Lenovo is a household name when it comes to midrange Windows laptops. But, with its Yoga Slim 7 Carbon, the brand is targeting the niche of ultraportable premium laptops with a long battery life.
In a market that’s slowly being taken over by MacBooks, does this laptop have a chance? Let's find out!
Design
The design, or rather the weight, is this laptop’s USP.
The Slim 7 Carbon is very light, weighing in at under a kilo, which is incredible for a 13-inch laptop. In fact, an 11-inch tablet with a folio case actually ends up being heavier than this thing.
It's also quite slim and easy to carry around, making it perfect for those always on-the-go.
This weight reduction has been made possible thanks to the choice of materials. The upper half of the laptop is made of carbon fibre, while the lower half is made of a magnesium-aluminium alloy. However, the overall finishing could have been a bit better because the top actually feels like plastic at first glance.
Talking of the keyboard, you cannot have much key travel on a laptop this slim, but it was quite comfortable to use during my usage period of well over 10 days. The glass trackpad also works pretty well with all gestures working as intended.
Since this laptop is a part of the Yoga series, you might expect its hinge to rotate 360 degrees, but that’s not the case as it only goes up to a 180-degrees.
And if it matters to you, it also passes the one hand open test.
Connectivity
The Slim 7 Carbon comes with only two USB-C ports, with one of them being Thunderbolt 4 certified. Lenovo is well aware of the non-existent I/O here and therefore it has bundled a dongle with this laptop. It adds a USB-A port, headphone jack, an HDMI port ….and even a VGA port for some reason.
You also get WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.1 here.
Display
The display of the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Carbon 13IAP7 is a 13.3-inch IPS panel with a 90Hz refresh rate. Its maximum brightness is 400 nits, which is decent but could have been higher since this is not an affordable laptop by any means.
The higher refresh rate does make the display pretty smooth to use.
The colours are crisp thanks to its 2.5K resolution and the viewing angles are also pretty good. So, this screen is quite good for streaming videos.
The display supports adaptive brightness, but I disabled it only after a day of use because it was really finicky.
While our review unit does not have a touchscreen, Lenovo does sell a version of this laptop with that as well.
Features
In terms of features, this laptop has a Harman-tuned speaker system that is loud, but its bottom-firing placement means that audio will be muffled most of the time. Also, the output doesn't have much depth.
It also has an infrared-based Windows Hello login system which works well. It also helps save battery as it puts the laptop to sleep soon after it detects you not being around it.
However, it doesn't have a fingerprint scanner, which some users might find inconvenient.
The webcam on this laptop is capable of recording at 720p and its performance is incredibly mediocre. There is also an e-shutter to disable the camera.
Performance
The laptop is powered by Intel’s 12th-gen Core i7 1260P, which is an efficiency-focused CPU that’s made of slim and light laptops. With this, you get integrated Iris Xe graphics, 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 1TB of SSD.
This combination provides great performance for intended use, and I witnessed no lags or stutters during my usage.
However, an i7 CPU without a dedicated graphics card always ends up being a bit of a confused combination. You see, this processor is overpowered for intended uses like MS Office, web browsing or light photoshop. But, it is underpowered for heavy workflows like video editing or 3D modelling.
I do wish that Lenovo had an i5-powered version of this laptop on sale in India which could have handled all intended tasks pretty well, while being more cost efficient.
Battery Life
The battery life on this laptop is great thanks to the Intel CPU’s 12th-gen hybrid architecture. It doesn't consume much battery on sleep, which is a problem that generally plagues most Windows laptops.
Even with the brightness set at over 80 percent, the battery lasts for around 6-7 hours. With lower brightness levels, you can easily touch 10 hours.
The laptop comes bundled with a 65W Type-C PD charger, and it can be charged through either port. But it does take well over 2 hours to fully recharge.
Verdict
I thoroughly enjoyed my time with the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Carbon 13IAP7. However, at a price of ₹1.19 lakh, this laptop banks heavily on its weight and form factor.
Granted, the convenience of having a laptop that’s slim and light enough to be carried around in a compact backpack is very underrated, and it becomes addictive once you actually get used to it.
But, it's also quite hard to ignore that if you can compromise on weight a bit, you can consider the MacBook Air M2 which will offer you superior graphics performance and a much better webcam as well.
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