Lenovo - Yoga Slim 7x - Copilot+ PC - 14.5" 3K 90Hz OLED Touch-Screen Laptop - Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 2024 - 16GB - 512GB - Cosmic Blue

I have posted a video review on Youtube under the same name as this written review. Please head over there to see this laptop in action, otherwise continue reading for written review. :) The Yoga Slim 7x is the latest premium ultrabook from Lenovo and is a MacBook Air competitor and boy does it rival one of Apple’s finest laptops in every way shape and form! I have owned an M1 MacBook Air for nearly three years now and this Yoga Slim 7x has left me dumbfounded, in awe and even considering switching back to Windows. Let’s discuss everything great (and a few bad) about the Yoga Slim 7x! Firstly, the overall design of the Yoga Slim 7x is (subjectively) beautiful. I appreciate the simplistic brand placing on the lid and palm rest. The color of the laptop stands out in being a deep cosmic blue, rather than grey or black. Although, I would love this in a white color option, but it would be (even) more difficult to clean. The Yoga Slim 7x is crafted from a plastic polymer, which allows it to be lighter, however the surface of this material is prone to smudges! You’ll need to keep a microfiber cloth handy, because you’ll be wiping it down multiple times a day if you like to keep things tidy. My favorite thing about the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x is the screen. It literally does everything well and is the shining star of this laptop. It’s a 14.5” 2944x1840 resolution (3k) glossy touchscreen display. It is HDR-capable with 1000nits brightness and even has a 90Hz refresh rate! But best of all, the panel is an OLED panel, which means you get deep, inky black levels! This helps boost the overall contrast and allows colors to absolutely pop! Trust me, once you go OLED, you’ll never go back. And this screen is giving me second thoughts of going back to my MacBook Air. It’s truly a gorgeous screen. The panel is also a color-accurate panel with a 100% sRGB and 100% P3 ratings (according to Lenovo, I wasn’t able to test this with my spyder calibrator, unfortunately). The screen has thin bezels surrounding it and there is an extended lip at the top of the screen which I think may have been necessary for the web-camera and IR components, but it also provides a place to grip the lid when opening the laptop. Tertiarily, it gives the laptop a distinct look and makes the Yoga Slim 7x standout from their square counterparts and I think it’s a wonderful decision on Lenovo’s part. The hinge of the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x is tight and provides excellent stability when maneuvering or typing. The hinge allows the screen to open nearly 165-degrees so there’s plenty of variety for screen-placement. The only negative on the hinge is that it is too tight fort the weight of the laptop. The base of the laptop isn’t heavy enough to prevent it from jumping off your desk when you try to open the lid, and it requires two hands to open. Internally, is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XElite X1E78100 12-Core (3.40 GHz) Processor. This is an ARM-based processor and it’s extremely impressive. Not all programs (mainly games) utilize ARM-based processors to their fullest, however with my testing (premiere, photoshop and gaming) it left me in awe. This processor will handle whatever you throw at it and do so quietly and without any slowdown. The Snapdragon XElite processor has Qualcomm’s Adreno integrated GPU and it performed admirably while gaming, but it mainly depended on the game and if the developer’s had optimized the game for ARM-processors. Ori and the Blind Forest ran beautifully at 83fps, while an older game like Bioshock infinite ran at a measly 42fps. Uncharted: A Thiefs End didn’t launch at all! For games optimized for the XElite, it will provide a solid gaming experience, but this laptop wasn’t curated for gaming, so don’t expect it to perform as one. The integrated GPU will be useful for content creators however. Both photoshop and premiere ran without any issues and I was able to edit 4k video. There was some minor slow-down when effects or graphics were integrated, but that was to be expected. With a little patience, you can get the job done with this laptop. The keyboard on the Lenovo is another star. It’s a full-size, backlit keyboard and the keys have great travel (1.5mm!!!). Each keycap is large, but not overly so; There is a lot of surface area to mash the key while not being unobtrusively so, allowing you to be efficient and effective while typing. It really is an awesome keyboard and it just feels wonderful with each stroke. They’re quiet too. I normally type pretty aggressively (sorry co-workers and random guy next to me on the red eye!) and some keyboards emphasize that with the type of switch they utilize. The switches on this keyboard are fairly quiet while maintaining a satisfying click. It’s extremely impressive and something I noticed immediately. One last thing on the keyboard. The backlight doesn’t have it’s own dedicated key on the function row. You have to hold down the function button and press the space bar to change the lighting. There is 3 levels of lighting options: low, high or none at all. There is a fourth option, auto, which is where I leave it at and it suited me fine across my time with the Yoga Slim 7x. The trackpad looks and feels like it was designed by Apple. It’s large, ultra-responsive and I never thought of it once while using the laptop, which is probably the highest compliment I can give a trackpad. Not once, did my palms activate the trackpad while typing and it always was responsive to any gesture I threw at it. The only non-apple thing about it is the trackpad is using a hinge-style click mechanism, rather than haptic feedback. Overall it feels wonderful to click and I think you’re really going to love interfacing with this laptop. The speakers are configured in a 4-speaker array. Two are top-facing speakers (housed under the speaker grills adjacent the keyboard) while the other two are configured under the laptop. The two speakers on the base of the laptop are oriented in a manner to provide dimensionality rather than extension. By this I mean, instead of opting for a tweeter and subwoofer configuration, Lenovo added two extra speakers on the bottom to add spatial awareness to music. All four speakers play the same part of the track, unless the studio mixed the song in a way to utilize stereo configuration. This was instantly recognizable when listening to a track fom Sabrina Carpenter or Billie Eilish versus Pink Floyd. Songs just aren’t mixed today like they were fifty years ago (for better or worse). This configuration allows more simulated depth to the sound, making it feel three-dimensional rather than adding actual depth to the music with a separate subwoofer. Even so, the sound is enveloping and overall, is clean and clear, including at low volumes. The mid-range is a tinge too flat while the highs can become fatiguing over time. My only complaint is there is zero bass extension or low end to speak of. It does reach an ear-splitting maximum of 81.5 db’s if you want to be a nuisance at your local coffee shop. The web-camera is awesome. The image is crisp, clear and colors are reproduced faithfully. There is no artifacts or washout anywhere. It looks beautiful and is on par with the web-cameras in Apple’s MacBook Pro lineup. Lenovo could have easily skimped on this and slapped a 720p web-camera, but they did the noble thing and included a 1080p web-camera. This is excellent understanding of your target audience from Lenovo. They know this laptop is for the student and power-user travelers, where video conferencing is crucial, so including the best possible web-camera (while maintaining a slim body) was pertinent for a successful product and they nailed it. There is also an IR sensor adjacent the web-camera and this allows for facial recognition sign-in (windows hello). This has been my preferred method of signing into a pc since the Surface Pro 3. It’s quick, effortless and works every time. Battery lasted 15 hours and 42 minutes on minimum brightness while streaming youtube. Lenovo claims a 23 and a half hour batter life. A bold claim I got nowhere near in my testing. However, the battery life on this laptop is phenomenal and it should last your entire workday without any issues or should make the perfect companion while traveling. Recharging the yoga slim 7x was quick to at 1 hour and 28 minutes. The Yoga Slim 7x is extremely thin at 12 milimeters (0.51 inches)! This makes it a portable beast, and when combined with everything else (processor, screen, etc) it becomes a portable powerhouse! However, to gain something, you have to skimp elsewhere. This elsewhere on the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x is the port selection and it is the weakest thing about this laptop. We live in a USB-C world, which is equally a wonderful and terrible thing. It’s wonderful in that we’re reaching the point of universality, but when it’s the only port on a laptop, I begin to grumble. There is three USB-type C ports on the Yoga slim 7x and you can charge or display video from any of them, which provides some flexibility. If you don’t have a usb type c hub, you’ll be relying on usb type-c to usb type-a adapters for any legacy peripherals or drives. Overall this laptop checks all the boxes (in my opinion) when you're looking for an excellent laptop. It has a gorgeous OLED HDR 90hz screen, powerful internals, excellent keyboard and trackpad and it has all-day battery life. All while being extremely lightweight! It's a special laptop!

Overall, I would say that this laptop was an excellent purchase! I was looking for a laptop for school, and initially, my choices were a Macbook Air M3 or a Microsoft Surface Laptop 7. Although both are still great in my opinion, when I saw the price and specifications on this laptop, I couldn't help but take up the offer. It has almost the exact same specifications as the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7, but since it was on a discount, it was more than $300 less! The experience I have had with this laptop has been nothing short of incredible. Here is my overview of what I have experienced: PROS: Excellent battery life: Takes only 40 minutes to charge from 30% to 80%, and that lasts the entire day for me. OLED Touchscreen Display: It's a very bright display (1000 nits HDR to my knowledge), the blacks are very accurate, and the touchscreen is so useful, especially coming from a Macbook previously. USB-C connectivity and Charging: I like how you can charge from any of the three USB-C ports on the device. USB 4.0 speeds have also been quite useful for file transfers! Sleekness and Design: This laptop is really thin, but doesn't feel brittle! The sleekness is comparable to that of premium Macbooks. I enjoy the build quality. The color is nice too. The metal build feels premium and durable. Keyboard: In my opinion, it is a really comfortable keyboard to touch type on. Daily performance: This laptop isn't slow when it comes to word processing, watching videos, and other basic tasks. The ARM chip that comes with it does a really good job of fulfilling what I need it to do. USB-C compatibility: Since this laptop uses USB-C as the standard connector, it is compatible with a lot of chargers. My charger works with my friend's Macbook, my brother's Android phone, and my audio interface, and vice versa. It is quite useful! AI features: Although I did not buy this laptop for the AI features, having Copilot and Live Captions that actively translate audio from languages like Spanish into English are really helpful for my purposes. CONS: Performance (Gaming and Music Software [DAWs]): Although this laptop has a fast chip, due to it being an ARM chip, it doesn't always run games the fastest. I mainly play Minecraft: Java Edition, which on version 1.21.1 runs extremely well and reliably as it has ARM64 compatibility (Java 17 has an ARM64-based version). However, since Minecraft 1.8.9 uses an older version of Java that doesn't have ARM64 compatibility (Java 8), it runs sluggish and slower than Minecraft 1.21.1 and newer versions, as it has to use x86 emulation. I also have experimented a bit with a DAW on this laptop, and although it works, I can't achieve having 3ms latency or less with monitoring, as the software just glitches. I am not sure if that is because of the emulation or because of the software I am using. Despite this, the performance is more than acceptable for anything else as long as you are not an avid gamer (which for me is good, because this is meant for school and work and Minecraft 1.21.1 should be more than enough for me. It provides a form of discipline!) Lack of ports: This laptop only has three ports, which are all USB-C. There isn't even a 3.5 mm headphone jack. However, this can be easily mitigated by getting a USB-C hub that gives you access to USB-A, HDMI, a 3.5 mm jack, and such. As much as it is a slight inconvenience, it isn't that bad, and the sleekness of the laptop and the speed of the ports more than make up for it in my experience. Overall, I would say that if you are looking for a laptop to buy for school or work, this laptop may be a good choice for you!

I got notice from Best Buy that my laptop is finally ready for pick up after a necessary reset. I love the laptop because of its light weight, brilliant display en the integrated AI option. I had to buy a dongle because of the Lack of usb outlets. There are only 3 usb-c outlets what is not enough for me. That is until now the only negative aspect. The 512 GB are more that enough for me, most of my data goes into a cloud anyhow. The processor if absolutely great, very fast and for the way I use the laptop more than enough. I don't play any games but use it for Office stuff. Overall I would say that this laptop is a great buy if you don't game with it.