Monica Chin Reviews the New Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga

Monica Chin, writing for The Verge:

My unit, currently listed for $2,369, has a Core i7-1260P with eight efficiency cores and four performance cores (as well as 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage). Unfortunately, that new processor doesn’t deliver the kind of performance gains I imagine many X1 Yoga users will care about — but it does lead to a decrease in efficiency that I think harms its outlook overall, especially compared to laptops from Apple. That may be an Intel problem rather than a Lenovo problem, but it is a problem all the same. [...]

For things like document markup, presentations, word processing, and video calls, I never got any heat or heard any fan noise — even on the Battery Saver profile, with 15-ish tabs and apps running in the background.

Unfortunately, I am going to have to say the dreaded sentence: I wasn’t impressed with the battery life. I got an average of six hours and 13 minutes out of this device at medium brightness — and while I sometimes saw the device break seven hours of continuous use with lighter workloads, it died after close to four and a half in other trials.

Intel’s chip offerings are clearly to blame, but that very much is a Lenovo problem. A huge problem, really. ThinkPads are supposed to be top-tier industry-leading laptops. It’s a proud brand with a great history. But now they’ve released a $2,400 notebook that gets crap battery life and only stays cool and quiet when you stick to basic productivity tasks.

Intel’s performance-per-watt problems have been obvious for years, as has Apple’s custom silicon performance-per-watt prowess. None of this is the least bit surprising.

Sidenote in My Continuing Series of Observing PC Hardware Being Graded on a Curve: Chin describes the 14-inch 1920 × 1200 display as “nice” and it goes into the “Good” column. But that’s just 162 pixels per inch. MacBook Air displays are 224 PPI. MacBook Pros: 254 PPI. iPad Pros: 264 PPI. The 2007 original iPhone had a 162 PPI display. This ThinkPad display is “nice” only if you have a time machine and carry it back to before retina displays became the norm.

★ Wednesday, 19 October 2022