Smarter chatbots, improved coding capabilities, more sophisticated video conferencing and streaming. For better or worse, 2024 is the year of artificial intelligence, and everyone is riding the wave. What started as a cool little demo a year ago has exploded, with a Copilot button sitting between the Alt and arrow keys on nearly every laptop that has arrived on my desk this year. Microsoft shows no signs of letting up on the gas as it launches its next phase of AI dominance: its Copilot+ laptops. I got to experience a tiny sample of the future on a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7, one of the first laptops to feature one of the new Snapdragon X Elite chips.
The $1,199 unit I reviewed stands out for its ultra-light, durable, and elegant chassis; its OLED display is equally as bright and sharp; and, for the first time, Qualcomm has made an effort on the performance front, coming close to matching some of the more powerful Intel-based systems.
The Yoga Slim 7 is a great mid-range laptop, with usable performance, decent battery life, and a beautiful display in a sleek package. It also comes with a generous helping of Microsoft’s AI special sauce, though it feels like it’s not being fully utilized at the moment. But if you want to dive into the world of artificial intelligence, the Slim 7 is a great choice.
However, I was totally disappointed with the battery life. The laptop lasted for more than 8 hours, which is far from the all-day duration claimed by Lenovo and Qualcomm. Moreover, the Yoga Slim 7, which runs on the ARM architecture, is unable to run some apps even using the Prism emulator. But what’s even more infuriating is that the AI experience is not that different from a regular laptop. As an AI-first laptop, I was expecting more than just the typical imaging and video conferencing effects you see everywhere.
Strong Points
- Slim and portable design
- Nice OLED screen
- Great feeling keyboard
Cons
- Battery life is disappointing
- Unimpressive AI features
Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 design
A laptop that is not only beautiful but also durable
I love big, sturdy desktop alternatives, but I’ll never give up something as sleek and elegant as the Yoga Slim 7. It’s a really nice device, with a sandblasted anodized aluminum chassis in Cosmic Blue, featuring Lenovo’s Comfort Edge design (a fancy way of saying rounded corners and edges). The laptop is beautiful in dark blue, but I find myself nostalgic for the wild days when Lenovo made laptops in Clementine Orange, when laptop OEMs weren’t afraid to paint them in all sorts of colors. But I digress.
Handbag, briefcase, bookbag, messenger bag, the 2.8-pound, 12.8 x 8.9 x 0.51-inch Yoga Slim 7 fits into almost anything. My large Telfar bag was large enough to almost encase the laptop, and I barely felt it when I went to a friend’s house. It’s perfect for the mobile professional. Despite its petite size, this laptop is MIL-STD-810H-certified for rugged build, and the Slim 7 can withstand a few bumps and dents.
But with a laptop this slim, it’s inevitable that a sacrifice or two will come along. In the Slim 7’s case, those sacrifices are ports. The laptop only has three USB-C Gen 3 ports and a physical camera shutter switch. And that’s it. If you’re still using wired headphones, this laptop isn’t for you. It’s time to invest in wireless headphones or earbuds.
Lenovo makes some of the best keyboards for gaming, and the Slim 7 is no exception. The smiley-face shaped keys with 1.5mm of key travel act like little trampolines, propelling your finger from one key to the next, and the LED backlighting is good, making the keys visible even in a dark room.
Keeping a laptop this slim can be tricky, and Lenovo has tried to solve this problem by fitting two fans in. The fans work well, with temperatures measured at 87°F, 99°F, and 105°F at the touchpad, center of the keyboard, and bottom of the laptop, respectively.
Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Display, Webcam, Audio
You won’t be able to take your eyes off the beautiful display
Give me a glossy display, make it OLED or Mini-LED. I want bright, vibrant colors to burn my eyes. Lenovo delivered on my expectations with the Slim 7’s 14.5-inch, 2944 x 1840 OLED touch panel. It just looks amazing, and the 16:10 aspect ratio gives you more screen real estate. The 90Hz refresh rate gives you smoother results when watching movies and reading texts, and it also enhances your gaming experience.
The colors in the Neptune Frost trailer are striking, playing off beautiful shades of yellow, red, blue, and green. Small details are clearly visible, like the tiny bumps on actor Cheryl Isheja’s forehead and the thin lines of sunflower yellow eyeliner. At an average of 865 nits, the panel is bright enough to handle use in direct sunlight. The 10-point capacitive touch screen is fast and responsive, but without a stylus it’s pretty pointless.
The 1080p webcam is good. It had no trouble reproducing the pink shade of the shirt I was wearing, and even picked out the tiny beads clearly. Zooming in on my face introduced a blurry pixelated effect that wasn’t very flattering. Still, it’s good enough for video conferencing and quick selfies.
Don’t expect too much from the Slim 7’s 2W quad speakers (two tweeters, two woofers); even with Dolby Atmos software, the top- and bottom-mounted stereo speakers don’t have enough power to make a difference. The system struggled to reproduce the bass in Flau’jae’s “Came Out A Beast,” with its brassy, cheap-sounding trumpets, French horns, and barely-there hi-hats; vocals from both Flau’jae and Lil Wanye were good, though.
Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Performance
Qualcomm moves to become a competitor.
Lenovo has equipped the Yoga Slim 7 with a 3.42GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 Oryon processor, 16GB LPDDR5X 8448MHz dual channel RAM, 512GB PCIe M.2 Gen 4 PCIe SSD, Hexygon NPU, and an integrated Qualcomm Adreno GPU. The CPU is at the bottom of Qualcomm’s X Elite ladder and doesn’t have a dual-core boost mode, which means it’s fine for general productivity tasks (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.), but don’t expect much when it comes to more advanced gaming capabilities.
Another drawback to this setup is that the Snapdragon chip is an ARM64 SoC, so many of your favorite apps and software won’t work well on ARM and you’ll need to use the Prism x64-x86 emulator. However, there are rumors circulating that ARM is never going to happen (remember Windows RT?), so there are still quite a few apps that won’t run on the Snapdragon SoC. The ones that do work, however, run pretty well.
In practice, the Yoga Slim 7 runs great. I didn’t notice any signs of slowdown while writing this review. With 55 tabs open in Google Chrome, along with the usual mix of G-Suite apps, YouTube videos, news, and social media sites, the Yoga Slim 7 performed reliably.
Qualcomm CPUs haven’t always been good at performance, so we weren’t expecting great performance from the Slim 7 in synthetic benchmarks. The laptop performed better than expected, putting it on par with a U-series Intel Core i7 processor. There were a few moments where the Slim 7 got close to the H-series chips but fell short. For example, there were many times when the laptop took more than four minutes to render an image with the CPU and GPU, while other Intel-powered systems completed the task faster. Both Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 showed similar results. The Slim 7 performed the worst in the Handbrake test, taking more than seven minutes to transcode a 4K video to 1080p.
Qualcomm says its integrated chip isn’t intended for gaming, but I had no trouble playing some demanding games, including: God of War and Control We ran it on a top-of-the-line Snapdragon Elite X1E-84-100 CPU system. This laptop has the same integrated GPU as the Slim 7, but the former has more TFLOPS than the latter, 4.6 vs 3.8. The difference is stark. After some tweaking on the high-end laptop, it was running smoothly and we were able to beat it without any signs of stuttering. This was not the case with the Slim 7. Hades II, God of War He was stuttering and confused. Control.
Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 AI
AI isn’t ready for its close-up yet
AI this and that. Some of you may not be impressed. At the same time, there were some useful features, like removing the background in Adobe Photoshop and editing in CapCut. Still, I don’t think this alone makes up an AI-first laptop line. Take Copilot+, for example. Cocreator, which lets you create AI-assisted photos with text prompts, is interesting but unnecessary. Windows Studio Effects smooths out your video conferencing experience, blurring or highlighting your background, and auto-framing to make sure you’re always in the shot.
Again, this is nice to have, but not necessary, especially since quite a few programs can do the same thing. Live translation, which translates in real time, is the most useful feature of Copilot+, although I found that fast talkers tend to stumble over the translation. It’s a less than impressive start for a highly anticipated launch. But AI is still a relatively new technology, so it should (hopefully) improve over time.
Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Battery
I expected more
I’m used to Qualcomm laptops sacrificing performance to give me all-day battery life, so I was surprised when the opposite happened with the Slim 7. Don’t get me wrong, I use the laptop every day and it lasted me over 10 hours. I expected less on the first day I ran the benchmarks. But then I was often surprised by low battery warnings popping up while I was writing a review, listening to music, browsing social media, streaming an episode of Supacell on Netflix, or participating in a video conference. But if you turn the brightness up to 100%, it probably won’t make much of a difference.
verdict
Score: 3.5/5
I wish the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 was just a regular Windows 11 laptop, because it has a lot of great things going for it. First, the design. It’s very lightweight, yet durable, and I love the color. Second, it has a gorgeous OLED screen that’s pleasing to the eye, but I could do without the pen-less touch panel. Even though it’s a lower-tier Snapdragon X Elite chip, I was impressed with how well it performed. It put up numbers comparable to Intel U-series laptops, making it perfect for most productivity tasks. I’d be pretty happy with 10 hours of battery life on an Intel laptop.
But it’s not Intel or AMD. To be at the forefront of this AI boom, Qualcomm has bet on ARM. It worked for Apple, but it’s unclear if it will work for this Snapdragon chip. Sure, the performance is good, but using an ARM-based processor means that you’re limited in the apps you can use with it. Some apps run in emulators, while others just show an error message and never complete. But the bigger drawback is the battery life, which is nowhere near the all-day life advertised.
All of this is aimed at making the laptop AI-first, but in the bigger picture, AI is still in its infancy. Most people wouldn’t be opposed to an NPU doing the heavy lifting of AI processing, but with the abundance of AI-enhanced apps and features available today, there’s no need for an entirely new line of chips (at least not yet). That said, both Intel and AMD have NPUs, and some have Copilot buttons, like the Yoga Slim 7 and its ilk.
While $1,199 is a reasonable mid-range price, the Slim 7 isn’t for everyone. It’s a laptop for first-time users who want to dive into AI, and specifically everything Microsoft’s artificial intelligence brand has to offer. Everyone else can get better performance and longer battery life with an Intel or AMD device.
