless the best keyboard on any laptop is specifically what you need, the cheaper one is the better buy and we would not agonise over it.
If neither quite fits
Look at the MacBook Air M4 at £1199 — it scored 5 out of 5 and suits students, writers and anyone who works away from a socket. If the budget will not stretch, the Acer Aspire 14 AI at £649 is the cheapest option in this category we would still put our name to.
Living with each of them
On paper the gap looks like a specification difference; in use it is a habits difference. With the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 the thing you adjust to is a merely adequate display, and you do adjust — within a week it stops registering. Its display (14in IPS, 1920 x 1200, 60Hz) is the part you stop thinking about. The ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED asks for a different accommodation: a shallow keyboard, against a display of 14in OLED, 2880 x 1800, 120Hz that holds up better than the number suggests. Neither compromise is severe. They are simply different, and which one you would rather not think about is a more useful question than which is objectively smaller.
Which one ages better
Both launched in 2025, so neither starts with a support-window advantage. The other half of ageing is the weak point you already know about: a merely adequate display on one side, a shallow keyboard on the other. Weaknesses of that kind do not improve with firmware, so assume you are buying them for the life of the device and price the decision accordingly.
Our recommendation
For most people we would take the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13, which scored 4 out of 5 in our testing against 4 for the other. That said, a score is a summary, not a substitute for knowing what you need.
Buy the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 for the best keyboard on any laptop. Buy the ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED for a superb OLED panel for the money.
Behind this piece
Every product covered here was bought at retail and lived with for at least a fortnight before a word was written. Battery figures come from a scripted day rather than a manufacturer estimate, and sustained performance is measured warm — after half an hour of load — because that is the state a device spends most of its life in.
Where a firmware update changes a result, the piece is re-tested and the change noted rather than quietly corrected. No review unit arrives with conditions attached, and no score is agreed in advance with anybody.
Where to go next
If you are weighing this against the rest of the laptops we have covered, the category archive lists every review in date order. The closest comparisons we have published are ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 vs Framework Laptop 13: Is the 2025 Model Worth the Change? and ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 vs Razer Blade 16: Is the Razer Blade 16 Worth £1250 More?.
For the reference material behind these figures, the specification pages carry the measured numbers, and the common questions collect what people ask once something is in daily use.
