Lenovo ThinkPad T16 review: A basic business laptop that’s just good enough

Over the past couple of years, more laptops have been transitioning from 16:9 displays to a taller 16:10 format. It started with the best laptops on the market, but this aspect ratio has become more common over time, and it’s trickled down to more affordable machines. Lenovo’s ThinkPad T series is where the company’s more mainstream business laptops live, and in 2022, it was their turn to get that upgrade. The Lenovo ThinkPad T16 is the result of that transition, replacing the T15 models of the past.

The ThinkPad T16 is a fine laptop. It performs fine, even with heavier multitasking. It has a solidly-built chassis and the keyboard feels good to use. For many business users, that may be all that matters, and it’s worth considering if that’s all you need.

However, the laptop is let down by its washed-out display, which has very poor color reproduction. It’s the first time I can say I reviewed a laptop with a legitimately bad screen. I’m also not a fan of the placement of the touchpad, which messed with my productivity a lot — a particularly bad situation for a business machine.

About this review: Lenovo sent us a ThinkPad T16 for the purposes of this review and did not see the contents before publishing.

Lenovo ThinkPad T16

The Lenovo ThinkPad T16 is a mainstream business laptop with a 16-inch display and fast 12th-generation Intel Core processors. But it’s display is lacking any good color reproduction.

Lenovo ThinkPad T16: Pricing and availability

The Lenovo ThinkPad T16 was first announced at MWC 2022, and it launched in the summer. It’s now fully available from Lenovo, with a pre-built configuration and a customizable model that lets you choose the specs you want. You should also be able to get it from Lenovo’s reselling partners.

Prices on Lenovo’s website tend to vary a lot since the company is always running some kind of sale. At writing time, pricing starts at $1,055.52, and the configuration used in our review costs $1,501.92. You’ll probably be paying a different amount, though.

Design: It looks like a ThinkPad, and it feels solid

If you’ve seen any ThinkPad laptop, the T16 will immediately feel familiar. This model comes in the classic Thunder Black, though there’s also a Storm Grey version. It has the classic red accents you’d expect and features like the TrackPoint and duplicate mouse buttons. I only bring this up because I still think these elements feel outdated and ugly, but it’s not a huge deal once you’re just using the laptop for work.

Just like other ThinkPads, the build quality is solid. This model uses a mix of many different materials. The lid mixes polycarbonate, carbon fiber, and glass fiber; the keyboard and touchpad cover uses aluminum and magnesium, while the bottom cover is made from polyphenylene sulfide (PPS). The Storm Grey model actually uses different materials for the lid, which is simply aluminum, but the rest of the chassis is similar. It may not be as strong as aluminum, but the mix of materials used for the lid here still feels very sturdy, and the whole laptop has a textured feel that’s nice to the touch. It doesn’t feel as premium as more expensive laptops, but that’s only natural.

The laptop isn’t particularly thin, measuring 20.5mm, but that didn’t bother me that much. The starting weight of 3.9 pounds is decent for a 16-inch laptop but not overly light. Design isn’t a major focus for what you’d call a “workhorse” machine, as Lenovo refers to the T series.

Lenovo ThinkPads (and business laptops as a whole) are known for their great connectivity, and the ThinkPad T16 delivers, for the most part. It has a lot of ports, but the majority are on the right side, including two Thunderbolt 4 ports, one USB Type-A port, HDMI, RJ45 Ethernet (with gigabit speeds), and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Having these all packed together can make it hard to plug in multiple peripherals if they have larger plugs.

That leaves the left side of the laptop with just a USB Type-A port and a Smart Card reader, which is an optional configuration. Smart Card readers can be useful in certain organizations for identity purposes. You also have options for cellular connectivity with this laptop, though my configuration didn’t include it.

Keyboard and touchpad: It has a number pad, and that’s a problem

If you’re using a laptop for work, a comfortable typing experience should be a major priority. Lenovo’s ThinkPads always have great keyboards, and it’s no different here. Typing on the keyboard feels comfortable and there’s just the right amount of travel and resistance to make for one of the best typing experiences you can get on a laptop. That’s nothing new, but it’s good that it’s still here. The keyboard is backlit, too, and I like that the keyboard has bigger arrow keys than many laptops these days.

Because the laptop is fairly big, there’s enough space here for a numpad on the right side, which is useful if you’re entering numbers frequently. Personally, I don’t have a ton of use for a numpad on a laptop, but I can see how it’s useful if you work in Excel spreadsheets.

Typing on the keyboard feels comfortable and there’s just the right amount of travel and resistance to make for one of the best typing experiences you can get on a laptop.

The problem is this creates a very uneven design, which is exacerbated by the fact that this is a ThinkPad. The rest of the keyboard has to be pushed to the left, and along with it, so is the red TrackPoint in the middle. And with the TrackPoint, the mouse buttons and touchpad have to move, too, so the touchpad is not in a centered position. In fact, it’s quite far from it. I often found myself right-clicking on items because I thought my hand was on the left side of the touchpad, which is where it would normally be on any other laptop. It wasted a lot of my time, and that’s not great for a productivity-focused laptop.

The touchpad itself feels good, though. The surface of the touchpad is extremely smooth, and it feels great to move my fingers on it. Even with the mouse buttons above the touchpad, it’s fairly spacious thanks to the large overall design. Aside from the position, I have no complaints about the touchpad here.

Display: It’s simply not good

Easily the biggest downside of this laptop is the display. To be clear, Lenovo offers a few configuration options, and this is the entry-level model, but it’s not great. Colors look lifeless and washed out, making for a bland and simply inaccurate display. Putting this next to my (relatively affordable) desk monitors illustrates just how bad this screen is. While it’s fine for just typing and text-based work, that’s all it’s really good for.

Other display options can get brighter, have better colors, offer touch support, and even have a higher resolution. If you’re keen on getting this laptop, you should definitely consider upgrading. This configuration is very hard to recommend.

Colors look lifeless and washed out, making for a bland and simply inaccurate display.

Lenovo claims this panel covers 45% of NTSC, and that seems to be accurate. I got 46% on my tests, as well as 64% coverage of sRGB, and 48% of Adobe RGB and DCI-P3. Those are the worst scores I’ve seen for any laptop I’ve reviewed, even the One Xplayer Mini Pro handheld.

As for brightness and contrast, the Lenovo ThinkPad T16 does get a bit brighter than the advertised 300 nits. In my measurement, it went over 340 nits at full brightness.

Like other Lenovo laptops I’ve tried, the brightness settings aren’t even, so if you set the brightness to 75% in Windows, you’ll only reach about half of the maximum brightness of the panel. That only means you may have to turn the brightness higher, so it’s not a big deal.

Above that display sits a webcam, and this configuration comes with a 2.1MP sensor that supports 1080p video. That’s very welcome in a more mainstream laptop, even though it’s not the best webcam around (that’s reserved for HP’s laptops). However, Lenovo does ship this laptop with the Lenovo View app, which gives you some additional image settings to help you look a bit better. It can really help make the picture more vivid, which is great because the default settings are a bit washed out.

Performance and battery life: Good enough for work

Like many business laptops launched in 2022, the Lenovo ThinkPad T16 is powered by 12th-generation Intel Core processors, and my review unit specifically has a Core i7-1270P processor with vPro. There are also options for discrete Nvidia graphics, though mine doesn’t have that. This model also has 16GB of RAM (you can go up to 48GB) and a 512GB SSD.

In real-life usage, performance has generally been very good, and that’s what you’d expect from this kind of processor. I usually work with multiple browser tabs open, along with many other apps, including some occasional photo editing, and the ThinkPad T16 handled it all just fine, so there are really no complaints on that front. Sure, there are 13th-generation processors being launched now, but they don’t seem to offer a huge boost in performance, so this is still very good.

Looking at benchmark scores, I did get some results that are a bit below what I’d expect from this processor. Most laptops with the same processor, or even with a Core i5, seemed to offer better raw performance, though that wasn’t always consistent.

Lenovo ThinkPad T16 Intel Core i7-1270P

1,504 / 1,407 / 1,774 / 1,119

1,442 / 1,340 / 1,632 / 1,238

1,536

While Geekbench 5, Cinebench R23, and 3DMark Time Spy showed significantly lower scores for CPU performance, PCMark 10 was a win, and that’s a slightly better indicator of overall performance. Either way, real-life performance matters the most, and everything ran smoothly during my time with the ThinkPad T16.

In real-life usage, performance has generally been very good, and that’s what you’d expect from this kind of processor.

The ThinkPad T16 unit Lenovo sent me also comes with a large 86Wh battery, though the default configuration is only 53Wh. My battery testing includes a standardized test, playing a 720p YouTube video with both volume and brightness set to 50%. In that test, the ThinkPad T16 lasted almost 10 hours and 36 minutes, which is very good. In real life, my results usually hovered around six hours, with the display brightness set to 50% and all display power-saving features disabled. The most I got was seven hours, and the worst result was four hours and 16 minutes on a day when I spent a lot of time on a video call. That result was definitely an outlier, and you can expect about six hours fairly consistently.

Should you buy the Lenovo ThinkPad T16?

You should buy the Lenovo ThinkPad T16 if:

You shouldn’t buy the Lenovo ThinkPad T16 if:

In many ways, the Lenovo ThinkPad T16 is a good laptop. The build quality is solid and in line with what you’d expect from a ThinkPad, the keyboard is great, and it has good performance and battery life. However, that poor display and the placement of the touchpad make it hard to recommend as a laptop that costs $1,500. Of course, you can upgrade, but the configuration we reviewed has some serious shortcomings.

Lenovo ThinkPad T16

The Lenovo ThinkPad T16 has 12th-gen Intel processors and a 16:10 display, which is unfortunately let down by its poor color reproduction.