Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 8 Review

It's no secret that we endorse the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, giving the 14-inch business laptop not only our Editors' Choice award but a perfect five-star rating, calling it the best work laptop you can buy for two years in a row. (Lenovo is also one of PCMag's Business Choice brands for 2023.) If you like the Carbon but want a flip-and-fold convertible laptop, your Lenovo of choice is the ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 8 (starts at $1,456.95; $2,126.04 as tested). It's an admirable enterprise 2-in-1 whose biggest flaw is its C-suite price when sold individually, though it could also use a sharper screen at its reviewed price and an SD card slot. While it's not yet as close to perfect as Lenovo's Carbon, being made of basic aluminum instead of fancy magnesium and carbon fiber, the ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 8 is an outstanding 2-in-1 laptop for work if you need the flexibility, earning our Editors' Choice award in the category.

A ThinkPad in Storm Gray, Not Matte Black? Heresy! 

This year's Gen 8 is basically identical to the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 7 we reviewed in June 2022 except for an update from Intel's 12th to 13th Generation Core processors. Its aluminum chassis measures 0.61 by 12.4 by 8.8 inches and barely misses ultraportable status at 3.04 pounds. Like other ThinkPads, it has passed MIL-STD 810H torture tests for road hazards like shock, vibration, and temperature extremes.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The $1,456.95 base model teams a Core i5-1335U chip with 16GB of RAM, a 256GB solid-state drive, Windows 11 Home, and a 1,920-by-1,200-pixel IPS touch screen. Our test unit, model 21HQ007US, sells for $2,126.04 at B&H, but at this writing Lenovo.com let us configure a matching system for about $1,800. It steps up to a Core i7-1355U CPU (two Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 12 threads), a 512GB NVMe SSD, and Windows 11 Pro.

Processors with Intel's vPro IT management technology are available, as are up to 2TB of storage and 4G or 5G mobile broadband. Adding $194 buys you a display with a built-in privacy filter that narrows the field of view to thwart snoopy seat-mates in business class. Adding $209 replaces the IPS screen with a high-res (3,840-by-2,400-pixel) OLED panel with more brilliant colors and contrast.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Looking at Lenovo's rivals for corporate supremacy, HP's and Dell's flagship 14-inch convertibles are the HP Elite x360 1040 (alongside the HP Dragonfly Folio G3) and Dell Latitude 9440 2-in-1, respectively. We haven't reviewed the former, but it looks to be in the same price ballpark as the X1 Yoga. The Dell costs more, partly due to a sharper 2,560-by-1,600-pixel display—the model we just tested, loaded with 32GB of RAM, was more than $3,000. Likewise, the HP is considerably more expensive to start. Our Editors' Choice pick among premium consumer convertibles, the Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8, was $1,400 as tested in April with a 2,880-by-1,800 OLED touch screen.

In the modern fashion, the ThinkPad has a 16:10 aspect ratio display with thin (well, thinnish) bezels. The webcam at the top center has a sliding security shutter and IR face recognition, joining a fingerprint reader built into the power button to give you two ways to skip passwords with Windows Hello. You'll feel no flex if you press the keyboard deck and almost none if you grasp the screen corners; the screen barely wobbles when tapped in laptop mode.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The laptop's left flank holds two USB4 Thunderbolt 4 ports, either suitable for the AC adapter, plus a USB 3.2 Type-A port and an HDMI port for an external monitor. A second USB-A port is on the right, along with an audio jack, security lock slot, and charging cubbyhole for the supplied stylus pen. Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth come standard on this laptop.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

A Reliable Design With the Features You Want

Lenovo's webcam records in 1080p resolution and offers a few enhancement toggles like face framing and blurring the background (along with your outline). Its images are well-lit and colorful without noise or static, though a bit on the soft side.

If you're looking for extra video enhancements, the included Lenovo View software has options to control brightness and color within the webcam image, and the option to add a slightly ghostly floating headshot of you to the screen during presentations. It can also blur the screen if someone comes up behind you, and nag you if your posture is poor.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

ThinkPad keyboards are basically the best in the laptop world (though not all of Lenovo's lesser ThinkBook and IdeaPad models match up), and that includes the X1 Yoga models. Except for the Fn and Control keys in each other's places at the bottom left—switchable via the supplied Lenovo Vantage software—the layout is first-class. Here you'll find real Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys, instead of shifted cursor arrows, and the ability to answer and end Microsoft Teams calls with F10 and F11. 

The backlit keyboard has a supremely snappy and comfortable, precise typing feel with decent feedback. Following ThinkPad tradition, you'll find two pointing devices: First is the TrackPoint mini-joystick embedded in the keyboard with three mouse buttons below the space bar. (The right button is extremely handy if you dislike the imprecise right-clicks of a touchpad.) Second, of course, is a smooth touchpad below that's on the small side.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Quad speakers (two flanking the keyboard, two on the bottom) pump out loud and clear sound, not tinny or harsh even at top volume. You won't hear much bass, but highs and midtones are clear, and you can make out overlapping tracks. Dolby Access software provides music, movie, game, and voice presets and an equalizer. 

We wish Lenovo had sent a unit with the 2.8K OLED touch screen, but the full HD IPS panel is bright and sharp enough. Its colors don't quite pop like poster paints as OLED panels do, but they are rich and well saturated. Brightness and contrast are fine, and white backgrounds are clean instead of dingy, with no pixelation around the edges of letters. 

The integrated pen is more of a swizzle stick than a stylus, skinny and barely four inches long, but it's pressure-sensitive and has two customizable buttons. It keeps up with my fastest swoops and scribbles on screen with decent palm rejection. Lenovo says the pen needs only five minutes in its niche to be fully charged and takes an 80% charge in 15 seconds.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Lenovo Vantage centralizes system updates, Wi-Fi security, and handy settings such as microphone noise cancellation, disabling all input for a minute or two while you apply a cleaning wipe, and dimming the display if it senses you're walking rather than standing still and reading. The company also pre-installs Mirametrix Glance to help application focus when using multiple displays.

Testing the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 8: Versatile Business Systems Square Off 

For our benchmark charts, we're putting the latest ThinkPad X1 Yoga against the new Dell Latitude 9440 2-in-1, as well as the non-convertible, comparably priced Asus ExpertBook B9 and the HP Dragonfly Folio G3, a 13.5-inch convertible with a unique pull-forward design. The last slot goes to a detachable rather than a convertible, the leading Windows and business tablet the Microsoft Surface Pro 9.

Productivity Tests 

We run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.

Our other three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

Finally, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

All these lightweights are well-equipped if not overkill for everyday apps like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. The Lenovo landed in the middle of the pack in our CPU and Photoshop tests, but it never pretended to be a mobile workstation for crunching huge datasets or CGI rendering. Notably, however, the X1 Yoga outpaced the HP Dragonfly Folio G3, our previous Editors' Choice holder, in most of these tests. All told, this Lenovo 2-in-1 is a fine productivity and light creativity partner for the office, especially those working in creative fields.

Graphics Tests 

We test Windows PC graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).

To further measure GPU performance, we also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

The X1 Yoga and its rivals are just fine for solitaire and streaming but can't play the latest, most demanding games, much less many modern casual ones. It's nothing we haven't seen in a thousand reviews of laptops with integrated graphics, but it's worth repeating that would-be gamers want a notebook with a discrete GPU. Not to mention that workers in need of heavy graphics performance should consider a mobile workstation.

Battery and Display Tests 

We test laptop battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window)) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

To evaluate display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

Nearly 14 hours of battery life is terrific for a 2-in-1 or even an ultraportable, and it outlasted the HP by almost 2 hours, so we won't grumble that the ThinkPad didn't last quite as long as the Dell and Asus. The Lenovo also packs a high-quality display that's well shy of workstation-class color fidelity but is plenty vivid and bright enough for mainstream apps.

Verdict: Ready for the Corner Office, or a Long Flight 

The ThinkPad X1 Yoga isn't the bargain that Lenovo's 14-inch Yoga 9i or Lenovo Yoga 7i Gen 7 are, but business laptops cost more than consumer models when individually priced. Our Gen 8 review unit doesn't have Intel vPro manageability, but it has MIL-STD 810H sturdiness and a three-year courier or carry-in warranty as distinct advantages over civilian convertibles.

If you (or your company's fleet-buying discount) can afford it, the X1 Yoga is a splendid office 2-in-1 that stands proudly alongside the superlative X1 Carbon. The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 8 is considerably more impressive—and not much more expensive—than Lenovo's small-business 2-in-1, the Lenovo ThinkBook 14s Yoga Gen 3, and it earns our Editors' Choice award in the category.