Watch: We opened up Lenovo’s uber-repairable ThinkPad at CES 2026

CES 2026 is in full swing and there’s a surprising amount of cool stuff on the show floor, and it’s all pretty exciting even with high memory prices and uncertain availability throwing cold water on the party. Laptops in particular are turning heads, but there’s one trend that caught the attention of PCWorld’s Adam Patrick Murray: repairability.

In a hands-on live-on-the-floor video, Adam shows how easy it is to user repair the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 14 Aura Edition. He starts by tearing down the demo unit and removing the backplate for immediate access to the internals. The battery, SSD, and even USB ports are easily swapped out—and not only that, the laptop can be flipped over to pop out the entire keyboard. All of it is simple to replace.

Everything is held together by Lenovo’s new magnesium-based Space Frame, which improves upon past designs with its focus on user-accessible parts. The one big downside here is soldered RAM, which is a huge bummer if you want to level that up later. But, to be fair, Lenovo is leaning into user repairs, not user upgrades.

Overall, it’s nice to see Lenovo move in this direction with its latest ThinkPad, as user repairability has sort of fallen by the wayside in recent years (aside from Framework). And all of it’s here without sacrificing battery capacity, cooling power, or anything else. It’s a significant shift from just last year when Lenovo laptops got an F for repairability.

That said, it is a ThinkPad, so it’s a business-oriented machine and the repairability is primarily designed for IT managers in large-scale organizations. But it’s a step in the right direction and it’d be great to see this trend extend into the consumer space soon. If nothing else, it’d help with the e-waste problem with laptops.

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