Dell, Lenovo new release laptops to take on Apple MacBooks
Lenovo and Dell are offering shiny, premium lightweight yet powerful Windows laptops to compete for consumers.
Windows laptops have faced an uphill battle in 2022. Their all round capability has been surpassed by Apple’s new MacBooks with in-house designed chips. Apple’s ARM based processors have offered increased power and graphics capability, and longer battery life at an affordable price – all at the same time.
Intel and AMD laptops still offer plenty of power and you get reasonable battery life – typically 8 to 10 hours of everyday use, but not the 20 hours that, say, the 2022 13-inch MacBook Pro offers. You also don’t get Apple’s advanced neural engine supporting machine learning software.
Lenovo and Dell have showed off new shiny premium lightweight consumer laptops offering capable computing on the go.
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Lenovo 14-inch Yoga Slim 7 Pro X
Lenovo Yoga series originally was about devices that performed contortions. You could rotate the screen almost 360 degrees to transition from laptop mode to tablet, tent and display modes. The Yoga Slim 7 Pro X (14ARH7) screen opens to 180 degrees but not beyond.
There are lots of variations of the Yoga Slim. You can opt for Intel and AMD Ryzen processors, various memory and SSD configurations, and choose between dedicated and on-board graphics. An Nvideo GeForce RTX 3050 leads the range. They start around $1500 but can cost several thousand.
My review unit had an AMD Ryzen 7 processor and high end RTX graphics.
It is lightweight with a high resolution 3K touch screen, with a serviceable 400 nits of brightness and fast 120 Hertz adaptive screen refresh rate, making it suited to gaming.
As with Lenovo laptops generally it has excellent, well spaced out keys and a large trackpad. However, the function keys along the top row are very small, not even half sized.
The Yoga is slightly bigger and heavier than a 2022 MacBook Air (1.45kg v 1.24kg) and you get a good smattering of ports – 2 x USB-C, 2 x USB-A, an audio combo jack, and a 1080p quality front-facing camera. A privacy switch at right disables the camera. Music sound quality is OK but not outstanding.
The Ryzen 7 processor didn’t match the Apple’s M2 chip for single core (1413) and multi core (8870) performance during benchmarking, but the Yoga’s dedicated graphics card returned excellent GPU performance.
It survived for 8 hours 50 minutes playing 1080p video continuously at 200 nits of brightness.
The Yoga Slim 7 Pro X is stylish and offers power in a lightweight form factor. From $2949.
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Dell XPS 13 Plus (9320)
Dell’s latest XPS 13 exudes elegance. It has an aluminium shell and a small, thin and lightweight form factor. It’s just 15.28mm thick and weighs 1.24kg.
As with the Lenovo, there’s lots of variations. There’s a variety of 13.4-inch displays, each with 500 nits of brightness and a choice of 4K, 3.5K and full HD resolution. Mine was the XPS 13 Plus non-touch model.
What sets it apart is the innovation around the keyboard and touchpad. The keyboard is tiled with individual keys making a continuous surface across the keyboard without gaps. There are no individual top row keys; instead you control audio, brightness and other functions from a series of lights along the top-row.
The touchpad takes up the bottom third of the keyboard. While you can use the entire width of the keyboard to control the cursor, there are no depressions marking where the touchpad area starts and ends. That means guessing which I wasn’t keen on. Typing is comfortable nonetheless although the LEDs lighting individual keys lettering can appear faint in bright lighting.
The notebook has just two ports, both Thunderbolt 4 USB Type-C ports with DisplayPort and power delivery capability. You need an adaptor for other connections such as HDMI or Ethernet.
My review unit had an Intel Evo i7 1260p processor with four fast performance cores and eight efficiency cores. These processors are based around key performance indicators but are not necessarily the most powerful.
In benchmarking, Geekbeek scored 876 for single core and 5730 for multi core operation, which is less than for the Yoga Slim. The XPS 13 uses on-board Intel Iris XE graphics. While it’s not as powerful as dedicated graphics, it can power medium and better gaming.
Battery life isn’t that fantastic; 7 hours 52 minutes playing 1080p video at 200 nits brightness but that may be all you need for day-to-day on the road. My review unit costs $2519.