Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x 14: A promising marriage of AI and hardware
Lenovo revealed its Yoga Slim 7x 14 laptop, which will take advantage of Qualcomm's Snapdragon Elite X processor to power its AI offerings.
Lenovo has a new line of laptops featuring Qualcomm chips, meant to handle the workload of AI tools and features while maintaining both performance and battery life. The Yoga Slim 7x 14 is the manufacturer's consumer offering, and it's shaping up to be an excellent one.
From my limited time with the laptop, I can tell you it has a relatively thin and light chassis (though the commercial offering was surprisingly lighter), yet feels sturdy. It's a portable, practical machine, which most office workers and students are sure to appreciate.
The specs are also impressive from what we're seeing right now though, depending on the final performance findings, we'll see just how much of a difference the Snapdragon CPU makes. This could be the deciding factor as to whether the Yoga Slim 7x 14 could even be one of the best laptops.
Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x 14: Price and availability
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x 14 was revealed just before Computex 2024. Hopefully, we'll find out more information about its availability in other regions once the event comes around.
For now, however, we know that the laptop is launching in the US through Best Buy and Lenovo's online store and will retail for $1,299 (around £1,020 / AU$1,960).
Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x 14: specs
The specs for the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x 14 can be seen below:
Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x 14: Design
When considering a standard Lenovo laptop, you think of the classic black color with a very squarish and practical build. But the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x 14 is a beautiful Cosmic Blue color that, coupled with its thinner and lighter form factor, makes for a stylish and sleek machine you can take on the go.
The Yoga Slim 7x 14 sports a sturdy yet light chassis and a gorgeous 14.5-inch 3K OLED display, that supports HDR 600 True Black with 1000 nits of brightness. The keyboard is lovely to type on, with wider keys that mitigate mistypes for those with larger fingers or shaky hands.
The laptop packs a 1080P FHD web camera, which is of standard quality and perfectly suited for video conferencing. Unfortunately, it's covered by an E-shutter button and not a physical one, meaning there's always a risk of someone hacking your laptop and spying on you with the camera.
The most disappointing aspect of the Yoga Slim 7x 14 was the meager port selection, which only comes with three USB Type-C ports and one combo jack. I know priority was given to the thin form factor, but it's still a letdown not having some of the basic ports on the laptop.
Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x 14: Performance
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x 14 is equipped with the Snapdragon X Elite, which not only is expected to give it unparalleled processing power according to all reports we've seen so far. Still, it will also provide the laptop with the battery power it needs to keep up with the energy-intensive AI tasks that it will be running.
According to these same reports, the Qualcomm CPU beats out Apple’s M3 and Intel’s Core Ultra 7 155H in Geekbench 6 – with 85% and 88% of the speed of the Snapdragon respectively. Its thermals are also impressive, it has great AI acceleration, and the battery life wins over similar market laptops in the local video playback testing.
Since my time with the Yoga Slim 7x 14 was limited, I couldn't perform any benchmarks myself. However, the laptop was quite speedy as I tried out various tasks like internet browsing. I also couldn't test out the AI features it comes with, which was a big selling point of the laptop. But I imagine that it'll work like most other offerings we're seeing right now.
Of course, once we get our hands on it for a review, we'll be able to fully and thoroughly test out all aspects of the laptop and see how Qualcomm's chips hold up.
Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x 14: Early Verdict
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x 14 could potentially be one of the best laptops on the market, especially in the 14-inch sector. It's a sexy and lightweight machine that comes in an appealing color, a lovely display, a speedy and powerful processor with a long-lasting battery life, and a great keyboard and mousepad combo.
My only real gripe is the abysmal port selection that many other laptops in the same market beat out. But then again, if Apple can get away with it, Lenovo most likely can too. Otherwise, it's shaping up to be a convenient and well-rounded laptop that's perfect for consumers needing a productivity or streaming machine and the price is pretty affordable as well.
It'll also be interesting to see firsthand how well AI plays with the Qualcomm chip – whether the pair will work well together and create something greater than the sum of its parts or if it'll end up clunky and disjointed.
