Lenovo ThinkBook 14s Yoga Gen 2 Review

The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 7 is a first-class corporate convertible, but our June review unit’s $2,457 price might capsize a small business. Fortunately, Lenovo has another 14-inch 2-in-1 for offices south of the enterprise: The ThinkBook 14s Yoga Gen 2 (starts at $1,007.40; $1,197.99 as tested) is a slightly generic laptop with an old-school full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) display—its aspect ratio is the familiar 16:9 instead of the slightly taller, newly fashionable 16:10—but it’s a capable performer with a convenient onboard stylus. The ThinkBook isn’t the best convertible you can buy, but saving $1,250 has its attractions. 

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Everything You Need, Nothing You Don’t 

We gave the first go-around of the ThinkBook 14s Yoga an Editors’ Choice award in April 2021, but table stakes have gone up since then. The Gen 2 model sports a 12th Generation Intel Core processor—a Core i5-1235U in the $1,007.40 base model. Our $1,197.99 Staples config has the same 16GB of RAM, 512GB NVMe solid-state drive, and 1080p touch screen but steps up to a Core i7-1255U CPU (two Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 12 threads).

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The screen is rated at 300 nits of brightness, which is adequate but not the 400 nits we always hope for, and uses IPS technology; there’s no snazzy OLED model available. Bezels are thin—Lenovo cites an 86% screen-to-body ratio—and the webcam features 1080p instead of 720p resolution. The cam lacks Windows Hello face recognition, but there’s a fingerprint reader integrated with the power button. Memory can’t be expanded past 16GB, though there are two M.2 SSD slots. 

The aluminum ThinkBook has a two-tone color scheme in Abyss Blue or our model’s Mineral Gray. It measures 0.67 by 12.6 by 8.5 inches, a close match for the Dell Inspiron 14 7415 2-in-1 (0.71 by 12.7 by 8.4 inches), and weighs virtually the same (3.31 pounds, to the Dell’s 3.4 pounds). The deluxe ThinkPad X1 Yoga is a little trimmer at 3.04 pounds. In the case of the ThinkBook, there’s hardly any flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Two USB 3.1 Type-C ports, one suitable for the AC adapter and the other with Thunderbolt 4 functionality, decorate the left edge. They’re joined by a USB 3.2 Type-A port, an HDMI video output, and an audio jack. A second USB-A port and a microSD card slot are on the right, along with the power button, a security lock slot, and a niche for the supplied stylus.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

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A Bit More Than the Basics 

The webcam features a sliding privacy shutter in the top bezel. At 1080p resolution, it captures relatively well-lit and colorful images with good detail and almost no noise. Bottom-mounted speakers produce loud, slightly hollow sound; drumbeats sound more like static than booming bass, but highs and midtones are clear, and you can make out overlapping tracks. Dolby Audio software provides music, movie, game, and voice presets and an equalizer. 

The skinny, 4.25-inch-long Lenovo Integrated Pen stashes in a charging slot on the right edge and has two customizable buttons. It kept up with my fastest swoops and scribbles on the screen, exhibiting good palm rejection. A supplied SmartNote app lets you save pages of jotted notes and export them to Microsoft OneNote.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

I found myself tapping the F6 key in hopes of turning up the brightness another couple of notches, but the touch screen is otherwise attractive, with clean white backgrounds and rich, well-saturated colors. Viewing angles are broad, and the edges of letters are sharp, not pixelated. Contrast is fairly good, though a brighter backlight would help. 

The backlit keyboard has a satisfactorily, snappy typing feel. Like many laptops’ layouts, it lacks Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys, combining those functions with the Fn key and cursor arrows and arranging those arrows in a clumsy, HP-style row instead of the proper inverted T. The up and down arrows, like the top-row Escape and Delete keys, are too small and hard to hit. Top-row shortcut-key functions include placing and ending Microsoft Teams calls, as well as adjusting brightness and volume. The midsize, buttonless touchpad has a slightly stiff click.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Lenovo preloads the Windows 11 Pro system with pitches for several annual subscription services, including $29.99 Smart Performance, $39.99 Smart Privacy, and $49.99 Smart Lock antitheft. An AI Meeting Manager program offers fee-based, real-time transcripts (as well as foreign-language translation and subtitles) during videoconferences. Lenovo Smart Noise Cancellation optimizes the microphones for a table full of attendees or a single speaker, while Lenovo Smart Appearance offers to blur the background, prettify your face, and let you walk around during a video call.

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Testing the ThinkBook 14s Yoga Gen 2: Snappy Enough, But Not Blazing Fast 

For our benchmark charts, we compared the ThinkBook 14s Yoga Gen 2 to four other laptops suitable for small business. Two are convertibles, the Dell Inspiron 14 7415 2-in-1 and the 15.6-inch Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro 360. Two are 14-inch clamshells, the Acer Swift 3 and the just-reviewed HP Pavilion Plus 14. You can see their basic specs in the table below.

Productivity Tests 

The main benchmark of UL’s PCMark 10 suite simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet work, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10’s Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop’s storage. 

Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). 

Our final productivity test is Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s famous image editor to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The Yoga Gen 2 kept toward the back of the pack in these tests. It proved more than suitable for everyday applications—it easily cleared the 4,000-point hurdle in PCMark 10 that indicates excellent productivity for Microsoft Office or Google Workspace—but its CPU results were underwhelming, in part due to the Core i7-1255U’s having only two Performance cores. 

Graphics Tests 

We test Windows PCs’ graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). 

We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

None of these laptops’ integrated graphics comes within a country mile of the discrete GPUs you’ll find in gaming rigs, so they’re strictly for casual gaming and streaming media instead of the latest shoot-em-ups. The Lenovo again settled for fourth place in a five-way race. 

Battery and Display Tests 

We test laptops’ battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window)) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

Though it managed only a midfield finish, the ThinkBook’s battery life was impressive—it should get you through a full day of work or school plus an evening’s entertainment. Its screen delivered pretty good color and clarity, though it was no match for the AMOLED screen in the Samsung or the OLED one in the Pavilion Plus, and its brightness was lackluster at best.

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Verdict: A Safe Small-Business Selection 

We see so many sleeker convertibles with brighter, more colorful displays that we’re not particularly excited by the Lenovo ThinkBook 14s Yoga Gen 2, but we can’t deny it’s a solid value.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

A sunnier screen and a better keyboard would be nice, to be sure, and those things are available in other laptops, both business models like the ThinkPad and Dell Latitude series and consumer entries like Lenovo’s Yoga 9i Gen 7 and HP’s Spectre line. But most of them cost considerably more. The ThinkBook is a well-built, low-priced small-business solution that you shouldn’t overlook if it’s in your price zone.