When it comes to paper goods, a "pad" usually costs less than a "book," but that's not true of Lenovo laptops. While ThinkPads are elite systems for enterprise execs, ThinkBooks are more affordable machines intended for small business. In other words, if you want a 14-inch convertible and can't swing a ThinkPad X1 Yoga, you'll find the ThinkBook 14s Yoga (starts at $968; $1,079.99 as tested) a fine alternative. It offers handsome design, perky performance, plenty of ports, and an onboard stylus, all in an excellent-value package. It's impressive enough to claim an Editors' Choice award as our new favorite midrange 2-in-1.
Attractive and Affordable
The $968 base model at Lenovo.com carries an 11th Generation Core i5 processor, 8GB of memory, a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive, a full HD (1080p) touch screen, and Windows 10 Pro. Our test unit, priced at $1,079.99 at CDW, steps up to a quad-core, 2.8GHz (4.7GHz turbo) Core i7-1165G7 chip and 16GB of RAM. That's a steal considering that our Editors' Choice-winning premium convertible, the HP Spectre x360 14, was about $1,700 as tested, and business models like the X1 Yoga and Dell Latitude 9410 2-in-1 over $2,500.
Clad in Abyss Blue aluminum, the ThinkBook 14s Yoga measures 0.67 by 12.6 by 8.5 inches, a bit bulkier than the Latitude (0.59 by 12.6 by 7.9 inches) but trimmer than the more consumer-oriented Asus VivoBook Flip 14 (0.72 by 12.8 by 8.7 inches). At 3.3 pounds, it's a tad heavy to hold in your hands rather than your lap in tablet mode, but no burden in a briefcase.
The fingerprint-prone lid features a two-tone color scheme with a large ThinkBook logo. Lifting it reveals a 1,920-by-1,080-pixel display with thin top and side bezels. (Lenovo claims an 86% screen-to-body ratio.) A sliding shutter on the top edge disables the webcam. Two hinges let you flip and fold the screen back into tablet, presentation kiosk, or tent modes, with minimal wobble if you tap the display in laptop mode. Though the ThinkBook hasn't passed the MIL-STD durability tests given to ThinkPads, there's hardly any flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck.
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The power button, which doubles as a fingerprint reader, is on the right side, along with a USB 3.2 Type-A port, a microSD card slot, a security lock slot, and a niche for the stylus pen. On the left, you'll find another USB-A 3.2 port, a USB-C 3.2 port (used by the AC adapter), a Thunderbolt 4/USB4 port, an HDMI connector for an external monitor, and an audio jack.
Everything You Need, Nothing You Don't
The 720p webcam, like all but a handful of laptop cameras, is nothing to write home about; it captures reasonably bright and colorful but soft-focus and slightly noisy images. Downward-firing speakers produce somewhat hollow sound; there's enough volume to fill a small room, but bass is minimal, and overlapping tracks sound flat. Dolby Audio software lets you choose among music, movie, game, and voice presets and play with an equalizer.
The backlit keyboard lacks dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys—you pair the Fn key and cursor arrows to get those functions, and the latter are staged in an awkward, HP-style row instead of the proper inverted T. Also, the Escape and Delete keys are puny. On the positive side, the typing feel is fairly snappy and there are handy top-row shortcut keys, including two to place and hang up on conference calls. The buttonless touchpad takes a light tap to click.
Lenovo rates the screen at 300 nits of brightness, which is usually fine, but I found myself wishing I could turn it up another notch or two—backgrounds were acceptably white instead of dingy, but things looked just a bit dim and prone to reflections. Otherwise, the display is acceptable, with rich colors and decent contrast. Viewing angles are wide, and fine details are sharp.
The 4.5-inch-long stylus pen offers 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity. Lenovo says it's fully charged after being parked in its storage niche for five minutes. It skipped once or twice while I was sketching and annotating screen snaps, but it showed good palm rejection and should suffice for everyday scribbling and note-taking.
Pressing the F9 key opens an online support window for troubleshooting and upgrades. A Lenovo Vantage utility checks for updates and offers one-stop access to system settings.
Testing the ThinkBook 14s Yoga: Keeping Up With the Higher-Priced Spread
For our benchmark charts, I compared the ThinkBook 14s Yoga with four other 14-inch convertibles. Two of them are consumer models—the Lenovo Yoga 9i and HP Spectre x360 14—and two are more costly business systems—the HP EliteBook x360 1040 G7 and Dell Latitude 9410 2-in-1. The ThinkBook is the lowest-priced of the quintet. You can see their basic specs in the table below.
Productivity and Media Tests
PCMark 10 is a holistic performance suite developed by the benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). Its primary test simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that rates the speed of the unit's boot drive. (See more about how we test laptops.)
The Latitude fell just short of the 4,000 points that indicate excellent productivity in PCMark 10, while the ThinkBook led the way with 5,290—it's an ideal partner for Microsoft Office or Google Docs. PCMark 8's storage measurement is cake for today's speedy SSDs.
Next is Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video editing benchmark, in which we put a stopwatch on systems as they transcode a brief movie from 4K resolution down to 1080p. It, too, is a tough test for multi-core, multi-threaded CPUs; lower times are better.
The 14s Yoga can't crunch huge datasets or render CGI scenes like a professional workstation, but it doesn't pretend to be one; it's got more than enough CPU power for everyday operations.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and add up the total (lower times are better). The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters.
The two Lenovos and the Spectre tied for the win in this event. Photo buffs will probably want a laptop with a 4K rather than 1080p screen, but the ThinkBook is fine for image touch-ups.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
We test Windows systems' relative graphics muscle with two gaming simulations, 3DMark and Superposition. The first has two DirectX 11 subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, suitable for mainstream PCs with integrated graphics and higher-end gaming rigs respectively. The second uses the Unigine engine to render and pan through a detailed 3D scene at two resolution and image-quality settings with results measured in frames per second (fps); 30fps is usually considered a fair target for smooth animation, while avid gamers prefer 60fps or higher.
The ThinkBook landed in the middle of the pack, beating the integrated graphics of the 2-in-1s with 10th Generation processors but trailing its 11th Gen peers. Iris Xe shows a clear step up from last-gen Intel UHD integrated graphics solutions, but it didn't show as much pep in the ThinkBook as in the HP Spectre and Lenovo Yoga 9i models. It's all right for casual gaming, but is clearly built for daily productivity and streaming entertainment rather than serious 3D action.
Battery Rundown Test
After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test. (We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop into airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the Blender Foundation short film Tears of Steel—with screen brightness set at 50% and volume at 100% until the system quits.
A full day of work plus an evening of Netflix or Spotify will be no problem for the ThinkBook. It didn't last nearly as long as the Dell Latitude 9410, but 15 hours of stamina is nothing to sneeze at.
A Small-Business Success Story
The ThinkBook 14s Yoga costs a couple of hundred dollars more than our previous midrange convertible Editors' Choice winner, the HP Envy x360 13, but it offers a 14- instead of 13.3-inch display, faster performance, better battery life, and HDMI and Thunderbolt 4 ports. It also costs hundreds less than more upscale 2-in-1s with no greater productivity potential. For small-office professionals, that's a winning combination.
Lenovo ThinkBook 14s Yoga
Editors' Choice
Pros
View MoreThe Bottom Line
Priced just above $1,000 in our test model, Lenovo's 14-inch ThinkBook Yoga competes with convertible laptops costing hundreds more.
April 02, 2021 at 12:21AM
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Lenovo ThinkBook 14s Yoga Review - PCMag.com
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