Living With a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga

Over the past few months I've been traveling with a number of high-end business-class notebooks, including the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga. This is the highest-end member of the ThinkPad family, called a Yoga because it has a touch screen and a hinge that allows the screen to flip all the way around so you can use it as a convertible tablet. It's not quite as small or as light as the Dell Latitude 7370, but offers some of the best features of any laptop I've seen.

At 13.1 by 9.0 by 0.7 inches and coming in at 2.8 pounds, the X1 Yoga is surprisingly thin and light for a 14-inch convertible laptop. With a carbon fiber lid and a magnesium alloy composite base, it has the classic black look of a ThinkPad and appears heavier than it is. The model I used has a WQHD (2560x1440) OLED display. While the resolution isn't quite as high as on the Dell Latitude 7370, the OLED really popped, with great vibrant colors. This is one of the best laptop displays I've ever seen.

The X1 Yoga has a nice assortment of ports, including three USB-A ports (one powered), a full-sized HDMI connector, a mini-DisplayPort, a headphone jack, Lenovo's proprietary OneLink+ dock connector, and the same power connector most ThinkPads have used for the past few years. It lacks a newer USB-C or an SD card slot, as well as Ethernet (the latter has disappeared from a lot of laptops in recent years), but does come with a stylus for use on the touch screen. The stylus charges when plugged into the system (you probably won't even notice it's there). The X1 Yoga has a very nice backlit keyboard with a pointing stick as well as a terrific and large clickable glass touchpad—one of the best I've used.

As a convertible, I found the X1 Yoga to be pretty easy to use in tablet mode, and it is convenient to be able to use it in touch screen mode for reading or browsing Facebook or the like. The "tent" mode (where the keyboard pretty much acts as a stand for the display) is very nice when giving presentations or watching videos. To me, such 2-in-1s don't really replace an iPad or a Kindle, but I do like the option of using it in different configurations.

The X1 Yoga I used had a 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5-6300U (Skylake) processor, with 8GB of RAM, which in my tests was quite fast for just about everything. It doesn't have discrete graphics, so it's not the best choice for workstation-style graphics apps, but it handled other tasks very well—it's the fastest thin notebook I've yet tested.

Battery life seemed pretty good, although it depends on what you are doing. With the screen at its maximum brightness and Wi-Fi turned on, it lasted 3 hours and 19 minutes on PCMark 8, a bit lower than the Dell Latitude 7370. PCMag's torture test showed a version with a 1980 by 1080 IPS display lasting over 10 hours on its tests, compared with 7 hours for the Latitude. In the real world, say at a conference with the Wi-Fi on but the screen turned down, I could usually get 6 to 8 hours, which is decent, but not as much as I had hoped for.

Overall, I was quite pleased with the X1 Yoga. It's one of the more expensive business laptops on the market (there are cheaper versions without the OLED display, and Lenovo also makes the X1 Carbon, which lacks the touchscreen and the convertible features) but also one of the best. Particularly for executives who want a 2-in-1, the X1 Yoga is a great machine.

Here's PCMag's full review.