First Click: I used an OLED laptop for two weeks and don’t know if I can ever go back

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As part of The Verge’s international team, I’m used to a certain amount of teasing about my work set-up. While colleagues in Slack dissect the pros and cons of using 30-inch external monitors in vertical orientation, or bemoan the fact that Apple and LG’s 5K UltraFine display isn’t shipping to Japan yet, I sit here with perhaps the simplest workstation I can get away with: a single 2013 MacBook Air. I have no external monitors, no second-screen tablets, and do all my work on a 13-inch display that hasn’t changed since 2010. And, until recently, I was happy. Until, that is, I tried a laptop with an OLED screen.

A coffee spill had put my MacBook Air out of commission

The laptop in question is a ThinkPad X1 Yoga, lent to me by my colleague Tom Warren after his review last month. My much-loved Air had been subject to an unfortunate run-in with a sleepy morning and a cup of coffee two weeks earlier, and had been taken away to an Apple store to await repairs. (I imagine this is like the behind-the-scenes parts of Westworld, but with Apple employees in surgical aprons hosing down mistreated MacBooks instead of mangled robots.) When Tom handed over the X1, I thought it looked pretty similar. Sure it was matte black rather than dull silver, but it was about the same size as the Air, the same weight, and had the same sort of chiclet keyboard. Plus ça change, I thought, and then I turned it on.

Now, there wasn’t a blinding flash of OLED-powered light that dropped me to my knees, but there’s no mistaking the fact that the X1 has a superlative screen. As Tom put it in his review: “That OLED display is without a doubt the star of the show here. It’s probably the main reason you’d buy the X1 Yoga, and it’s by far the best laptop screen I’ve ever used.” It makes the X1 expensive (starting $1,869) and tramples all over its battery life (I got six hours on average without a power cable and head-to-head tests show OLED drains battery faster than LCD), but boy is it vivid.