Immersive Test Drive: Unveiling the Lightweight Marvels - Lenovo's New Snapdragon X Elite Series Laptops Explored

Experiencing the Ultra-Slim Design of Lenovo’s Snapdragon X Elite Series: A Detailed Review

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Windows laptops are getting interesting again thanks to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite processor, which is said to deliver similar performance to Apple’s M-series chips that revolutionized the Mac line. Lenovo, also known as the company that is willing to ship products on the bleeding edge of computing, is joining the fight with two new laptops powered by the Snapdragon chip: the Yoga Slim 7x and ThinkPad T14s Gen 6.

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We had a chance to spend time with them ahead of today’s announcement, and while it’s way too early to know whether they’ll meet Lenovo’s performance claims, they at least seem pretty promising.

Kerry Wan/ZDNET

The Yoga Slim 7x is the more interesting laptop of the two, if only because of how thin and light it is: under three pounds and just over a half an inch thick. It also comes with a 14.5-inch 3K OLED touchscreen that looked spectacular in our brief time with it, but that’s to be expected from an OLED panel. You also get a few USB-C ports, an edge-to-edge keyboard, Wi-Fi 7, and a cool Cosmic Blue paint job.

Then there’s the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6, which is the business-oriented laptop of the two. It has beefier specs than the Yoga Slim 7x and comes with all the extra security benefits of Lenovo’s ThinkPad series. It has a 14-inch display with a few configuration options, but our favorite is the 2.8K OLED because, well, it’s OLED. You get the signature, ultra-comfortable ThinkPad keyboard and ThinkPoint, a couple USB-A and USB-C ports, HDMI 2.1, Wi-Fi 7, and a fingerprint scanner.

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Of course, the most interesting aspect of these laptops is the Snapdragon X Elite processor, which has yet to be put through any sort of extensive testing. We don’t know how well apps will perform, whether battery life will be better, or if it’ll get too hot under heavy usage. Lenovo is only making two performance claims with the Yoga Slim 7x and ThinkPad T14s Gen 6: better AI processing and multi-day battery life.

The X Elite in both laptops ships with the 45 TOPS Hexagon NPU (neural processing unit) that will help speed up the performance of AI-related tasks, whether it be text or image generation, photo editing, Copilot interactions, or other features. It’ll make conventional AI tasks faster for consumers with the Yoga, and make the new ThinkPad one of the fastest enterprise AI laptops around.

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As for battery life, Lenovo is claiming that the Yoga’s 70WHr battery and the ThinkPad’s 58Whr battery can each last for multiple days on a full charge. Of course, they got those results in a lab, so there’s no guarantee it’ll be the same in the real world. Still, it seems that Lenovo is confident these laptops will help set new endurance benchmarks for Windows laptops moving forward, much like other laptops launching with the X Elite on deck.

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Other than the chip, the rest of the specs for the Yoga Slim 7x and ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 are pretty run-of-the-mill. You can get up to 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage on the former, along with up to 64GB of RAM and 1TB of storage on the latter. Both ship with Qualcomm’s Adreno GPU, Dolby Audio, and Windows 11.

In our brief time with the laptops, we were left curious by the possibility that these could be as fast and efficient as Apple’s recent MacBooks. Again, it’s unclear whether Lenovo or any other company will deliver on the boastful promises of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite, but we’re anxious to find out once we get some units for testing.

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The Yoga Slim 7x starts at $1,199 while the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 starts at $1,699. Both will start shipping next month. Expect more coverage on these and a host of other Snapdragon-powered Windows laptops soon.