Tantra Analyst

Since the announcement on May 20^th, 2024, the PC industry has been abuzz with the new generation CoPilot+ PCs. Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x laptop was among over 20 models launched in June 2024. These PCs have started shipping as we enter the busy back-to-school season, which has traditionally been one of the peak buying periods for consumer PCs. 

That’s exactly what I focused on when I tested and used the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x over the last three weeks. My verdict: Excellent hardware, most commonly used apps work, but ensure the specific apps and games you need are supported before buying.

Great hardware, battery life, and looks

As the name suggests, the Yoga Slim 7x is a sleek, light, and lovely 14-inch premium consumer laptop. It is available only in a gorgeous cosmic blue color. At only 12.9mm thin and weighing 2.82 lbs., it is highly portable. For kids, this will almost feel like carrying another notebook when carrying it around the campus.

The top three unmissable features for buying this laptop are:1) Excellent performance, 2) Long battery life, and 3) Beautiful OLED display. The new powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite platform powering this PC brings the first two. Proven by a score of benchmarks, X Elite is one of the best, if not the best laptop SoC in the market today. It handled everything I threw at it, from apps to games, like a champ (check the apps section below). They all worked without the computer getting hot and, in many cases, without turning the fan on. It only got warm, and fans turned on when playing intense games or for an extended time.

Everybody, whether you are a student, a regular consumer, a productivity user, or a small business owner, will love this laptop for its very long battery life, thanks again to X Elite.  Not surprisingly, that was also one of the key design criteria for CoPilot+ PCs, as mentioned by Pooja Sathe, Lenovo’s Director and Category Leader of Worldwide Commercial AI PCs, on our Tantras Mantra podcast. If you are a power user, the 70 Wh battery will easily last more than a day. If you are a light user, it can go even a couple of days without charging. Most importantly, it goes to real sleep when you put it to sleep, and all the battery life remains intact while sleeping. And comes back from sleep very quickly, unlike today’s Windows laptops. All this means you don’t have to lug along the charger for a full day of classes or work. The included charger provides a couple of hours of runtime with only 15 minutes of charge. 

The bright 14.5” 3K OLED touch display with Dolby Vision and 90Hz refresh rate is worthy of Yoga-class and is stunning, offering better viewing even in bright sunlight. So, if you are a student sitting on the lawn during sunny summer or spring days, you can still work on it. The FHD Camera offers crystal clear video calls, the IR sensor saves the battery by turning off the display when not needed, and the manual privacy shutter gives complete peace of mind.

CoPilot+ features—some useful, others good to have

The name-sake features of this laptop were launched with a lot of fanfare. However, one of the marquee features, much promoted by Microsoft—Recall—was recalled (pun intended) before shipping due to privacy concerns. I tested all the CoPilot+, i.e., AI features on this laptop. All of them worked well. But how much you really need them is a question worth pondering. My most used feature was Windows Studio Effects. It substantially increases the quality and utility of the camera on Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and video apps, with auto framing, eye contact, portrait light, filters, and other features. Many laptops today offer some of these as proprietary features, but now they are democratized by CoPilot+.

The next most used feature was Live Captions, which automatically translates any content you are listening to on the laptop to 44 languages. It works reasonably well. I tried English captions for Hindi content. The translation was accurate when the content was more structured, like a newscast. However, accuracy degraded if the speech was fast, informal, conversational, or had an accent. The use of NPU for this was clearly visible when checked through processor utilization.

I didn’t use the Co-creator much. But it seems like a useful tool for students to create diagrams, etc., for their schoolwork. These features currently seem “good to have” rather than an absolute necessity and may not be a major reason to buy CoPilot+ PCs now. However, one should remember that AI is an incredibly fast-moving field. It is highly conceivable that new, interesting, and useful AI features and apps are on the horizon. Having one of the industry’s most powerful AI capabilities with an NPU offering market-leading 45 TOPS makes these PCs futureproof. 

App compatibility—most apps work, but still a “work in progress” 

The biggest issue, by far, when I used Windows on Arm PCs a couple of years ago (reviews here and here) was app compatibility. Even simple things like Zoom and Google Meet backgrounds didn’t work. But the situation is far better now. Microsoft, Qualcomm, and even OEMs like Lenovo have put in a lot of work to ensure most of the essential apps, be it productivity apps like Microsoft Office or creative apps like many Adobe tools, work. Google recently released its Chrome browser for Arm, which has made an enormous difference, and now almost all browser-based plug-ins work. 

But if you are a tech enthusiast or an engineering college-bound student, you have to make sure the specific apps you need are supported. For example, the popular 3D CAD software Solid Works didn’t even install. The simulation software MATLAB ran sluggishly. The popular 3D printer software Ultimaker Cura was very slow for complex models. 

Even the apps that worked have some rough edges. For example, unlike others, I could not run the popular video editing software DaVinci Resolve. The popular WhatsApp messenger app would go randomly offline and needed logout/relog-ins a few times a day. I couldn’t connect my old Samsung/HP laser printer. It took some workaround and manual configuration to make Office Outlook365 work for Exchange Server setup. I don’t know whether these are not supported, need optimization, or I was doing something wrong. But again, that is symptomatic of app compatibility. Suppose apps work perfectly; it’s all good. If they don’t, you don’t know what’s wrong and can’t easily find a solution. Making things worse, there is no good resource for consumers to check and confirm whether a specific app is supported and, if yes, whether it will run as a native app or using the simulator. Microsoft – If you are reading this, please create a website with a simple look-up table for consumers to check compatibility. This basic need is not being met right now.

When it comes to gaming, it’s a mixed bag. Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon claimed during his Computex 2024 keynote that they have tested 1200 games. I let my teenage son and nephews test their favorite games on Yoga. They found many that were playable with low settings, such as Bloons Tower Defense 6, Cyberpunk, Grand Theft Auto 5, and others. It’s a bummer that simple, popular games like Minecraft and Valorant are unsupported. Unlike apps, there is an aptly named website, www.WorksonWoA.com, to check the compatibility of games. 

That’s why my claim is “work in progress” for apps. The good news is that more and more developers are porting and developing apps for Windows on Arm, and compatibility will only grow. 

So, what is my recommendation for Yoga Slim 7x for back-to-school? It’s a BUY, if you are looking for a premium consumer PC that is futureproofed, but do your research if you have specific, uncommon apps or games that you can’t live without. If you are the kind who doesn’t want to be on the bleeding edge of technology and don’t want to experiment, then look elsewhere. 

Prakash Sangam is the founder and principal at Tantra Analyst, a leading boutique research and advisory firm. He is a recognized expert in 5G, Wi-Fi, AI, Cloud and IoT. To read articles like this and get an up-to-date analysis of the latest mobile and tech industry news, sign-up for our monthly newsletter at TantraAnalyst.com/Newsletter, or listen to our Tantra’s Mantra podcast.