At one of the deep dive sessions in Innovate ’24, Lenovo showcased to members of the media the design principle behind their new Coldfront: Hyper Thermal Solution that’s exclusive to the 2024 Legion 7i, Legion 5i, and LOQ gaming laptops. While that got us curious about how Lenovo managed to ditch the side vents and still give better thermal performance, what got more attention was the customizable keycap feature on the keyboard of the Legion and LOQ laptops.
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While it was a feature that came out since the 2022 Legion (aka Gen 7) laptops, it was only during Innovate ’24 that Lenovo was promoting it. The feature is supported by an 8-piece ceramic keycap kit that has four white keycaps and four colored (red, yellow, blue, green) keycaps. The kit came with a case that included a keycap puller and extra scissor switches in case you make a mistake of breaking them when changing keycaps–trust us, some members of the media accidentally broke these switches while trying to replace the keycaps.
While replacing the keycaps was relatively easy with the included tool, we were more intrigued by the fact that they showed to us how easy it was to replace broken scissor switches. This made us think: Legion and LOQ laptops are user-repairable to an extent as far as keyboards are concerned.
The whole idea of replaceable keycaps may be more for personalization purposes, but it brings us a step closer to Lenovo’s promise of user-repairable laptops.
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It can be recalled that they boldly promised that 4 out of 5 of its laptops will be user-repairable by 2025, and what was presented to us for the Legion and LOQ laptops shows that Lenovo is on track with that promise. Save for the likes of Framework, which has modular laptops, Lenovo is the only brand we know so far that allows users to replace keycaps–and even repair scissor switches on their own–with the keyboard of their Legion and LOQ laptops.Â
Some of the new ThinkPad laptops like the T14 series are already user-repairable, and we will not be surprised if Lenovo’s IdeaPad and Yoga laptops will get the same treatment in the future.
