Lenovo Yoga 6 (13-Inch) Review

The 13-inch Lenovo Yoga 6 (starts at $649.99; $949.99 as tested) looks unassuming, but it represents a strong overall package. Our configuration of this convertible laptop is reasonably priced for a Ryzen 7 CPU with 16GB of memory, delivering good all-around performance, especially for less than $1,000. The build is slim and portable, the battery life is remarkable, and the port selection is solid. There’s a little flex in the chassis if you press, and you might love or hate the distinctive fabric lid. But the Yoga 6 is unequivocally a fast and portable convertible at a nice price.

Let's Do Some Yoga: A Slim-And-Light Convertible

There’s no getting around this aspect of the design, so let’s jump right in: The lid on this laptop is fabric! It looks like denim, and feels a bit like it too, though even more textured, especially since it’s tightly bound to the lid. The color is what Lenovo dubs Abyss Blue, and Lenovo describes the material as stain-resistant. (I did not try spilling anything on it.) The color is slightly different from the color of the rest of the chassis, mainly due to the material difference, but the contrast mostly works.

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(Photo: Molly Flores)

The fabric is pleasant to the touch, and unique, though it will be divisive. With it in front of me here, I feel vaguely positive about it, yet I can’t say I’d necessarily choose it, at least not over a metal lid. If we’re talking about a lid in cheaper or more generic plastic, though, this may well be a better solution. Given the rest of this laptop is plastic, the lid may be the right choice. If nothing else, it runs the risk of looking dated before long, but points to Lenovo for trying something fresh.

As for the rest of its physical design, the Yoga 6 is highly portable for a 13-incher. The plastic build means a light chassis, and it’s very easy to carry and pack at 0.72 by 12.1 by 8.1 inches (HWD) and 2.9 pounds. That’s not the lightest 13-inch laptop you’ll find, but it’s a few hundredths of a pound difference, in most comparison cases. The bottom line is that this system is highly totable, but there is flex around the bottom of the keyboard and top of the touchpad if you press down. It’s a result of the thin build, but it shouldn’t be much of a problem through normal use, as the bottom and lid feel sturdier.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

That polished overall design extends to the keyboard and touchpad. They’re not luxurious, but given the base price of this system, they're everything we expect from a Lenovo laptop, most of which tend to have above-average keyboards. The touchpad is slick, not a cheap textured plastic, and is responsive. The keys have more travel than you may expect for a laptop this size, too. The keyboard feels comfortable for typing, and the keycaps dodge the pitfall of being too small.

The convertibility of this system isn’t remarkable by modern standards, but it does its job. You can flip and position this laptop as you’d like, and the hinges have good resistance.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Through normal use, a few times, even when idling, the fans revved up at odd intervals. The performance felt a little clunky on the Windows desktop when that happened, so it read more like a software issue, and matters returned to normal upon reset. During normal workloads, the fans were audible, and occasionally loud, but nothing too out of the ordinary.

A Closer Look at the Screen

I mentioned the display, but a closer look is needed. It measures 13.3 inches diagonally, with a full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) native resolution. That’s average these days, but the quality is good. This is a touch panel, a given since this is a convertible laptop, so it has a glossy finish instead of matte. 

(Photo: Molly Flores)

This usually makes colors pop a bit more than the alternative matte finish, but there are also more reflections off glass, so mind your lighting setup. The panel is rated at 300 nits, which isn’t incredibly bright, but in my use it was bright enough to help cut down glare. The colors and sharpness are solid as well.

The speakers are above average, particularly in terms of volume. This little system gets quite loud, which I first noticed by accidentally blaring sound at maximum volume, but it made me take notice. The Dolby Atmos speakers mostly maintain quality at higher volumes, but deeper tones start to sound like they’re buzzing rather than sounding rich. On the whole, though, audio is a high note.

The webcam on the Yoga 6, on the other hand, is a so-so 720p camera. The picture quality is just okay, with the usual sort of fuzziness and difficulty with strong background lighting that you’ve likely come to expect with average laptop webcams. It’s not bad, just disappointingly standard fare.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

As far as connectivity, the left flank holds a USB-C port with power delivery (the main charging port), a USB 3.2 Type-A port, and a headphone jack. On the right, you’ll find another USB-C port (with DisplayPort support) and another USB 3.2 port.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Testing the Yoga 6: Ryzen Above the Rest

Lenovo vends a few models of this laptop, with the base version starting at $649.99. That nets you an AMD Ryzen 5 4500U CPU, 8GB of memory, and a 512GB SSD. All models use AMD Radeon Graphics, so this is not a pro 3D or gaming machine by any stretch. 

Our $949.99 unit upgrades in two key areas: a bump up to a Ryzen 7 5700U and to 16GB of memory. Otherwise, it’s the same. This model is available through Best Buy, while Lenovo’s site has a slightly different combination of configurations. All things considered, our unit is a fairly priced mix of specs and build quality. Let’s see how it performs.

The table below contains the names and specs of the laptops we’ll compare against the Yoga 6: the Asus ZenBook 13, the Lenovo ThinkBook 13x, the Microsoft Surface Laptop 3, and the XPG Xenia 14. Some of these are a bit more expensive than our Yoga 6 tester, but much of the extra cost comes down to non-performance aspects like display resolution and storage capacity, and the base models of each are around the same price.

Productivity Tests

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage.

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 Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro 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).

Our final productivity test is workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, 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.

The Yoga 6 mostly finishes first or second on the media tests, beating out the Intel machines on average, and sometimes by a fairly wide margin. The latter part is not surprising, as we’ve seen consistent AMD dominance on mobile with these Ryzen processors, and it’s right up there with the ZenBook 13. 

Outside of these head-to-heads, these results show that the Yoga 6 can work through media tasks as needed. The numbers are good, not great, though. This laptop is unequivocally not a specialized machine for professionals. This machine can do for short or hobby video editing, but it isn’t suited to professional workloads unless you don’t mind some waiting.

Graphics and Gaming Tests

We test Windows PCs' 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).

There's not much to say based on these results: All the systems are roughly equal, but it's because they're on the same baseline of integrated graphics performance. They're all equally capable of light gaming and very light 3D loads, but shouldn't be relied on for any GPU-based tasks.

Battery and Display Tests

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100% until the system quits. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite to measure notebook screens' coverage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts and their brightness in nits (candelas per square meter) at 50% and 100% brightness.

The Yoga 6’s battery life is stellar, reaching over 19 hours. Needless to say, that easily qualifies as all-day battery life (and then some). You won’t have to worry about taking this laptop with you away from the charger for long stretches. As far as the display, the color gamut coverage is so-so, but the maximum brightness is as advertised. The lower brightness settings are darker than average, and the lowest setting just turns the screen off.

An Affordable, Portable Convertible

The 13-inch Yoga 6 grew on us from our initial impressions, proving itself a solid all-around convertible. The price is very fair for the components, and the build quality doesn’t leave much room for complaint. The base model would be a great deal too, if you’re okay with a slightly lower amount of power. 

The display and webcam don't distinguish themselves, but hitting average in some areas is fine at this price point. If you’re shopping for a no-fuss, sub-$1,000 ultraportable, and you like the fabric lid, you could do much worse than the Yoga 6.