With its 14-inch OLED display, 8-core AMD Ryzen processor, NVIDIA GeForce MX450 graphics, military-grade carbon-fibre construction, almost all-day battery life and a smooth and fast-running Windows 11 operating system, Lenovo’s Yoga Slim 7 Carbon is designed to meet the loftiest of expectations and then some.
In terms of handling, this powerhouse notebook is very light (just a little over 1 kg) and unlike most laptops with a 14-inch screen is surprisingly compact. With its nearly frameless display and space-saving keyboard layout, it could easily be pegged for a 12-inch notebook.
It also helps that Yoga Slim 7 Carbon has a very long battery life (about 12 to 14 hours) that could pretty much last an entire day at school or the office, which means that when fully charged, you can confidently leave its Rapid Charge Express charger behind. That also means less extra weight inside your laptop bag to lug around.
The estimated battery life, of course, is for typical daily use involving the usual Office apps, surfing the internet, basic photo editing, watching a couple of movies and playing around two hours of casual games. Battery life takes a slight hit with tasks like more intensive editing of graphics and videos, watching more movies and/or playing more hours of graphics-intensive games like the latest incarnations of Call of Duty, Halo or Grand Theft Auto.
In which case, it would be smart to have that rapid charger around, as true to its name, it does charge quite rapidly. You won’t likely mind lugging the charger’s extra weight since 15 minutes of charging will already get you three hours of video playback.
We will not blame you if you would love to watch plenty of movies and play a lot of games with the Yoga Slim 7 Carbon. The immersive experience offered by its dazzling color-calibrated QHD+ OLED True Black display, which is already impressive in itself and further enhanced with Dolby Vision HDR for exceptional image reproduction, is nothing short of stunning. You get deeper black levels, faster response time, power efficiency and better contrast ratios. Streaming content from Netflix and Discovery+ never looked this amazing.
And when there’s Dolby Vision, there’s also Dolby Atmos that provides high-definition three-dimensional sound that comes alive with deeper bass and the Yoga Slim 7 Carbon’s dual subwoofers. Action-packed movies, first-person shooter games and streaming music from Spotify is even more immersive when using headphones especially those high-end over ear types.
For getting work done, to say that the Yoga Slim 7 Carbon is a joy to use is an understatement. Lenovo’s patented TrueStrike keyboard may look deceptively compact but the keys are nearly full-sized and each key is nicely spaced and naturally backlit, making it ideal to work at night with only the desk lamp on.
The generally large touchpad makes navigating a breeze but if you are more comfortable with a mouse, the Yoga Slim 7 Carbon’s responsiveness to wireless devices makes navigating your favorite website or playing your favorite PC game a breeze.
And since this laptop has more than enough horsepower to more than hold its own against dedicated gaming machines, it naturally can handle multitasking with ease and aplomb.
Lenovo makes a big thing about its next-generation smart A1 chip and for good reason. It’s designed to improve security and optimize computing that includes numerous functions including zero-touch login and enhanced privacy—things that we more often than not take for granted but really shouldn’t.
There are smart sensors that increase responsiveness, fine-tune backlight brightness, put the computer to sleep when you leave and wake it when it senses your presence again, and toggle between faster processing power and conserving energy, among other features that make smart computing with the Yoga Slim 7 Carbon, well, smart.
The result is a user experience to write home about and yes, in a time when hacking and identity theft is very much prevalent, that much-needed peace of mind.
And did we tell you how sexy this lean and mean little machine is? One look at the Yoga Slim 7 Carbon and it has both “buy me” and “must-have” written all over it.
Lenovo and its Carbon imprint is synonymous with tough, durable computers and the Yoga Slim 7 Carbon is no exception. Made from aero-grade strength carbon fibre, its 2nd generation proprietary Web-Core 2.0 multi-layer Carbon Fibre also significantly reduces weight while increasing durability.
The Yoga Slim 7 Carbon has also been subjected to 9 MIL‑STD 810H military‑grade tests, that include extreme‑temperature conditions, drop instances to humidity fluctuations. We were tempted to put the Yoga Slim 7 Carbon to our own torture tests but given our long history with Lenovo computers, I guess it’s fairly reasonable to take Lenovo’s claim for it or at least close to being “a machine that is built to withstand whatever life throws at it.”
Aside from its industrial strength built, equally admirable is the Yoga Slim 7 Carbon’s cloud gray finish that exudes elegance from the get-go and is punctuated by the tabbed Lenovo logo.
With Wi-Fi 6 support that pretty much assures fast Gigabit speeds, it also has PCIe SSD storage and three USB Type-C ports; two for supporting external 4K displays, speedy USB 3.2 Gen 2 connections and power delivery charging, and one additional port for external peripherals. Impressive as it already is right now, this machine will not be out of place in the immediate future either.
Being a premium device and considered a flagship product, it’s understandable that Lenovo’s Yoga Slim 7 Carbon also carries a premium price tag. But if budget is not an issue, getting your hands on this no-nonsense laptop that covers everything you need in a next-generation machine is simply a no-brainer. (Photos and video by Ginger Franz Ocampo/BusinessMirror)