A splendid but spendy business convertible

Lenovo's updated ThinkPad X1 Yoga is a state-of-the-art corporate 2-in-1 convertible laptop—for companies that can afford it.

Fourteen-inch business laptops are the foundation of corporate mobile computing, and convertible models add extra flexibility for presentations and pen-input tasks like document markup. (Drawing and sketching aren't enterprise priorities.) The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 7 (starts at $1,589.40; $2,456.99 as tested) is a first-class example with a fine keyboard, a 12th Generation Intel CPU, and plenty of ports in a compact chassis. Its only negative is that business laptops cost a lot more than consumer models—even elite ones like Lenovo's own Editors' Choice-award-winning Yoga 9i Gen 7, another 14-inch convertible. It rings up at about $700 less, with a sharper OLED panel versus our ThinkPad's IPS screen.

Though clad in gray aluminum instead of matte black, the X1 Yoga Gen 7 is a ThinkPad through and through, from its MIL-STD 810H certification against the bumps and bruises of travel to the TrackPoint mini-joystick centered in its keyboard. Like a growing number of notebooks, it swaps the familiar 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio for a slightly taller 16:10 display. Our unit's touch screen offers 1,920-by-1,200-pixel resolution, though a 3,840-by-2,400-pixel, 500-nit OLED panel is optional.

The aspect ratio helps keep the X1's size down to a trim 0.61 by 12.4 by 8.8 inches—taking it out of the box, I could easily have mistaken it for a 13.3-inch laptop. Another 14-inch business 2-in-1, the Asus ExpertBook B7 Flip, also has a 16:10 screen but is a bit bulkier at 0.74 by 12.6 by 9.2 inches, though barely heavier at 3.15 to the Lenovo's 3.04 pounds. 

The $1,589.40 base model on Lenovo.com combines a Core i5-1240P processor with 8GB of memory and a 256GB solid-state drive. Our review system, $2,456.99 at CDW, steps up to a Core i7-1260P with 12 cores—four performance cores and eight efficient cores—and 16 threads plus Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics. It has 16GB of RAM and a 512GB NVMe SSD along with Windows 11 Pro, Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth. IT managers can specify Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs with Intel's vPro management technology.

The system feels impressively strong, with no flex if you grasp the screen corners or wobble if you tap the display in laptop mode. The bezels are thin on either side of the screen and thicker above (home of the webcam with sliding shutter) and below. An optional webcam has both IR face recognition and what Lenovo calls Computer Vision proximity sensing. Ours has neither option, but the power button doubles as a fingerprint reader for Windows Hello logins.

The laptop's left side holds two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports, either of them usable by the AC adapter for charging, along with an HDMI video output and USB 3.2 Type-A port. Another USB-A port joins an audio jack, a security lock notch, and a niche for the stylus pen at right. A SIM card for 4G LTE mobile broadband is optional.

The webcam offers 1080p instead of the usual lowball 720p resolution. It ranks well above average, capturing well-lit and noticeably sharp images with good color and no noise or static, even in not-too-bright environments. A Lenovo View utility lets you tweak brightness, color, and intensity to look your best during video calls. 

Speakers flanking the keyboard produce loud but somewhat hollow sound. Bass is minimal, but you can make out overlapping tracks. Dolby Access software provides music, movie, game, voice, and dynamic presets and an equalizer. The familiar Lenovo Vantage program (dubbed Commercial Vantage on business systems) centralizes system info and updates, shortcut settings, and Wi-Fi security.

The backlit keyboard is the ThinkPad X1 Yoga's main advantage over the Yoga 9i, with cursor-arrow keys arranged in the proper inverted T instead of an awkward row, and dedicated keys instead of Fn-arrow combinations for Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down. Top-row shortcuts include placing and ending conference calls, as well as adjusting brightness and volume. 

The keyboard is shallow, but it offers a quiet, snappy typing experience. The three large buttons below the space bar technically belong to the TrackPoint cursor controller, but they work fine with the smallish touchpad, which glides smoothly and has a comfortable click.

The touch screen is reasonably bright and vivid. Colors don't pop, but they do look rich and well saturated, and fine details are clear. Viewing angles are broad, and white backgrounds are clean instead of dingy or grayish. The skinny swizzle-stick digital stylus is about 4.5 inches long with two tiny buttons; it kept up with my fastest swipes and scribbles with good palm rejection.

For our benchmark charts, we compared the ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 7 to its business rivals, the Asus ExpertBook B7 Flip and the 15.0-inch Dell Latitude 9520 2-in-1. Two high-end consumer convertibles, the 14-inch Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 7 and the 15.6-inch Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro 360, rounded out the field. You can see their basic specs below.

Unfortunately, the X1 Yoga balked at our primary office performance test, UL's PCMark 10, which simulates workaday apps like word processing, spreadsheeting, and videoconferencing. This is likely due to a software glitch, and doesn't necessarily reflect poorly on the laptop's performance for everyday tasks. It did, however, run PCMark's Full System Drive storage throughput benchmark.

Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). 

Our final productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The ThinkPad performed capably in our processor and Photoshop contests, though it trailed its Yoga 9i stablemate with the same CPU. The Asus and particularly the Dell were relative underachievers. 

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). 

We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

The X1 Yoga landed in the middle of a lackluster pack in these tests; like other laptops with integrated graphics rather than discrete GPUs, these convertibles aren't built for playing the latest games. Their after-hours pastimes are limited to casual gaming and streaming media. 

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window) ) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

The ThinkPad proved to have the best of the three IPS screens, though it couldn't match the vivid colors of the OLED Yoga 9i and AMOLED Galaxy Book2 360. It lasted an unimpressive nine hours in our first battery rundown test, but a second try raised its runtime to an admirable 16 hours, more than enough for a full day of work plus a night of Netflix.

The ThinkPad brand is deservedly famous for top-notch design and quality, and the X1 Yoga Gen 7 is fully worthy of the name. It's a temptingly compact yet capable corporate 2-in-1 laptop that rates half a star below its civilian sibling, the Yoga 9i, simply because of its price premium. Yes, it has a nicer keyboard and MIL-STD 810H sturdiness, but our test unit isn't even a vPro configuration and lacks the high-res OLED display. Traveling execs will be delighted with it, but it doesn't come cheap.

Lenovo's updated ThinkPad X1 Yoga is a state-of-the-art corporate 2-in-1 convertible laptop—for companies that can afford it.

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I was picked to write the "20 Most Influential PCs" feature for PCMag's 40th Anniversary coverage because I remember them all—I started on a TRS-80 magazine in 1982 and served as editor of Computer Shopper when it was a 700-page monthly. I was later the editor in chief of Home Office Computing, a magazine that promoted using tech to work from home two decades before a pandemic made it standard practice. Even in semiretirement in Bradenton, Florida, I can't stop playing with toys and telling people what gear to buy.

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