The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x is one of soon to be many Windows 11 CoPilot+ PCs – a term Microsoft is using for its class of AI-ready PCs. There are some fringe issues that might turn into dealbreakers, and we’ll get into those in our Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x review, but ultimately, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x is an excellent option for a sleek and functional Windows laptop for daily use.
Build and design
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x is meant to be light and portable first and foremost – it’s not meant to be the most powerful device, but it’ll be easy to carry around and get your basic productivity tasks done, plus a little extra. It’s lightweight at 2.83 pounds, and at 18 mm thick it fits comfortably into most bags and backpacks.
Some folks who value portability over everything might find the 14.5-inch form factor to be a bit big, but I think most will find it to be conveniently light, and the 14.5-inch display helps to make the most of the OLED display, which we’ll get to later.
One thing that surprised me was that while the Yoga Slim 7x fit the definition of a CoPilot+ laptop, it didn’t turn out to be what I’d expect from a Yoga laptop. The Yoga name is associated with 2-in-1s, including machines with 360-degree hinges that allowed laptops to be used as tablets. While this laptop does have a touchscreen display, it’s not particularly flexible as form factor goes – not only is there no 360-degree hinge, the display can’t quite be made to lay flat, either. I didn’t mind too much, but if you’re buying a Yoga device with the thinking that you’ll have that kind of hinge, you won’t find it on the Yoga Slim 7x.
But, you will find a laptop built to last. The solid aluminum chassis meets the MIL-STD-810H requirements for durability, so it can survive a few drops. While it is lightweight, it feels solid in hand, too – it doesn’t feel like something cheap or frail, which is great for a laptop as thin as this one.
The Yoga Slim 7x comes in just one Cosmic Blue colorway, which as best I can tell is something between a dark slate grey and a gunmetal blue. It looks nice! Maybe a little bummer on no color options, but as the CoPilot+ class of PCs is just getting started, it’s a good bet this initial production run wasn’t big enough to justify multiple colors.
CoPilot+ PC AI features
While there’s much to talk about concerning the Qualcomm chipsets inside CoPilot+ laptops, a big reason they are there in the first place is for their on-board NPU, which powers on-device Windows 11 AI features. So, what are those features?
The most widely useful one that operates on device is live translation and captions. Rather than relying on individual sites or programs like Zoom or YouTube, this laptop can both produce captions for audio playing on the PC or that comes in from the mic (if you choose to), and can offer live translations for other languages, whether that’s for videos or live video calls.
I thought it was hit or miss in practice. I found YouTube’s captions to be better, but if you’re watching something that doesn’t offer captioning at all, it’s not bad – but it will have enough mistakes to lose some meaning. That’s OK for entertainment, but if you’re leaning on it for work meetings, I think the technology is not quite good enough to rely on. There can also be quite a bit of lag when unpausing a video before the captions kick in again, which can be annoying.
I was more surprised at how well live translation worked. I tested it by watching a YouTube video in Mandarin Chinese, knowing that in times past, machine translation between Mandarin and English has been famously spotty. The live translation feature handled it well – the speaker was fast, but the translated captions kept up with the pace of the video, and were at least as accurate as Google translating the transcript would’ve been, if not more so. I could tell it still didn’t quite get everything right, but it got a lot closer than I was expecting. Ultimately, I think I’d have the same feedback as with captions – love it for entertainment, but I’d still stop short of relying on it for work purposes. It might not be too far away, though.
However, I could never get the captions to work with sound coming in from the laptop’s mic, having turned that feature on. User error is always a possibility!
Aside from all that, the AI features include a lot that’s familiar. Cocreator is an image generator baked into Paint, which can generate images either from a prompt or from a sketch you draw. You will need to buy credits after your initial free allotment to use this feature, though. Is it useful? Depends on who you are! I think of my dad, who works with stained glass as a hobby – I’m sure he’d use this all the time to generate new ideas for windows instead of spending two hours trying to get Pinterest to work, and then calling me for help.
I also think of tabletop game masters running their games online, and who don’t have the time to get good at art in addition to preparing for their sessions (and living the rest of their lives!) – it’s a cool way to generate some decent art of a monster they’ve got in mind. It’s great for churning out quick images for presentations, or to try new marketing ideas, too. And if you want to tinker with the images that have been generated, two free months of Adobe Creative Cloud are included with purchase of the laptop.
There are also live appearance filters in Windows Studio effects that can be used during voice chats, whether that be for your face or to blur the background. It’s not a new or groundbreaking feature, but it’s there and it works!
Lastly, there’s Microsoft’s CoPilot assistant, which you can ask questions instead of using a regular search engine. There’s a dedicated CoPilot key on the keyboard to bring that up, and you can set the style of the assistant to be more personable or strictly business. The usual warnings apply – the answers aren’t always going to be accurate, and it’s not always going to be clear which answers are good and which aren’t. Maybe AI search in general gets better soon, but that’s still a maybe.
One omission here is the Recall feature, which Microsoft revealed as a way to search through the history of your laptop use to find information – for example, if you want to remember what you were searching for around noon last Tuesday, and can’t quite remember the details (and don’t want to trawl your browser history). No need to rehash the whole story – suffice it to say it worked by continuously taking screenshots of your laptop screen during use, which raised a whole lot of security and privacy concerns. Microsoft pulled it, and it’s not clear when the feature will be available – and they’ve said it will be opt-in once it is.
Performance
Unlike most Windows PCs that use chips from either Intel or, less often, AMD, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x has a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chipset that includes a 3.42 GHz CPU, Adreno graphics, and an NPU (neural processing unit) that is dedicated to running some of the on-device AI features mentioned above. The chipset is based off a design from Arm, and is part of a move towards Arm-based chips in Windows PCs that is promising to be more efficient, leading to better battery life.
Often, efficiency is lumped in with a hit to performance, but that’s not the case here. For such a compact laptop, the Yoga Slim 7x stays surprisingly cool during use, even with a lot of tabs or programs open, or while watching videos.
It’s still limited at the high end – it’s no gaming laptop, and it’s not meant for demanding video editing tasks – but even for gaming, I was surprised at what I could squeeze out of it. Games that are less resource intensive like Dungeons of Dredmor run just as well as they do on my desktop, but the laptop can even run more complex games. I was surprised that something like Baldur’s Gate 3 played OK – on lowest settings, there was still noticeable lag while dialogue loaded, and larger fights can be a little taxing, but I figured it would be totally unplayable, and I was wrong! Better yet, while the laptop did start to warm up during gaming, it still stayed cooler than a lot of other laptops I’ve used.
However, some games were completely unplayable – for a different reason, and one that might be a dealbreaker for some folks. Programs and games for Windows are often designed around the Intel x86 architecture, and these Qualcomm chipsets use the ARM64 architecture.
Short version: compatibility issues. Some programs and games that would otherwise work on a Windows PC won’t run on this laptop. The most notable problem is Google Drive – you can still run it in a browser, but the version of Google Drive you can download as a program does not work on this laptop. Given that most folks won’t be looking at this as a gaming PC, the Google Drive compatibility issue is going to be the biggest potential sticking point if that’s part of your workflow. For what it’s worth, games like Fortnite and Elden Ring aren’t compatible, either, but I’m not sure that’s going to sway too many purchasing decisions.
Display and audio
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x ended up being a really strong laptop for watching videos. Lenovo went all out with the display, using a PureSight 2944 x 1840 OLED touch display with a 90Hz refresh rate and 1,000 nits of brightness. The high resolution and brightness makes reading text on the display a lot easier, and the contrast was fantastic. You can also turn HDR on at the cost of battery life, which is worth doing when gaming or watching videos with HDR content – this display can take full advantage of it.
But, how great the display is makes me wish the audio was just a little better. The laptop comes with four 2W speakers that fire upwards, two on either side of the keyboard. They get plenty loud, but the bass response was notably weak, even for usual on-board laptop speakers. Dolby Atmos helps as always, but I did think even highs weren’t as distinct as I’d like. The speakers aren’t bad, but you notice the shortcomings when juxtaposed with the standout display.
Keyboard and touchpad
Lenovo is almost always on point when it comes to keyboards and trackpads, and they live up to their reputation here. The keys have 1.5mm of key travel with .3mm dish keycaps that feel super comfortable to type on. The larger 14.5-inch form factor also helped them to space out the keys well – I definitely felt I wasn’t as typo-prone using this laptop. It’s one of the best laptop keyboards I’ve used in a while.
No complaints about the touchpad, either – it’s very large and responsive. Like with a lot of larger touchpads, I sometimes felt unsure of where the borders were for right clicking, but it wasn’t a problem that often.
Battery life
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x has a 70Whr battery, which is good for how compact this laptop is. That efficient Qualcomm chipset makes the most of it, too – one hour of regular use using adaptive brightness and with HDR off only use 7% of the battery; overall, I found I never used the laptop enough to totally drain the battery within a single day of use. Depending on what you’re doing, I’d guess most folks will get anywhere from 10 to 14 hours on a single charge out of the box.
Even watching videos for one hour with 100% brightness and HDR turned on only used up 10% of the battery, which was better than I was expecting.
And, if you do manage to drain the battery, the included 65W charging brick got the battery fully charged within two hours, and got me to 32% with 30 minutes of charging.
Connectivity, ports, camera
There aren’t many ports on the Yoga Slim 7x, which might not be too surprising for a laptop that prioritizes lightness and portability. There are three USB-C ports, one of which is for charging, and that’s it aside from the side power button and the physical camera shutter switch. The headphone port is tough to part with, especially because the on-board speakers aren’t the best.
I also missed having a fingerprint sensor – I’ve gotten used to using that to log in to other laptops, and I noticed the lack of one here. It’s faster than PIN or password, and between lighting, hair, glasses, hats, headphones, and angle of use, facial recognition never works as quickly or consistently as I’d like.
Finally, there’s a MIPI webcam that works great for video calls. It can also be used with the AI features mentioned before to adjust your background or your appearance on the fly.
And, finally, this is a Wi-Fi 7 laptop, although keep in mind you’ll need a Wi-Fi 7 router to match to take advantage of that.
Pricing and availability
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x comes with 16GB of RAM and either 512GB or 1TB of SSD storage, and starts at $1,200. But, it’s only $90 to upgrade to the 1TB SSD configuration, which seems like a great value if you do need extra storage. It’s already become available here in North America, and comes in Cosmic Blue.
Should you buy the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x?
CoPilot+ PCs might be best known as AI PCs, but the promise of AI still hasn’t been realized, and while the AI features here often work well and are useful, they’re nothing I’d call essential. Fortunately, even without the AI features, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x stands out as a solid Windows laptop at a reasonable price. The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chipset is plenty powerful, and is efficient enough to give this laptop better than average battery life in its class (including the MacBook Air and Microsoft Surface Pro). The OLED display was a wonderful addition, and kind of a steal in a 14.5-inch laptop that starts at $1,200.
That the laptop is such a good value might speak to how eager Microsoft and its partners are to get CoPilot+ PCs into homes. If that’s the goal, they’ve taken the right steps toward it. This is a flat-out good laptop for anyone who just needs a solid machine for basic work and entertainment. The one snag is the compatibility problem with the ARM64 architecture – if there’s no support for a program or game you use frequently, that’s an instant dealbreaker. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem like there are too many programs that don’t work, but you should definitely consider all the programs you rely on and make sure they all work with ARM64 before making a purchase.