By Customers interested in 14-inch convertible laptops can save a significant amount of money with Lenovo’s ThinkBook brand of laptops, which is priced significantly lower than its ThinkPad computers for business use. Except for a few luxuries and the TrackPoint pointing stick in the keyboard, it is difficult to see what you are giving up for this ThinkBook 14 2-in-1 Gen 4 ($1,149.99 as tested), which starts at just $1,036.75. The flagship ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 8 costs approximately $1,500, and its ThinkPad X1 2-in-1 Gen 9 successor is nearly $1,800. The ThinkBook wins our Editor’s Choice award for a small-business 2-in-1 laptop because it is a productivity partner that is both capable and reasonably priced.
Configuration and Design
Although our test unit (model 21MX0006US) is also available via business resellers like CDW, our $1,149.99 pricing, as tested, comes from Best Buy. An Intel Core Ultra 5 125U processor, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive, and an IPS touch screen with 1,920 by 1,200 pixels are all included in the Windows 11 Pro laptop. The ThinkBook 14 2-in-1 Gen 4 is available at Lenovo.com for $1,036.75, starting with Windows 11 Home and half as much memory and storage. However, it can also be upgraded with a faster Core Ultra 7 155U CPU, up to 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB HDD.
The ThinkBook is a small notebook measuring 0.66 by 12.3 by 8.8 inches, similar in size to other 14-inch 2-in-1 laptops (the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 8, for instance, measures 0.61 by 12.4 by 8.8 inches). It is clad in two-tone Luna Gray aluminum rather than the matte-black magnesium seen on most ThinkPads. It weighs 3.61 pounds, which is too much to be considered an ultraportable (the svelte Lenovo Yoga 9i 14 weighs less at 2.98 pounds), so even while it does not weigh much in a briefcase, you will not want to carry it around all day in tablet mode.
The webcam is positioned on a little ridge above the display, which facilitates one-handed system opening. Although the webcam cannot recognize faces, Windows Hello can bypass passwords thanks to a fingerprint reader integrated into the power button. The screen with a 16:10 aspect ratio has thin top and side bezels. In laptop mode, the display wobbles when tapped, however, if you hold its corners or press the keyboard deck, there will not be any flex.
Battery and Display
We play a locally saved 720p video file (the Blender movie Tears of Steel, which is open-source) with the display brightness set to 50% and the audio level set to 100% to test the battery life of each laptop and tablet. Before the test, we make sure the battery is completely charged and that the keyboard backlighting and Wi-Fi are off.
We also measure a laptop screen’s color saturation, or what proportion of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show, as well as its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter) using a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to assess display performance.
Productivity Tests
We use the same general productivity benchmarks on desktop and mobile platforms. Our first test is PCMark 10 from UL, which includes a storage subtest for the primary drive and replicates a range of real-world productivity and office tasks to gauge overall system performance.
Three more CPU-focused benchmarks rate a PC’s appropriateness for applications requiring a lot of processing power by utilizing all of the cores and threads that are available. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 renders a complicated picture using the company’s Cinema 4D engine, and Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.5 Pro mimics common applications like machine learning and PDF rendering. We also convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p quality (lower times are preferable) using the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4.
Lastly, we use PugetBench for Photoshop, developed by Puget Systems, a manufacturer of workstations. The renowned image editor from Adobe, Creative Cloud version 22, is used to rate a PC’s performance for multimedia and content development. This is an automatic plugin that does a range of standard GPU-accelerated Photoshop operations, such as applying masks, gradient fills, and filters, as well as opening, rotating, resizing, and saving images.
Graphics
Two DirectX 12 game simulations from UL’s 3DMark are used to test the graphics performance of Windows PCs: Time Spy, which is more demanding and best suited for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs, and Night Raid, which is more low-key and appropriate for laptops with integrated graphics.
We also run two tests from GFXBench 5, a cross-platform GPU benchmark that emphasizes high-level, game-like picture rendering as well as low-level tasks like texturing. Using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation, respectively, the 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests are rendered offscreen to support various display resolutions, workout visuals, and stress compute shaders. It is preferable to have higher frames per second (fps).
Even while the Core Ultra 7-powered HP dominated our numbers, a gaming laptop or mobile workstation with a dedicated GPU is still significantly superior. The built-in graphics on these computers work well for playing solitaire and streaming videos, but you should not expect to play the newest shooter games.
Verdict
The Lenovo ThinkBook 14 2-in-1 Gen 4 offers great build quality, an outstanding keyboard, and plenty of connections for a low price, but it is a few ounces heavier and has a somewhat duller screen than ideal. We are pleased to present this ThinkBook as the Editors’ Choice winner for small- or home-office convertibles.
