All right, today we're going to be taking a look at Lenovo's Yoga 7s, the 2in-1's. Basically, these are convertible laptops from Lenovo's value range. You got the IdeaPad Fives below them, and then the Yoga 9's above them. There are also traditional clamshell versions of these two laptops, the Slim 7 i14 and 15 or editions. I'll link our reviews of those laptops down below. Anyway, Sierra's here and she's going to walk you through the ins and outs of these two laptops and then at the end, I'm going to do something a little bit differently. I'm going to share my personal mini buying guide for choosing a bang for your buck laptop. just like one of these. Lenovo, like most laptop manufacturers, likes to keep their naming as confusing as possible. So, here's the difference. Lenovo is currently selling a wide variety of different Yoga 7 2in ones in both a 14 and 16in form factor. Firstly, if there is an I in the name, as in the Yoga 7i 2in116 we have, that means it has an Intel Lunar Lake processor. This is also called Core Ultra Series 2 with a V at the end. If it does not have an i, it is powered by an AMD Ryzen 5 or 7 processor that ends in a 300 number. Both of these processors, Intel or AMD, offer basic performance, but more than enough for people who are sticking to Microsoft Office, web browsing, and even learning to code. We feel the main difference is that the AMD model has a more powerful CPU. But if you want to do some light gaming, the Intel Core Ultra 7 processor gets you a more powerful GPU. The only other major difference we notice between versions is that when you buy from Lenovo's store, you get an included pen for your touchcreen. Well, it looks like you do not get one included from Best Buy. Lenovo also seem to have better deals on many of these models, so it's something to keep in mind. Deals obviously change, so make sure to check out our website, bestlaptop.dalss. We have a helpful price tracker that tracks prices across retailers. That way, you know when it's the best time to buy and where to buy from. Our 14-in came in a warm tone silver color, which looks nice, especially for the price. Our 16-in came in a darker gray, which looks more boring. Comparing the silver to HP's Omnibook X in its attractive blue color, we feel both look equally sharp. Although the Omnibook looks a tad more modern due to the squared off keys. Back on the Yoga 7s, both resist fingerprints on their lits. When you go to open the laptops, they do not open with one hand as the hinges are too stiff. This is disappointing, but it becomes helpful when you want to utilize the touchcreen or pen capabilities as the screen doesn't move. In my testing, the whole chassis was more likely to move before just the screen. Great stability for the artists out there. By the way, neither of our units came with the pen, but we have requested it, and we'll do a follow-up video on best twoin- ones where we'll test it out. On the Yogas, the screen and deck flex were quite minimal, leading to an overall sturdy feeling build. This also translates into them both being on the heavier end. That's when compared to all laptops with similar size screens. The 16-in weighs almost 4 1/2 lb, while the MacBook Air 15 weighs around a full pound less. Even other Windows thin and light laptops like the ZenBook S16 and Slim 7i15 only weigh around 3 12 lb. This weight factor seems to be one of the sacrifices you're making if you buy a budget 16-in laptop. The 14-in Yoga 7 is a little more reasonable at 3.1 lb, but still around a third of a pound more than competition like the ZenBook and MacBook Air, which come in under three. Luckily, its charger is pretty light, so if you like to carry your charger with you, that's a nice benefit. Last annoyance with the chassis is that our 14-inch model does not sit flat on the desk. We were honestly shocked by this as Lenovo 7 series laptops are their mid-range offering. These tend to meet a very consistent quality standard. We've only seen such build quality issues before in their much cheaper 1 and 3 series. So, we believe this is an anomaly. If your unit has a similar issue, please exchange it. Next, let's look at these two displays because they are very different. The 14-in version, whether it's a 7 or 7i, comes with a 1920 x 1200 60 Hz OLED display, which is vibrant and color accurate. It goes up to 395 nits of brightness, which is around what we expect from an OLED panel. But between that and its glossy finish, you may experience some reflections in a brighter environment or near a window. The only other negative on the smaller screen is that we did detect some PWM flickering at lower brightness. This is where the screen turns on and off extremely quickly to simulate lowering its brightness. Please be aware this is a common downside of most OLED displays in laptops at this price point. Unfortunately, we feel the 16-in display is disappointing by comparison. It is still only 1920 x 1200 at this bigger size, which lowers your pixels per inch below 150. This means that small text like you'd see on Excel may look a little blurry. Also, it's not an OLED like the 14-in. It's a 60 Hz IPS panel with even lower brightness at 350 nits and abysmal color accuracy. Reds look washed out, blues look muted. It's just not great at all. Unlike its competition, the Omnibook X and 7 Flip 16 and also the Dell Plus 16, there is no upgrade option on Lenovo's website, meaning you're stuck with the worst screen in this larger chassis. This is a major miss. If you want a value laptop with the best keyboard, though, Lenovo has you covered there. They may have cut corners in other places on this laptop, but the dish keys with an ample 1.5 mm of key travel make these Yoga 7s a joy to type on. The keyboards are not too clicky and loud, but not too mushy either. Among other competitors in the same category, they surely come out on top. Their layout is mostly standard with a slightly compressed style on the arrow keys, which I know Josh doesn't love. It's the one where the up and down key are both squished together in the middle, which may or may not bother you. I don't mind it as much as he does. The 16-in includes a standard numpad as well, which is nice to see considering the Omnibook X and 7 Flips didn't include one. We also like that the soft coating of the keys matches Lenovo's more premium brands like the 9i. Lastly, the fingerprint reader, which is the only biometric on these laptops, is in a really good location. My major con with the keyboard is its backlight, especially on the silver version. Both use a white backlight, which is hard to read against the silver one's white keys. There's also backlight bleed around the edges of the keys on both. If you use this laptop in a darker environment from some angles, like propped up on your lap, you're probably going to get blinded. The trackpad on these laptops gets the job done. It is a mechanical trackpad with a click that is a little stiff and loud. I didn't have any issue with the tracking, but Josh found a little resistance to it. He was comparing it to all other laptops, including more expensive ones. The trackpad on the 16 is pretty large, but I didn't experience any palm rejection issues on it. For ports, these Yoga 7s look like they have the same ports, but they are actually very different between the Intel and AMD versions. for our Yoga 7i with Intel. On the left side, we have HDMI 1.4B, USBC that supports Thunderbolt 4 and power delivery, as well as a headphone mic combo jack. On the right side, we have a USBA 5 GB port, another Thunderbolt 4 port, and a micro SD card reader, which is a bit of a strange inclusion for a laptop like this. Micro SD is normally used for people doing video work, such as taking drone footage. We'd also like to point out that HDMI 1.4b is an older standard that does not support an external monitor running at 4K 60 Hz. It taps out at 4K 30 Hz or 1440p 60 Hz. You'd have to connect via the Thunderbolt ports which support Display Port 2.1 instead. Now, how is the AMD version different even though it looks like it has the same ports? Well, firstly, they do have an HDMI 2.1 port which supports 4K 60 Hz and higher. However, the USBC ports do not support Thunderbolt 4. They both support power delivery and USB speeds up to 10 Gbit. One of these ports only goes up to display port 1.4A and the other 2.1. Keep in mind, display port 1.4 is better than HDMI 1.4, meaning both sides of the AMD laptop still have a port that supports 4K 60 Hz and sometimes higher. This whole section has been nice and confusing, so double check the ports on the one you are looking at before buying. For example, some people may need 4K 60 Hz from their HDMI port as they don't want to tie up one of their USBC ports for a monitor. Don't forget, the only way to charge the laptop is via one of the USBC ports, so you may only have one available unless you use a charging dock. Back on the positive though, we are happy to see a charging and docking port on both sides of the laptop, so cables are unlikely to get in your way. This is an advantage of the Yoga 7 over the Omnibooks and Dells at this price point. These laptops also have Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4, which is very nice to see. Here's how the 1440p webcam looks and sounds on the 14-in Yoga 7. Here's how the webcam looks and sounds with overhead lighting only instead of our studio lights. Both webcams do offer a physical privacy shutter, but here's how the 1080p webcam looks and sounds on the 16-in Yoga 7. Here's that same 1080p webcam in just overhead lighting. The speakers sound poor and lack bass. And even though both speakers appear to be upward facing, they are not. So, the sound will get worse if you use it on a blanket. Take a listen. [Applause] [Music] Next, let's look at how these different processors perform. One thing to note, although we have a Core Ultra 7 and Ryzen 7 in our two Yoga 7s, we do have a lower five version of both of those CPUs on the graphs, so you can get an idea at how they might perform. Those processors are available in the even cheaper configurations of these Yoga 7s, just like they are in HP's Omnibook X and 7 series. We'll start with Geekbench, which tests a variety of common performance tasks. In this test, Apple's M4 performs the best, then Intel's Aero Lake H. Here we are looking at comparable laptops, but neither of these CPUs are available in these yogas. Out of the ones that are, the Ryzen 7 is the best, followed by a tie between the Intel Ultra 7 and Ryzen 5. The Ultra 5 trails behind. Moving over to Cinebench, which tests processor when it's maxed out. The best chip is Qualcomm's X Elite, at least in multi-core. Apple's M4 found in the MacBook Air and Intel's AeroLake H are next. Out of the chips available in these laptops, though, Ryzen 7 and 5 chips are ahead of Intel's Ultra 7 and 5. Please note, Intel does do well in single core, which may make laptops with these chips feel a little more snappy than their multi-core scores would indicate. But the reverse occurs when we measure integrated GPU performance. This will be relevant if you want to do some light photo editing or gaming. Starting with Wildlife Extreme, which allows us to compare to Mac OS. Here we see quite a spread. The 860M graphics in the Ryzen 7s do very poorly, surprisingly beat out by the lower tier 840M graphics in the Ryzen 5 processor. Next, we see the lower tier 130V graphics in the Ultra 5 processor score around 5,000, and the higher tier 140V graphics from the Ultra 7 chips score around 7 to 7500. The MacBook Air wins here overall, but Lunar Leak's Ultra 7 graphics are still the best we've seen in a Windows Light user chip like this one. Switching over to Time Spy, which is a more realistic gaming benchmark. The story is similar. AMD's integrated graphics are the worst despite their CPU scores being solid, and the Ultra 7 chips with the 140V graphics win out again. You'll notice the 140T graphics have also been doing well. Those are a part of Intel's better performing Aerolake range, which you can get in Asus's ZenBook 14. Now, a lot of people don't actually care about multi-core score or integrated graphics, but they do care about how much heat and fan noise a laptop makes during intensive tasks. Looking at Cinebench, which represents intensive CPU tasks, the 16-in Yoga has more surface area to dissipate heat and therefore stays a bit cooler. The higher power Ryzen 7 CPU in the 14-in chassis doesn't seem to fare as well. Anything above 40 starts to get a little uncomfortable, which is disappointing to see compared to the ZenBook 14 with the same processor. Part of the reason for this may be because it doesn't run as fans as high as the ZenBook 14, though, only hitting 48 dB instead of a more obtrusive 52. You'll notice the heat and fan noise from both of these laptops is pretty average. Nothing crazy bad, but nothing phenomenal either. In light use, which is what most people will do on these laptops, they stayed quiet and cool in their balance modes. Last big thing is battery. Firstly, looking at performance while unplugged, it looks like neither of the Yoga 7s limit their performance, so that's good. Next, we'll go over battery life. There are many factors that affect this, such as screen type, resolution, brightness, and processor. Your battery life may be different than ours if you get a different configuration of this laptop. When we're looking at how long it takes for the battery to die, we test two different use cases: video playback and office productivity. Let's start with how long it can last while playing a downloaded movie on repeat. Here, the Yoga 7 with the 14-inch OLED screen and AMD processors seems to do the best between the two, but not as good as some competition, like the Omnibook X Flip with Ultra 5 or the ZenBook with Ryzen 7. This result may seem odd considering the Omnibook has a smaller battery, but that is likely negated by it having the lowest performing processor. Looking at the 16-in Yoga 7i, it does all right, but not as well as we'd like. Switching over to the office productivity use case, we now see the Yoga 7i6 does the best, while the rest of these all seem to drop. This is likely because this is a more realistic use case of Microsoft Office tasks and it is a harder test. All of these laptops still last for over 8 hours though, so that's enough battery to get you through the workday. Now, if you want to run Linux, we did test Fedora 42 on both the AMD and Intel versions of the laptop. On the AMD version, only Bluetooth didn't work. Everything else was functional. On the Intel version, everything worked, which is nice to see. Now, I'll hand it back to Josh to close us out. All right, as Sierra and I were finishing this review, we asked each other, would we buy one of these laptops at over $1,000? Absolutely not. You should wait for more premium laptops to go on sale. HP's Omnibook Ultra Flip or Lenovo Zone Yoga 9i. They're both a step up in quality over these two. Also, most people who buy twoin-one laptops, they never use them as actual twoin-1s. If that's you, then there are a ton of better laptops to consider for around $1,000. If you're okay with Mac OS, Apple's MacBook Airs are far more premium. They get a lot of little things right that these just don't. If you're more comfortable with Windows though, the Omnibook Ultra or ZenBook 14 have much more powerful CPUs. Even Lenovo Slim 7i's, the traditional clamshell version of these laptops, I'd buy over these ones. I just feel they're better all round machines. Now, I'm not saying I don't recommend these Yoga 7 2in-1s. We just feel that they only become competitive below $1,000. Out of the valueoriented 2in1's that we've tested, Sierra prefers this Yoga 714 because of its OLED display. Even though it's only got a 1920 resolution, she feels on a small 14-inch panel, it's fine. She also really likes the Yoga's keyboard and just likes Lenovo as a brand. I, on the other hand, would get the HP Omnibook X Flip 14. For around $900, I can get that laptop with Intel's Ultra 7 L processor. I play casual games, you see, and that processor has the best integrated graphics. The Omnibook X, it also has a higher resolution OLED display, and I'm a pixel peeper, guys. I find that resolution, it makes small text just look crisper. And we didn't talk about this, but the Omnibook's front edge is softer and more rounded. I found the Yogas just cut into my wrist a tiny bit. That being said, the Omnibook X Flip 14, it does have a smaller battery than the Yoga, but I'm okay carrying a small charger with me. Finally, we've mentioned sales a lot in this video because these laptops should really only be bought on one. Our website, bestlaptop.deals, has a price tracker that tracks sales across retailers. That way you'll know when it's the best time to buy. We also just launched price drop notifications, so go set one of those. Till next time, go do something awesome with your day and we will catch you later.