The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga is a premium 2-in-1 aimed at business users with specific tastes, but is a brilliant display and webcam privacy enough to beat its competition?
The ThinkPad line remains one of the most iconic and recognizable Windows notebooks. Its design, solid build quality, and performance are legendary, and the brand usually brings some nice innovations along for the ride. But 2018 is a new year in more ways than one — the Windows ecosystem has become remarkably robust, with a vast array of excellent options in all kinds of form factors.
Take the convertible 2-in-1, for example, a flexible notebook style where a machine can act as a legitimate clamshell notebook but convert into tablet, presentation, and multimedia modes. The ThinkPad X1 Yoga 3rd generation is the brand’s most recent entry into this increasingly popular class, and it comes at the usual premium price.
Our review unit came with an eighth-generation quad-core Intel Core i7-8650U CPU, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB PCIe solid-state drive (SSD), and a 14-inch WQHD+ (2,560 x 1,440 or 210 PPI) Dolby Vision HDR-capable display, all sold at a whopping $2,740. You’ll spend at least $1,640 for the base configuration with a Full HD display, Core i5-8250U, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB PCIe SSD.
Does Lenovo bring enough to the table to justify such a high price compared to an increasingly excellent stable of 2-in-1 options?
The ThinkPad X1 Yoga isn’t terribly different in its third generation, and it’s very much a ThinkPad. It’s a sleek black sports sedan of a convertible 2-in-1, built with Mercedes-like tolerances that grant it some rigidity and contribute to its MIL-STD-810G certification for robustness and protection from the elements. Aiding to its mostly solid build — although there is some flex in the very thin display and in the keyboard deck – is a mix of carbon fiber, glass fiber, and magnesium alloy that makes up the chassis.
In-hand, the ThinkPad X1 Yoga has a unique feel. Unlike many all-metal competitors such as Lenovo’s own Yoga 920 and HP’s Spectre x360 13, which are cold and hard to the touch, the ThinkPad enjoys the usual X1 coating that feels warm and soft. It’s a pleasure to carry around, and the palm rest is unusually comfortable.
As far as its convertibility goes, the hinge is mostly comfortable to swivel around from notebook to tablet, but it has a clunkiness thanks to the “Wave” keyboard that uses a “rise and fall” mechanism to pull the keys into the chassis as the display is rotated. That means that the keys are protected and the rear of the “tablet” is nice and flat, but it does create an action that’s far less smooth than the competition.
Aesthetically, the updated branding is sleeker and modern, maintaining the lit red dot on the ThinkPad logo that indicates operating status. It’s as recognizable as every ThinkPad, and it’s a look that remains iconic even as it’s become slightly more modern. Yet it’s simply no longer such a standout, given options like the elegant and sleek HP Spectre x360 13-inch.
We call it a sport sedan, though, to highlight its relatively heavy (3.08 pounds) and thick (0.67 inch) dimensions. It’s not the slimmest or lightest convertible 2-in-1 around, beat handily by Lenovo’s own Yoga 920 in thinness (0.5 inches), and the Spectre x360 13, which is both thinner and lighter at 0.53 inches and 2.78 pounds. Both of those feel much more streamlined in the hand, and while they don’t sport the same soft-touch feel, they’re less to carry around and are more effective as tablets.
Overall, this is a convertible 2-in-1 that’s just a little chunkier than we’re used to seeing, and it drops the ThinkPad line a little farther back into the pack. It’s clearly a quality machine, but it’s no longer the standout design that it might have been in some previous generations.
A real strength of the ThinkPad X1 Yoga, on the other hand, is its connectivity. There are two USB-A 3.1 Gen 1 ports for legacy support, two USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 with Thunderbolt 3 ports for the future, a full-size HDMI port, a microSD card reader, a microSIM slot, and a 3.5mm audio combo jack. An Ethernet Extension Connector is also on hand, but the required dongle for native Ethernet connectivity is sold separately. Wireless connectivity is provided by the usual 2×2 MU-MIMO 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.1 radios.
ThinkPads are renowned for their keyboards, and usually for good reason. They tend to offer one of the most comfortable and precise typing experiences around, and that’s been true for years. The ThinkPad X1 Yoga is nearly as good as usual, but it does stumble just a bit. While it has decent travel and a soft bottoming action, it’s also a touch loose. It lacks the snappiness of the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, and it isn’t as precise as the Spectre x360 13. We guess that’s due to the unique Wave keyboard mechanism, and while it’s a good keyboard, it’s not as great as it could be.
The touchpad is better, with a comfortable surface and good Microsoft Precision Touchpad gesture support. It’s also a bit smaller than it could be, thanks to the extra buttons up top to support the iconic red ThinkPad TrackPoint nubbin that’s nestled in the middle of the keyboard and that provides precise controls for ThinkPad fans who demand its presence.
This is a 2-in-1, so of course its sports a comfortable multitouch display. The usual ThinkPad Pen Pro slides into its holder and enjoys the same in-port charging as always. It’s therefore smaller than we like, which mitigates somewhat the pleasure of using its 2,048 levels of pressure sensitivity — more than the Spectre x360 13’s 1,024 levels, but less than the Microsoft Surface Book 2 13 ’s 4,096 levels.
Finally, The ThinkPad X1 Yoga supports Windows 10’s Hello password-less login via a fingerprint reader on the keyboard deck. This is a particularly secure option because Lenovo has opted for “Match-in-Sensor” technology whereby fingerprint data is isolated on a System-on-Chip (SoC) and therefore can’t be hacked at the operating system level. There’s also a special ThinkShutter camera switch that physically covers the webcam for privacy from video snoopers, but you can opt for an infrared scanner with facial recognition support instead.
We’ll add that Lenovo has baked Amazon Alexa support into the ThinkPad X1 Yoga, making it one of the first PCs to support the retail giant’s increasingly popular digital assistant. Or, at least, it will be, once Lenovo ships the required update in late April.
The previous ThinkPad X1 Yoga generation offered one of the few OLED displays you’ll find in a notebook, but Lenovo has dropped that option in the third generation due to battery concerns. Instead, there’s now a 14-inch WQHD+ (2,560 x 1,440 or X PPI) panel at the high end that will support Dolby Vision high dynamic range (HDR) with a software update in late April. That’s the display in our review unit, and we were excited to give it a look.
According to our colorimeter, this is one spectacular display. It aced all our tests, with 454 nits of brightness, a very strong 1050:1 contrast ratio, 96 percent of AdobeRGB color gamut, 0.68 color accuracy (under 1.0 is considered excellent), and a perfect 2.2 gamma. The only display that comes close to these across-the-board results is the Apple MacBook Pro with Touch Bar which normally serves as a benchmark, and although its brighter and has slightly better contrast, its colors aren’t as wide or as accurate.
The ThinkPad X1 Yoga’s more pedestrian competition doesn’t come close. The Surface Book 2 13 has great contrast and brightness, but not nearly the same kind of color gamut and accuracy. And the Yoga 920 and Spectre x360 13 displays aren’t even in the same ballpark. Lenovo knocked this one out of the park, albeit at a price — it adds almost $500!
We note that Lenovo has included a small utility that switches the color profile of the display for user and task preference, from the “Native” setting with the most vibrant colors to a “Standard” setting that’s muted somewhat, with additional settings for photo editing, video editing, and reading modes. The setting makes a huge difference not only in color saturation and brightness but also in white point, and you’ll likely want to play around with it — colors can be a little too saturated at the “Native” setting.
This is an incredibly nice display for productivity and creative tasks and you’ll love watching movies and TV thanks to deep blacks and bright colors. That will only get better once the Dolby Vision HDR support is released, which will be supported by Windows 10 and Netflix and should make for a truly dynamic binging experience. We’ve tested HDR on some past monitors, and while it’s not perfect on the PC, it does raise the bar on image quality drastically when paired with movies or games that embrace HDR.
You’ll also enjoy surprisingly loud audio to go with that awesome picture. Lenovo touts its Dolby Audio certification, “bass enhancer,” and “device orientation tuning,” but nevermind the names — we’re impressed that so much sound can be squeezed out of such a relatively small machine without distortion.
