Friday, September 20, 2024

New Qualcomm-powered Lenovo laptops arrive this summer

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Lenovo announced on Monday that it’s adding two Qualcomm-powered laptops to its portfolio: one new Yoga Slim and one new ThinkPad. 

The Yoga Slim 7x 14 Gen 9 is the creativity-focused laptop of the two. It will be configured with a Snapdragon X Elite processor, up to 32GB of memory, up to 1TB of M.2 SSD storage, three USB-C ports with Power Delivery and DisplayPort 1.4 support, and a 14.5-inch OLED touch display. The whole laptop will weigh just 2.8 pounds and be as thin as 0.51 inches, and it has a 1080p IR webcam that supports Windows Hello. Lenovo claims the Yoga Slim’s battery life will last multiple days, which, if true, could rival the MacBook Pro.

The ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 is, of course, business-focused. It will have the same Snapdragon chip, storage capacity, and webcam but will support up to 64GB of memory and one of three 14-inch display options: an IPS with up to 400 nits of brightness; an IPS touch display; or an OLED that covers 100 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut, also with 400 nits of brightness.

It will also have a fingerprint reader, two USB-A and two USB4 Type-C ports, an HDMI 2.1 port, and an audio jack. It’ll weigh almost the same as the Yoga Slim (2.71 pounds) and also have multiday battery life, but it will be thicker at 0.67 inches.

The Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6.
Image: Lenovo

This isn’t the first time Lenovo has released a Windows laptop with a Qualcomm chip. In 2019, there was the Yoga 5G (called the Flex 5G in the US), which not only had a Snapdragon 8cx processor but also offered 5G connectivity. In 2022, Lenovo released the ThinkPad X13s with a Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, but it didn’t have a lot of software compatibility at the time. (Windows didn’t have a great reputation for emulating x86 programs on Arm, either.) It also ran warm and had few ports, an inflated price tag, and unimpressive performance compared to Apple, Intel, and AMD laptops.

Lenovo expects the Yoga Slim 7x 14 Gen 9 to start at $1,199 and the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 to start at $1,699. Both will be available in June.

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