Reading List

Monica Chin Reviews the New Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga from Daring Fireball RSS feed.

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.