LENOVO ThinkBook 14s Yoga Review

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In this article, I give you my Lenovo ThinkBook 14s Yoga review with specs included. With the ThinkBook line, you’re probably familiar already, it’s the more affordable small business home buyer alternative to the more expensive ThinkPad line of laptops but you get some of the same features.

Some of the same features between ThinkPad and ThinkBook lines are the Yoga design with the garage pen, Intel 11th gen ultrabook CPUs, obviously, a touch screen, as well as pen support. Plus a few other things not to mention the body colors.

Despite the scary name that Abyss Blue is actually a fairly muted and pretty blue and ThinkBook has that kind of two-tone thing going on with the ThinkBook logo having a more of a matte look.

Lenovo ThinkBook 14s Yoga is also available in Mineral Gray in case Abyss Blue is not your thing.

So, this is a more affordable alternative to the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga for example which is quite an expensive piece but is also slimmer and lighter. In fact, Lenovo ThinkBook 14s Yoga is a little heavier than average for a 14-inch convertible. It’s about three and a half pounds which is one and a half kilograms so you’ll feel the extra weight.

It doesn’t make much of a difference to most people probably not unless you’re really looking for the super lightest carry but if you’re using it in tablet mode then you’re definitely going to want to rest it on your knee or something like that.

Inside we have Intel 11th gen Tiger Lake quad-core CPUs, which you can get with an i5 or an i7. You can get with up to 16 GB of RAM. There are two M.2 PCI-E NVMe SSD slots, one of which will be populated. So, that’s a little more expandable than average, that’s nice as well.

Lenovo’s Thinkpad Pro pen is Wacom AES technology and it’s perfectly serviceable. This sort of line of laptop pens is geared mostly towards note-takers. You could use it for some art. It’s maybe not Wacom EMR level like you would find on a Wacom Cintiq but that obviously is not the target market but it works pretty well.

Lenovo ThinkBook 14s Yoga has a touchscreen and it has Gorilla glass. And, as we often see with laptops that have gorilla glass it is glossy and glaring. It looks sort of like a windowpane in front of your display. That’s the unfortunate thing about it but it is more durable as a result.

Brightness on this they claim 300 nits for the full HD IPS display and it’s a little bit above that so that helps but you’d really need something super duper bright to counter that much in the way of reflection. So, use this indoors folks.

Something we don’t see so often on laptops anymore is a fingerprint scanner that is embedded in the power button on the side of the laptop. Since it’s a convertible they don’t put it on the keyboard yet because you might be using it in some orientation where that’s just not easily accessible. And, it works okay.

You have a webcam privacy shutter. No Windows Hello IR camera here. That would add to the cost and they are trying to keep the cost low. I’d say it’s fair enough.

The keyboard on this is decent enough. It’s pretty low travel, it’s not super springy, I might like it to be a little firmer a little crisper. I had no trouble typing on it and typing well but it just wasn’t the most delightful tactile experience. This is not a high-end ThinkPad laptop and the keyboard makes it obvious. And, it has white backlighting for the keyboard.

You got a fairly large Microsoft precision trackpad. There is no nav point stick pointer on this for those who are really fond of that.

In terms of performance, it’s an ultrabook. Core i5 or Core i7 are options. I have the Core i7 and it’s going to perform well enough for things like your Office, your zoom calls, if you’re doing some Photoshop work all that sort of thing. Obviously, it’s not a mobile workstation-class, this is not meant for Blender.

Lenovo ThinkBook 14s Yoga has Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics which is pretty good for integrated graphics but it’s not a gaming laptop either, you get the idea.

Uh performance numbers were where we expected them to be. They were just fine. Heat is well managed. It has a larger than average fan and a two pipe heatsink. So it’s a little bit beefier and that does help it to run cool and you don’t really hear that fan very much. So that is well done.

As a practical small medium business or a home user kind of laptop should be we have plenty of ports on board. We have a thunderball 4 port we have a usbc 3.2 gen 2 port as well 2 usba an hdmi 2.0 b micro sd card slot yay and a headphone jack as well.

There’s no 5g option on this or 4g lte but you do have wi-fi six which is an intel ax201 card with bluetooth 5.1. This has two 2 watt harmon branded speakers and they are louder than average for a 14 inch laptop certainly. But despite that they still managed to sound a little bit like somebody speaking down the hallway if you know what i mean.

A little muffled and a little tinny. So loud yes great quality not so much. You have two microphones on board and your average 720p webcam as well. So let’s talk about the pricing because this is confusing and it’s still covered times and laptop prices can go haywire.

When this first launch it was supposed to be closer to the thousand dollar mark. Currently, it’s like 1350 to 1650 on lenovo’s website. But if you look around at other retailers which i strongly suggest you do if you don’t want to spend that much money.

As staples has the base core i5 with 8 gigs of ram and a 256 gig ssd for around 950 dollars. And our configuration which is a core i7 of 512 gig ssd and 16 gigs of ram is priced around 115 at b h photo video to give you an example.

So if you’re interested in this do shop around. I mean obviously at lenovo’s current prices it’s not sufficiently cheaper than an x1 yoga to make you jump ship just to save some money. We have a large battery for a 14 inch ultrabook inside. It’s 60 watt-hour and you get a 65-watt fast charger.

But somehow that didn’t translate into superb battery life given that it’s just a full hd resolution display in your standard ultrabook cpu. It’s kind of weird there’s no intel evo certification here or anything like that. But for us with 150 nits of brightness for the display light computing kind of work.

Again like office some zoom calls maybe a little bit of photoshop that sort of thing thrown in i was getting seven to eight hours. And Lenovo only claims something like eight and a half hours. And you know manufacturers claims tend to be pie in the sky. They’re actually closer to accurate here.

So obviously with more aggressive power management you might get better battery mileage. But also if you’re doing more heavy tasks then you might get worse. So it’s okay not great when it comes to battery life despite that chunky battery.

When it comes to expandability we’ll take a look at the internals in a moment. But kudos to Lenovo for at least giving us one ram slot. It has eight gigs soldered on board and you can put a standard ddr4 so dim into the dim slot if you want to bring it up to dual-channel or decrease the amount of memory.

And we have two rather than one m.2 SSD slot. All right to get inside torx t5 screws they are all visible. And then the guitar pick to pry it off. It’s got some pretty strong clips probably from the back first. And most of the screws are captive on this.

The ones in the front are shorter remember that when you put it back together though they are captive so you probably won’t be losing track that’s what the underside looks like aluminum. And here are the internals 60 watt-hour battery right here. Our speakers flanking on the sides.

Our single ram slot lives under this cover right here the heat shield. So you just pry that up and then there is the ram right there. So we have a 16 gig model so it has eight gig soldering on board no matter what you’re gonna get that eight gig solder on board and right here the additional 8 gig modules so we have dual channels 16 gigs of ram.

Here’s our wi-fi card intel ax 201 it’s a wi-fi 6 card. There is no 4g 5g option on this more soho-oriented model versus the thinkpad line. Pretty good cooler with two heat pipes over here and a fairly large fan. Which is surprising given this your standard ultrabook with uh intel iris xc graphics but we never say no to more cooling.

And something that’s a little unusual here two m.2 ssd slots. So you’re going to get it with one boot ssd here they’re using a half height drive which benchmarked pretty well. But there is room for a full height here they have just a cover to take it up. And then there’s a second slot right here.

So if you want to put in a second ssd you could do that nice. So that’s the Lenovo thinkbook 14s yoga. So it’s a convertible that’s well-built sturdy aluminum casing all the things you’d expect from Lenovo which is the garage pen. Pretty good software for security and all that sort of thing.

Um, the pricing is really going to be key in where you find it because obviously, this is something that you’re going to buy because you don’t want to spend the money on the thinner lighter sexier models right. So at retailers it’s a go if you’re buying from Lenovo and you’re going to spend 1500 bucks or more on this then it might be a tougher sell.

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Lenovo ThinkBook 14s Yoga
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