More Mobile: Problems in Paradise (Premium)

The problems first began in the summer, I think: I had moved the review unit Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 10) into my home office and was using it while docked to the HP Conferencing Monitor and its built-in USB hub. But things started getting wonky, with weird performance issues, especially with browser tabs. It was so bad, I eventually moved on to the next review laptop, hoping that the issue was with the laptop. But subsequent laptops experienced the same problems.

Today, about three months into this ordeal, I’m not sure what to say, given that I’ve spent a lot of time and effort trying to eliminate potential culprits.

As noted, it wasn’t the original review laptop since I’ve now had this issue across multiple laptops. It’s not the USB hub in the HP Conferencing Monitor, since I’ve experienced this strange problem with three different hubs, two USB-C-based and one a Thunderbolt 4 dock. And it’s not the web browser, which was an initial worry, come to think of it. I was using Brave, my preferred browser, when this first happened, but I’ve now experienced the same issue with both Chrome and Edge, the latter of which I’m temporarily punishing myself with so I can write about it for the book. (I suppose it could be Chromium-related? Hm.)

It’s also not related to an external display … probably.

I say that because, while I had been using an external display (the HP Conferencing Monitor) since March, that’s the only external display I’ve used—beyond for a few short experiments with USB-C-based portable displays—in the past year. I do still have the external display I had been using before my switch to a More Mobile setup, but haven’t tried that yet. I’m curious to see whether connecting to that over HDMI will make a difference. For some reason.

I do have a theory, however. But I want to be careful not to go down that misguided path that so many people with theories succumb to (meaning, I want to be open to the real answer, not just the possible answer that popped into my head). And it’s related to something that’s been bothering me all year long: I don’t trust that Intel’s 12th-Gen chipsets work properly.

I write that based on reviewing laptops for well over 20 years, and after having had several 12th-Gen-based laptops come through my home this past year. There’s just something wrong there, something I don’t see any other reviewers—like, any other reviewers—mentioning at all. And in my brain, I tie these issues to Intel’s switch from its traditional processor architecture to a so-called hybrid architecture with multiple performance and efficiency cores. This design will of course make sense in the long run, but my guess—my gut feeling based on using so many of these machines—is that the 12th-Gen chipset, which is the first mainstream Intel chipset family to use this new architecture—isn’t quite right.

If you were to go back in time one, two, or three years and look at any 12 laptops I reviewed in that year, you’d see roughly the following mix: 10 Intel-based PCs, one AMD-based PC, and one Qualcomm-based outlier. Of those 10 Intel-based PCs, nine were based on a 15-watt U-series part, and the other would be a higher-wattage outlier, usually an H-series. That’s been the mix, pretty much, for years.

This year, everything changed. With Intel, that is: now, most of the review laptops I’ve gotten have been 28-watt P-series chips, a type of chip that never existed before this year. The P-series chips sit midway between the 15-watt U-series chips, which are now much, much less common, and the 56-watt H-series chips, which are, oddly, a bit more common than before. But the new P-series chips are everywhere. P-series in the new U-series.

My theory is that the shift to a hybrid architecture made the U-series chips less viable, meaning that they are not as powerful as previous-generation U-series chipsets. And so many PCs that would have otherwise gone with U-series chips are now using P-series chips instead. These chips compromise battery life for performance, but they allow PC makers to claim year-over-year gains in the latter. Otherwise, we’d have a situation where maybe the battery life was the same but performance was down some low double-digit percentage YOY.

And no one wants that in any reviews. Plus, it would all point back to Intel: what the heck is going on with this firm? Well, I think I know. It’s making a transition to a new Arm-like hybrid architecture, and this first (mainstream) outing isn’t quite there. Maybe the 13th-Gen chips will solve these problems, or make them slightly less bad. Or maybe we just get used to it. Looked at cynically, only Intel could raise the average wattage of its mainstream chipsets in a time in which it is finally moving to be more efficient overall.

There are precedents for this. In the U.S. car industry, for example, car makers have often floating smaller, more efficient vehicles that no one was ever going to buy so that they could lower their average mileage numbers and keep selling the giant SUVs that everyone really wanted. Today, Intel can probably claim that its efficiency average is way up, but it’s a fact that PC makers are suddenly shipping more devices with 28-watt chipsets in PCs than the more efficient 15-watt chipsets that preceded them. They’re everywhere. And they did not even exist a year ago.

It is very important to understand that this is a theory. As noted, I’ve seen no other reviewer question what’s happening with Intel’s 12th-Gen chipsets. I’m alone on this one, but then I don’t rely on benchmarks, benchmarks that can be artificially targeted by chipsets much like Volkswagen used to target the emissions testing equipment that would have otherwise told us that its diesel engines were an environmental disaster. Even the obvious and negative battery life byproduct isn’t seen because so many reviewers rely on video looping “tests” that, like performance benchmarks, mean almost nothing compared to real-world usage and experience.

Also, it’s possible that some 12th-Gen issues have eased up over time. The first several such laptops I received this year had weird issues right out of the box, but that seems to have fixed itself. And I’ve reviewed at least one U-Series laptop that performed just fine for the duration. Driver updates? I don’t know. All I can do is report on I what I see.

And I need to get work done. I have podcasts to record, regularly, and one of them requires screen recording, and I can’t afford to have my system hang every time I close a browser tab. (During last week’s Windows Weekly, I literally left all my tabs open until we went to commercial, and then slowly closed as many as possible. This gets tedious.)

It’s also important to know that I will be testing my theory. In fact, I’m doing it right now by using an AMD Ryzen-based laptop with the HP Conferencing Monitor. So far so good, with no browser tab issues, but that’s not enough. I need to test other components, like that external display, and I have a second Thunderbolt 4 dock I can try as well. I’ve introduced external USB-C webcams over this time period, for example, three of them. It could be Windows 11 for all I know. There are so many variables.

But I do know this: the More Mobile setup I used successfully for at least 9 or 10 months is suddenly feeling pretty shaky. And while I have theories, I really don’t know why yet. It’s something I’ve already spent a lot of time on. And something I will continue to test until I know exactly what’s wrong.