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In this article, I give you my Lenovo ThinkPad T480 review with specs included. This is the Lenovo thinkpad T 480. This is no Mickey Mouse laptop can resist. This one here is your bread and butter 14-inch business laptop that doesn’t try to be the thinnest the lightest the sexiest.

Though happily the t-series has gotten slimmer has gotten lighter over time. 3.6 pounds which is one point six three kilograms. You know not superduper light. Almost twenty millimeters thick but that’s actually an improvement. But what’s so good about this what makes it not Mickey Mouse is the fact that it’s like the laptops of old that you can actually upgrade.

You can take off the bottom here undo some screws. And besides that look removable battery this has little Innova bridge battery system. They’ve been doing there for a couple years and that’s good stuff. You have an internal battery that’s 24 watt-hour and this removable one here available in two sizes.

So lots of runtime as a result. But also when you open it up there’s two RAM slots. And a relatively speaking is still fairly thin and light 14 inch but. That’s pretty rare. Then you have your usual m2 SSD slot for well an SSD drive your socket and Wi-Fi card your optional LTE Bay also AM to socket in there and a hard drive base.

So all of that stuff is kind of like old-school awesomesauce makes your IT department happy. And even makes some folks who aren’t IT folks happy. Presume on saying that you can grow into our grow beyond when you actually need to add more RAM a bigger hard drive whatever that sort of thing is.

Starts around 1050 dollars or so. So the t 480 has a relatively speaking for a thing pad fairly low starting price of a thousand and fifty dollars. That gets you not the most exciting configuration. Do that a Core i5 and these are all Intel eighth-generation quad-core 15 want you series ultrabook CPUs.

The Lenovo’s done some nice things here. Just like what the other thing pads we’ve reviewed recently where they’re giving a little extra wattage likes your powers. So they run a little bit faster than you might expect. Sort of like dell does with the XPS 13 the 9370 latest generation model.

So that model that i’m talking about the base model has a Core i5 and it has eight gigs of ram ddr4 24 inch of mega its that part’s good and if 500 gig hard drive. Hard drive it’s nostalgic, isn’t it? You don’t see that ultrabooks much. But you know some people do just need lots of cheap storage.

So I’m not really gonna make fun of that. And if you want to spend some more money you can get an m2 pcie nvme fast SSD all the way up to one terabyte in capacity. You the 256 you can get a 512 you get the idea. So you have options. That base model also has a 1366 by 768 display not even Full HD. This is the stuff the IT department buys when they hate you.

Know it’s not really this this is when when they’re budget constraint and the boss tells them okay you got an outfit 25 people with decent durable laptops that meet milspec standards are pretty thin not bad-looking great keyboards. So skimp on the display. So that’s why that option exists.

You probably want to go with the full HD display which is available in touch or non touch versions. Those are IPS displays and they’re mad. They’re all mad which is nice even the touch models and there’s like no glare on them which is a good thing.

It’s the same tiles that are use also on the t4 80s that we recently reviewed. Now that the 1080p panels themselves still don’t have such great color gamut unfortunately. The brightness is okay at 246 minutes. And that’s the same panel whether you get non touch or touch in terms of the panel ID number. You can see the metrics are on screen there.

So it’s not a horrible pound but it’s not super fantastic. But they do have a wqhd resolution that’s the 2560 by 1440 option. That’s non touch and matte but it look better that one has some somewhat better color calibration and color saturation that probably matches the standard for consumer laptops in this price point.

Which would be about full srgb and 75% of Adobe RGB. When it comes to performance here the story is pretty much the same as the x1 carbon and the t4 80s. And all the other Intel 8th gen think pads that we reviewed so far. They’re using the Ultrabook cpus inside. Which is to say they’re fast.

And Lenovo has done a very good job with cooling and also with providing a little extra watch to the CPU. They get better than average benchmarks even over time like the PC mark ain’t benchmark. Which I was tell you folks it’s one of the longer running benchmarks.

Takes up to a half an hour to complete and usually you see a graph where it goes like this. In terms of the clock speed drops edit turbo boost so much. It with this one it’s pretty much straight across the top like you’d see with a 45 mobile workstation or in gaming laptop. So that’s the good stuff there.

You got Intel you HD 620 integrated graphics. Nvidia MX 150 dedicated graphics is optional. But 2 gigabyte of RAM for me RAM for that. I it’ll give a little extra you know. It’s not concerned into a gaming laptop or anything like that. But a little bit of extra kick. And yeah if you’re playing something like Skyrim in fact you will get somewhat better frame rates because that’s not a very demanding game.

It’s kind of old but is there to give premier a little extra hutzpah of that sort of thing. We don’t have that unfortunately. Lenovo didn’t send us that model. I’d like to see what the thermals are like. But typically it’s been news than so many laptops now that are thin and light.

I don’t expect that it’s going to be much of a thermal issue going on there. One trick though lenovo wants you to buy a vpro cpu which is the slightly more expensive cpu option. It’s not technically required they just doing this because they want you to spend a little more money.

You get a obviously a larger heatsink if you do that because they’re gonna put a heatsink over the CPU and the dedicated GPU as well. Other options include a 4G LTE modem and you’ve got a fingerprint reader. Usually about 11 bucks or so on the on the deck of the laptop. You probably want one of those.

There’s a think shudder. If you get the 720p standard webcam is that little sliding door that they have on thinkpads now that well if you want to make sure you’re not being watched by anybody you can slide that shut and feel safe. But if you go with the windows hello IR camera and then you can’t get the thing shutter because I don’t want you to get in the way of you logging in using your face.

It’s also a smart card reader option unusual D TPM 2.0 with encryption on ship for that fingerprint reader and so on. So that it’s harder for anybody to hack into it. So is it business laptop they go with security they go with that milspec sturdiness for a dust for vibration for shock you know all that sort of stuff.

You can go up to 32 gigs of ram which is pretty Hardy for an ultra. Most ultrabooks top at 16 gigs of ram. You have to RAM slots they’re. Known the RAM is soldered on board. Some ddr4 24 hundred megahertz again so that’s fast ram. So that’s pretty nice.

And that makes it a little different and a little bit more of a power user machine. For those you were out there doing save virtual machines vm’s and you’re running several VMS you need more RAM to do that more than anything else. You got four cords to throw at it.

Now you’ve got the rim to throw at it too. Lastly the big selling points here are all the ports that you don’t usually see on a fairly portable 14 inch laptop anymore. Including an actual Ethernet jack built in an SD card slot that houses an entire SD card. It does not stick out in an annoying way.

You’ve got full size HDMI you have two USB 3.0 ports on here. You have the Lenovo docking connector for the latest style docking station that side mounts on there. And you have a USB C slash Thunderbolt 3 port. And the charger is USB sea-based. So you’ll have to find the splitter if you need to charge it or a dock or something like that at the same time as using those ports.

And hardware info 64 utility reports that as being four lanes. So it should be full speed all the way for that Tim. So that’s a good thing there. So it’s a nice little modern touch and again for power users. As ever it’s one of the best keyboards on the market. And all those keyboards are just so comfy.

You get better-than-average key travel. You excellent damping the whole thing just feels cushy in all the right ways. But not mushy. It’s a wonderful typing experience for those of you who do content creation via the written word. There trackpads are also quite good.

So roomy enough trackpad and Microsoft precision styled these days. And you have the NAD point eraser stick pointer with its own little dedicated buttons too. So when the stars of the show here is a lenovo’s bridge battery system. Which sadly has disappeared from the X line with the X 280.

But still here with the T 480. If you get the T 4 80s the slimmer lighter model you did not get the removable battery. The bridge battery system likewise. The carbon doesn’t have that. So that’s the one of those little power user things that sets it apart. Slide 2 latches you remember how that was our laptops in the old days right.

And there it is the battery. So this is the smaller battery. It’s available in two different capacities. This is the 24 watt hour which is the same capacity as a 3-cell internal battery. This one obviously sits flush with the product so if you wanted to look like as slim as possible there you have it.

And Lenovo claims around 15 point 6 hours of runtime with this Plus this which is about o 48 watt-hour of battery. Which is really optimistic. Lenovo like most PC manufacturers is overly optimistic. You can also get the 72 watt hour battery which will stick out. It’ll have a hump it’ll also raise it from you would consider more comfortable typing position.

They claim up to 30 hours. Okay, that’s also optimistic. So with our battery right here our standard small size battery I’ve been getting about eight to nine hours. Which is pretty darn good. This is what the 1080p display the core i5 CPU and inside.

Core i5 raise its core i7 usually doesn’t make much of a difference when you’re talking about the same 15 1u series CPUs inside. So you can estimate that we’re probably talking 15 16 hours if you get the extended battery. But the best part is you can buy a bunch of these if you need.

If you’re on the road for a long time and you’re just away from electricity just buy several of these things swap them in as you need them. So that’s the joy of that there. All right so take the bottom cover of it ironically since this is one of the most upgradable laptops you probably would wanna upgrade it’s a little bit more annoying to get the bottom off. There’s Philips head screws are all visible.

It’s just the clips around the battery bay or a little bit tenacious. Maybe work it off and then there you have it. There is the internals right there. That’s the front 24 watt hour battery for the bridge battery system the one that’s now middle ECL inside because what we have to unscrew and take it apart to get to that battery right there. Here we have our hard drive bay.

You can recognize the cage right there for those who tinker with your laptop. So where’s the m2 SSD slot. Aha you can’t have both a hard drive and an m2 slot. Because you take that out and notice we have the SSD ml we don’t have a hard drive.

Hard drive could fit in here but what they do if you go with the m2 SSD and even pcie is they put on this little daughter card here and then they mount it into here using the hard drive bay. Crafty very crafty. So there’s that. Stereo speakers one on each side. Pretty decent sounding just like the t4 80s in fact. And we have to RAM slots both cover the little mylar.

There’s one slot and this is the other one. We have an 8 gig module in ours. We’re makings of ram total. The max would be 32 gigs if you point with 2 16 gig modules. And it’s ddr4 24 hundred megahertz ram that they’re going with here. You know their stuff would be if you want your optional 4G LTE.

That’s the slot for that right there. We don’t even have any wires in here pre-installed for that for ours. And this is your Wi-Fi card which is an Intel 82 65 a Seikh right there. And that’s our really decent-sized found there. And it is effective in terms of cooling. In terms this does not get hot to the touch nor loud.

Now we don’t have the nvidia MX 150 graphics option. Here’s our cpu under the heat sig. And the Nvidia stuff would go right over here. And the heatsink would extend over if we had that. And again they’re tying that to the purchase of a V Pro CPU. So they’re doing a little up charge there it’s not that would be an absolute technical requirement they just want to sell it that way.

So that’s the Lenovo thinkpad T 480 14-inch business ultra book available in your choice of black black or black. Some Lenovo’s are now also available in silver this is not one of them. So now you see we also have the Lenovo thinkpad T for a TS review out.

So you if you’re wondering with the differences with that slimmer one besides the fact that slimmer and lighter what the differences are you can watch that. And I will be doing a smackdown are really just not Smackdown so much as a comparison so you can figure out which of the 14-inch Lenovo ultrabooks is few. Because we have the thinkpad x1 carbon 6 gen a lot of similarities. We have this tea for a tea and the tea for a 80s. And that’s going to be coming up.