6:40
Last year, I flew out to the Valve headquarters to check out their Steam Machine and Steam Frame. And I was only going to be there for a few hours. I was flying in and then flying out on the same day. It was a super short trip, so I packed super light. I didn't bring a ton of camera gear cuz I assumed I'd be moving around to different places, trying all their new hardware. I didn't even bring a change of clothes. I brought a phone and a laptop. And this was the one I brought, the 2024 Yoga Slim 7X. I didn't even bring its charger and I ended up using the laptop for over 15 hours at the event and on planes and it still had juice left over. And it's cuz this has been one of the
longest-lasting laptops for the past 2 years. And now this new one, the 11th gen Lenovo Yoga Slim 7X has a new chip and just new upgrades to this whole thing that take it to the next level. So the big thing here is the new Snapdragon X2 Elite chip. It has a faster CPU, really good in single and multi-core, and the best part of it is it's even more energy-efficient. Even this early sample performs really well in benchmarks and apps while also being very quiet as you'd expect. But the battery life, like I thought the previous generation was already really good, but this new one is just bonkers. So Lenovo is quoting 31 hours as their target for local video playback. And from my testing on this early pre-production unit, I'm getting almost
25 hours. It's over a day of straight playback. This is legitimately a two or maybe even a three-day battery of full use for a lot of people. And it's consistent performance whether it's plugged in or if it's on battery, something that most other Windows laptops struggle with. It's still a very light device, but it does have a physically large battery, which allows it to outlast the MacBook Air products. The other really important part of the story though is that the Windows on Arm experience has matured extensively over the past couple of years. Like in 2024, when the first generation of Snapdragon Elite devices launched, you still had to
look into lists of like which apps would run properly. But at this point, the whole compatibility thing is basically gone. Stuff just runs on these devices. And for all the flak that I give Microsoft for like, you know, Windows 11 being bloated and them just drenching their product with Copilot sauce, the way they've executed Windows on Arm support over the past couple of years is really good. And we now have native apps for the vast majority of tools. We've got Chrome, Firefox, Brave, all native. And then we have the full Adobe suite including Premiere and After Effects. We have Blender, Resolve, Visual Studio, Unity, and even the Unreal Engine.
They're all fully native apps now. When it comes to gaming though, most games still aren't native. They still rely on Prism emulation, but the latest version with AVX and AVX2 support makes this experience so much better than before. And Qualcomm showing good frame rates in many AAA titles, but there are still games that don't run on these systems yet. They have taken big steps towards their anti-cheat integration. There's now support for BattleEye and Easy Anti-Cheat, which opens up a lot of titles that were blocked before, but there's still no Vanguard support for Valorant or League players. So it's an amazing chip with a much more mature ecosystem around it, but Lenovo didn't
just chip drop on this thing and call it a day. They tweaked the whole Slim 7X product. So inside, we're looking at a new thermal system with their flat heat pipe tech, which keeps the device very quiet even on load. The previous keyboard was good, but this new one is just better. They increased the key travel to 1.5 mm and this is now very similar in feel to their beloved ThinkPad keyboards. It's very responsive to type on. There's now four speakers instead of the previous two. And the screen has also been upgraded. This is now fractionally smaller than the previous generation. This is now 14 in instead of the previous 14.5. It's now a 2.8K 120 Hz OLED and it hits 1,100 nits
in HDR. It's got great colors, excellent calibration out of the box. And when you compare to the IPS panels of the MacBook Airs, this is just so much better. Colors and contrast when you're watching media, even moving the cursor around on your desktop is like twice as fast on this device. It's hard to tell cuz you're watching this at 60 FPS on YouTube, but it's an awesome screen. And in terms of pricing, this is targeted at 900 bucks for the entry point, but because of RAMpocalypse, I have no idea how this will actually shake out in terms of the retail pricing. But the new Lenovo Slim 7X, it's an awesome device
this year. Super fast chip, crazy battery life.
