Lenovo - Yoga Slim 7x - Copilot+ PC - 14.5" 3K OLED Touch-Screen Laptop - Snapdragon X Elite - 16GB Memory - 512GB SSD - Cosmic Blue

I was very excited about these new breed of snapdragon laptops with OLED displays but I am disappointed. The design is beautiful, the dark blue color is pleasing, holding the laptop felt nice. The key board felt okay, not the best, but the bleeding lights from underneath the keys is not pleasing in the dark, the power button is in a horrible position, and the electronic camera blocker is also not good, I prefer an actual cover over the camera. The speed of the laptop is good, snappy. No heat no fan noise that I could detect. Battery life is better than intel laptops, but not as good as it is being siad, we seen better on current tablets. Here is my main issue with this laptop, now windows is the only OLED alternative to Apple laptops. That motivated me to go back to Windows. I wanted to have a laptop with an OLED display. The problem is the OLED display on these laptops is not good for watching movies. The OLED display is not color calibrated, everything looks yellow, redish and movies don't look sharp. And here comes Windows and its drivers saga, somehow in one of the powerdown shut off, the computer did an update that downloaded a driver and color management software XRITE without my authorization, I was excited and surprised, but it didn't give me any way to adjust the colors, only the option to choose different ICC profiles which didn't help the situation. I also try the windows own color calibration with no sucess either. No matter what I did, skin colors never looked natural. Apple still king when it comes to well calibrated display on all their devices out of the box with no efforts on my part. By the way, I also tried the ASUS PZ13 Proart and the Samsung Book Edge 4, they all use the same snapdragon ship, and they all share the same OLED panel display with the same situation, very yellow, very red bias colors and no way to adjust it.

Pros: design and feel, OLED screen, battery life, light weight, top value/price for the specs you get, works absolutely fine after you install required updates. Cons: would have liked to see more ports but definitely not a deal breaker. Web browsing, videos and music, doc editing, file syning to cloud was seamless. Geekbench 6 scores were 2465 single core and 13733 multi core.

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!