Evaluating the Readiness of Windows for Qualcomm Snapdragon in the Latest Lenovo Yoga Slim ^7X Laptop Review

Key Takeaways

• The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x offers great battery life, a nice OLED screen, and an ARM-based chipset.
• Its slim design means limited ports with no USB-A or Thunderbolt support.
• Windows 11 ARM software compatibility issues hinder overall performance.

The first wave of Windows “Copilot+ PCs” has arrived, promising all-day battery life, greater power efficiency, and great performance to better match Apple’s MacBook lineup. The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x is one of the first models to reach store shelves, but it doesn’t quite live up to the hype.

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x

5/ 10

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x is one of the first Copilot+ PC laptops, with all-day battery life, an OLED screen, and a power-efficient ARM-based Snapdragon X Elite chipset.

Pros

• Great battery life
• Slim and light design
• Fantastic OLED screen

Cons

• ARM Windows 11 has software compatibility issues
• No USB-A ports
• No Thunderbolt support

$1199 at Lenovo $1199.99 at Best Buy

Price and Availability

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x starts at $1,199 in the United States. That base model has a Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 Processor, Windows 11 Home ARM Edition, 16GB RAM, a 512GB SSD for storage, and a 14.5-inch 3K OLED touchscreen. Lenovo also sells a higher-end model for $1,289.99 model with a larger 1TB SSD.

Lenovo’s online store gives you a few options for customizing the hardware, including upgrading the RAM from 16GB to 32GB (a $69 charge at launch), bumping up the SSD from 512GB to 1TB (a $45 charge), and upgrading to Windows 11 Pro (for $28). You can replace the SSD and upgrade Windows at any time after purchase, but the RAM is not user-upgradable.

Specifications

Operating System

Windows 11

CPU

Snapdragon X Elite

GPU

Qualcomm Adreno

RAM

Up to 32GB

Storage

Up to 1TB

Battery

70Wh

Display (Size, Resolution)

14.5-inch 3K OLED touchscreen

Speakers

4 stereo speakers

Colors

Cosmic Blue

Ports

3 x USB 4 Gen 3 Type-C

Network

WiFi 7 802.11BE, Bluetooth 5.3

Dimensions

12.80 x 8.86 x 0.51in

Weight

2.82lbs (1.28kg)

Webcam

1080p

Expand

Design: The Ports Are Lacking

Even though the Yoga Slim 7x might have exciting new hardware and software, the design is typical for an ultrabook PC. It packs a large 14.5-inch screen, front-firing speakers, and a large keyboard and trackpad into a package measuring 12.80 x 8.86 inches. It weighs slightly more than the current 13-inch MacBook Air, at just 2.82 pounds.

The Yoga Slim 7x is primarily built with aluminum, not plastic, and the build quality seems acceptable. It doesn’t feel as cheap as some other laptops, but I can flex the keyboard or display panel a bit. The coating on the back of the screen panel is also a magnet for smudges.

Jerome Thomas / How-To Geek

Lenovo’s keyboards are generally high quality, and I don’t have any big complaints about the keyboard on the Yoga Slim 7x. There’s a dedicated function row with shortcuts for brightness, volume, microphone access, locking the screen, and even opening the calculator. The keys are all backlit, and you can toggle the key brightness by holding down the function key while pressing the space bar. The trackpad below the keyboard is spacious, too.

The Yoga Slim 7x is one of several new Windows laptops with a dedicated Copilot key on the keyboard, which opens Microsoft’s AI chatbot assistant when pressed. You can use Microsoft PowerToys or a third-party utility to remap that to perform other actions—I changed it to act as a play and pause button because there’s not a dedicated key for that on the keyboard.

There are speakers on each side of the keyboard, each with 2W woofers and 2W tweeters, complete with a “Dolby Atmos Smart Amplifier.” They don’t sound great, especially in comparison to Apple’s recent laptops—there is very little base, and some distortion is noticeable at higher volumes.

Jerome Thomas / How-To Geek

The Yoga Slim 7x has three USB Type-C ports, all of which support USB4 Gen 3, USB Power Delivery (USB-PD) 3.1, and DisplayPort 1.4. Those are the only physical ports on this computer. You don’t get a headphone jack, an SD card reader, USB Type-A ports, or anything else. It’s great that all three ports work the same, so you can use any of them for power input or a USB hub , but I wish there were better built-in options for connectivity. There’s also no support for Thunderbolt, so some types of external drives, monitors, and hubs won’t work.

There’s also a 1080p webcam above the display, with a switch on the side of the bottom lid for turning it on or off. There isn’t a physical cover for the webcam, though.

Finally, even though this laptop is sold under the Yoga brand, this is not a convertible laptop. The screen can be pushed back to nearly flat with the keyboard, but it cannot bend all the way around for tent mode or functioning as a tablet.

Display: A Fantastic OLED

The Yoga Slim 7x has an excellent screen. It’s a large 14.5-inch OLED panel, with a resolution of 2,944 x 1,840 (3K) and a 16:10 aspect ratio. The screen also has touch support, a 100,000:1 contrast ratio, a 90Hz refresh rate, and a 100% DCI-P3 100% sRGB color gamut. That all adds up to a display that looks great and has super-smooth animations, no matter if you’re playing games, watching movies, or just reading emails.

Lenovo includes the ‘X-Rite Color Assistant’ application, accessible from the taskbar status icons, which allows you to switch between different color profiles. I’m not a graphic designer, so I just stuck to the default color settings.

Jerome Thomas / How-To Geek

The 90Hz refresh rate gives you more fluid animations and more responsive games than a typical 60Hz screen while using less power than the 120Hz screens that are more common on smartphones and gaming hardware. However, Windows still isn’t consistent with supporting high refresh rates. Moving around windows and scrolling through the Microsoft Store might be silky smooth, but opening the Start menu or performing other actions seem to be stuck at 60Hz.

The display also supports HDR content, either through VESA DisplayHDR True Black 600 or Dolby Vision. However, there are still not many applications and games on Windows that support HDR, including most streaming services.

Software: Hello, ARM Windows

The Yoga Slim 7x has an ARM-based Snapdragon X Elite processor, which means it runs Windows 11 for ARM instead of the typical Windows 11 operating system for x86-based Intel and AMD processors. The ARM edition looks exactly like Windows 11 on every other PC, and it has all the same included applications, but software and driver compatibility are a bit different.

Most applications, games, and drivers for Windows were built for 32-bit or 64-bit x86 computers, though most web browsers and some other applications are now ARM-native as well. Windows on ARM can run most x86 applications and games with the Prism compatibility layer , which translates x86 code to ARM code as needed.

When the Prism emulator works, you don’t notice it at all, though the software might run a bit slower than it would on a comparable Intel or AMD-powered computer. This is also similar to how the Rosetta 2 emulation layer works on Mac computers with ARM-based Apple Silicon chips.

Some of the applications I use every day already have ARM-native versions, including Firefox, Slack, Outlook, and Spotify. Discord doesn’t have an ARM version yet, so it runs as an emulated x86 application, and performance randomly slowed down about two weeks into my review period. I tried a few games, with mixed results: “Civilization VI” worked well, but “Overwatch” had frequent stuttering that seemed to happen regardless of the graphical quality setting. Some games don’t open at all, and most games from the Microsoft Store or Xbox app can’t be installed. Microsoft is working to improve game performance in x86 emulation, but the inconsistent compatibility is something to keep in mind with the Yoga Slim 7x and other ARM-based Windows computers.

Some software just doesn’t exist on ARM Windows and can’t be emulated. If you have a device that needs specific third-party drivers to function, instead of the generic drivers available through Windows Update, it probably won’t work. You also can’t use virtualization software and some emulators—VirtualBox and VMWare don’t have ARM Windows versions. I couldn’t try Microsoft’s HyperV virtualization tool , because it needs Windows 11 Pro. This laptop ships with Windows 11 Home. You can use the Windows Subsystem for Linux , though it will install ARM Linux, which doesn’t have all the same software as x86 Linux.

This new ARM laptop still has some software bloat, like McAfee antivirus and random Lenovo tools. I had to uninstall McAfee after a few days because it kept showing annoying popups and blocked some applications from running. Microsoft is also increasingly aggressive with prompts to use the Edge browser and defaulting to OneDrive for storage in Windows 11.

Finally, it’s worth noting that Windows 11 is currently the only operating system for these Snapdragon X laptops. If you want to give desktop Linux a serious try, buy a different laptop with an x86 Intel or AMD CPU (or better yet, a laptop designed specifically for Linux ).

Performance: Great, If Your Apps Work

This is one of the first PC laptops with a Snapdragon X Elite chipset, and thankfully, it doesn’t disappoint. I spent most of my workday switching between Firefox, Slack, Discord, and Outlook, usually with music playing from Spotify or YouTube, and the laptop remained snappy and responsive the whole time. I tested the 16GB RAM model, but there’s also a 32GB RAM configuration—the memory is not user-upgradable.

In the Geekbench 6 CPU benchmark , the Yoga Slim 7x earned a respectable single-core score of 2,459 and a multi-core score of 13,439. It also got a 20,599 OpenCL score in the Geekbench 6 GPU test . That’s around the same performance as an Apple MacBook with an M2 or M3 chip, but not the higher-end MacBooks with M2/M3 Pro or Max chipsets. The 2024 Dell XPS 16 has an almost identical CPU score .

Jerome Thomas / How-To Geek

You can also play some games on the Yoga Slim 7x, with performance close to most other high-end ultrabooks. You won’t get a great experience with more demanding titles, like “Cyberpunk 2077” or “Baldur’s Gate 3,” but less demanding games might work. The x86 emulation layer is more of an issue with games than the Snapdragon’s raw performance, but hopefully, that will become better over time.

Even though the actual hardware in the Yoga Slim 7x is on par or exceeds most of the competition, your real-world performance will vary depending on how much of your software needs to be emulated.

Battery Life: All Day on a Charge

Windows laptops have historically struggled to maintain great battery life, thanks to the broken Modern Standby in many newer laptops , the inefficient architecture of x86-based processors, and other factors. Improved battery life was one of the promised advantages of the Snapdragon chip in the Yoga Slim 7x, and thankfully, that turns out to be true.

I was able to easily get all-day battery life on the Yoga Slim 7x, with my usual mix of managing emails, talking in Slack, juggling five to 20 tabs in Firefox, and checking Discord. The Snapdragon X Elite chipset also didn’t generate much heat, so when I wasn’t gaming or running benchmarks, the laptop fans were quiet or not running at all.

The battery life here is much closer to a tablet or MacBook than most other Windows laptops. It’s great to see Microsoft and Qualcomm make actual progress in this department, even if there are other limitations with this hardware that need to be improved.

The Competition: It’s Tough

The Yoga Slim 7x’s starting price around $1,200 in the United States is pretty typical for a Windows ultrabook. It’s competing directly with the 2024 Dell XPS 13 and 14 , both of which cost more than the Yoga ($1,399 and $1,699, respectively), as well as laptops like the new Surface Laptop and Samsung’s Galaxy Book lineup . The Yoga’s AMOLED screen might be hard to beat in this price segment, but the rest of the hardware is pretty standard, outside of the unique Snapdragon X chip.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that the 13-inch M2 MacBook Air starts at $1,099. The hardware is a poor match on paper, with only 8GB of unified memory and 256GB storage in the base configuration, but that hardware generally goes further on macOS than Windows. Apple’s modern M2 and M3 chips have similar power efficiency and battery life as the Snapdragon chip in the Yoga 7x, but software compatibility is far less of a gamble—as long as it’s available on macOS, anyway.

Should You Buy the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x?

Jerome Thomas / How-To Geek

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x is a great laptop at a glance, with a thin and light design, great performance, and all-day battery life. The OLED screen is especially great, but without a fully convertible 2-in-1 design, there’s not much point to this laptop having a touchscreen.

The greatest strength of the Yoga Slim 7x, the Snapdragon X Elite chipset, is also its greatest weakness. Beyond basic productivity apps and web browsers, software compatibility in ARM Windows is a crapshoot. Some applications and games just don’t work, while others have reduced performance, even compared to what you would get on an Intel or AMD-powered ultrabook around the same price. The software situation should improve over time, as more Windows software is updated to run natively on ARM chips and Microsoft improves the x86 emulation layer, but it still makes the Yoga Slim 7x a hard sell at the moment.

If you want a Windows laptop, and you primarily work in a web browser and basic productivity software, the Yoga Slim 7x is probably a good laptop. There are too many edge cases where it falls flat, though, and you shouldn’t pay this much money to be beta testers for Microsoft and Qualcomm. If you know the software you need works on ARM Windows, or the situation dramatically improves with Windows updates, consider picking it up on sale.

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x

5/ 10

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x is one of the first Copilot+ PC laptops, with all-day battery life, an OLED screen, and a power-efficient ARM-based Snapdragon X Elite chipset.

See at Lenovo $1199.99 at Best Buy