X1 Carbon: 5th Gen (2017) versus 7th Gen (2019)

I've been using an X1 Carbon for almost 3 years and recently switched to the latest model. I figured a comparison between these two could be useful for someone out there trying to decide whether to update or not. The model I got is the one with 14 inches and the following specs:

• Intel i7-8565U
• 16GB RAM
• 512GB SSD M.2

Keyboard

Nothing really changed and that is certainly good news. Remains, in my opinion, one of the bests in the market.

Battery life

With almost all of the power savings enabled on Linux (see tools like powertop) I get around 6-7 hours on the 7th Gen while I would get 4 hours max on the 5th Gen.

Performance

This is one of the aspects that impressed me the most due to the nature of what I do for work. One of the build steps for a Node.js project that used to take 2 minutes on the 5th Gen model now runs on 50s on the 7th Gen!
If you will be only browsing the web I'm not very confident that you will notice any difference from that.

Disk

Without running specific benchmarks on what is shipped on the new model I can only say that the boot times and for my daily use the SSD seems to be pretty much unchanged.

Screen

I choose the 300nit configuration (WQHD, 2560 x 1440) for the new and it's about the same quality than the previous model I had.

Build quality

I was very happy with the quality of the X1 5th Gen, with only a bit of paint wearing off on one of the edges (if you squinch you can notice it on the photo above). I will say that the 7th Gen looks a bit more sturdy and somewhat more durable. YMMV.

Miscellaneous

With the 7th Gen version I noticed a problem with the touchpad I didn't had before on Linux which would make the touchpad unresponsive only when initiating the OS after suspension. After googling for solutions I finally found something that would work for my case which was creating a file /lib/systemd/system-sleep/touchpad-fix.sh with the following:

if [ "$1" = "post" ]; then
    echo 'fixing touchpad...'
        rmmod i2c_hid ; modprobe i2c_hid
fi

Did you experienced other problems? Let me know in the comments!