Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon review

As someone who has used Macs for a long time, it’s been a while since we used a Windows PC. When we got to try out the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon, we were excited to see what I’d been missing. And now that I’ve had this laptop for a month, we our rethinking my life choices when it comes to computers. It didn’t take long for me to fall in love with the IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon. This machine is much better than my MacBook Pro in almost every way. It is very light, has a beautiful screen, works quickly, and has a long battery life.

The price of this laptop is about the same as that of a new Mac, which makes it even harder for me to stay with Apple when I need to buy a new laptop. We can only guess if regular Windows users would agree with me, but I can’t see how anyone who uses this laptop would feel let down or like they didn’t get their money’s worth. My quibbles about the machine are mostly limited to some of its components not being as stellar as the rest. Overall, though, it’s by far the best laptop I’ve ever had.

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon review: Design

The luxurious appearance of the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon first drew my attention and left me delighted. The “cloud” gray color scheme is really more silver, with hints of gray being saved for the feet of the laptop and the little Lenovo logo that runs down the bottom right of the top of the lid.

The inside has a streamlined design and is outfitted with a compact keyboard that is bookended by two elongated speaker vents. Just below the keyboard is a spacious touchpad. Because of the thin bezels, the display gives the impression that it is floating in midair. In the area of the top bezel where the camera is situated, there is a lip. You can buy this laptop from its official website.

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon review: Keyboard and touch pad

Lenovo didn’t say much about the keyboard, but it’s not like the ones on other Lenovo computers that aren’t ThinkPads. For one thing, it has more travel. It also has the most comfortable bottoming action and the most precise switches of any Lenovo keyboard I’ve used that wasn’t a ThinkPad. It’s just a little bit worse than my favorite Windows machines, the HP Spectre and Dell XPS lines, and the only keyboard that’s much better is the one on Apple’s latest MacBook.

The keyboard on the IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon is much better than most other Lenovo keyboards. For a 14-inch laptop, the touchpad is big and roomy. Thanks to Microsoft’s Precision touchpad drivers, it has a smooth surface and is very responsive. It’s one of the better touchpads I’ve used on a 14-inch computer. The display can also be touched, and it worked just fine. Input is a good thing.

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon review: Display

When the laptop is turned on its side, you can see how thin it is because it is only as wide as it needs to be to fit some ports. On the left side, there are two USB Type-C 3.2 Gen 2 ports. One of them can deliver power and send video out through DisplayPort. On the other side, there is a USB-C 3.2 Gen 1 port, a button to turn off your webcam, a 3.5 mm headphone jack, and a power button.

The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon has a USB-C 3-in-1 dongle hub instead of HDMI and USB-A 3.0 ports to make up for this. Even though it seems to be a trend to take these ports out of ultrabooks, many people still use plug-and-play hardware with USB-A ports, and dongles can be annoying. It looks like they’re here to stay during the USB transition period, which is a shame.

The laptop’s bottom is smooth and doesn’t have any vents. There is a small cutout on each side for subwoofers. This is a smart design choice that doesn’t stand out in a bad way. Vents are hidden under the screen on the bottom, between the hinges and the feet of the laptop. If the bottom had a little more air flow, it might make the computer cooler.

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon review: Audio

When the laptop is turned on its side, you can see how thin it is because it is only as wide as it needs to be to fit some ports. On the left side are two USB Type-C 3.2 Gen 2 ports. One of them can deliver power and send video out through DisplayPort. On the other side is a USB-C 3.2 Gen 1 port, a button to turn off your webcam, a 3.5 mm headphone jack, and a power button.

The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon has a USB-C 3-in-1 dongle hub instead of HDMI and USB-A 3.0 ports to make up for this. Even though it seems to be a trend to take these ports out of ultrabooks, many people still use plug-and-play hardware with USB-A ports, and dongles can be annoying. It looks like they’re here to stay during the USB transition period, which is a shame.

The laptop’s bottom is smooth and doesn’t have any vents. There is a small cutout on each side for subwoofers. This is a smart design choice that doesn’t stand out in a bad way. Vents are hidden under the screen on the bottom, between the hinges and the feet of the laptop. If the bottom had a little more air flow, it might make the PC cooler.

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon review: Graphics

The display can switch between 60Hz and 90Hz, which is the last thing to know about it. If it had better graphics than an integrated Radeon GPU, gamers could turn it up to 90Hz for faster response in games, but as it is, you probably won’t need to change the standard 60Hz refresh rate.

A 720p webcam sits in a small notch above the screen. It made just average webcam videos with a grainy picture that was noisy and had colors that were washed out. It’s too bad that Lenovo didn’t pair the high-res screen with a 1080p webcam. It is an infrared camera, so it can recognize your face, and Lenovo put sensors in the notch that can tell when you are sitting in front of the laptop. When you stand up, Windows locks and when you sit down again, it logs you back in.

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon review: Performance

An AMD Ryzen 7 5800U processor powers the IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon with eight cores and sixteen threads, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB solid-state drive (SSD). This combination gives you great productivity and even a little bit of power for simple creative tasks. The IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon came in second place in all of our tests, except for the 3DMark Time Spy graphics test. It was slower than the Acer Swift X, which also had a Ryzen 7 5800U but added an RTX 3050 Ti GPU for good measure.

In every benchmark except Geekbench 5, where the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7i Pro with the 35-watt Intel Core i7-11370H CPU was close, there was a big difference between the two AMD machines and the Intel field. But in our Handbrake test that encoded a 420MB video as H.265 and Cinebench R23, which were both pretty realistic tests, AMD won and the Acer Swift X beat the IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon. That’s probably because the Lenovo is thin and doesn’t have as good of a thermal design as the Acer.

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon review: Battery life and heat

The IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon has a battery with a capacity of 61 watt-hours, which is enough for a 14-inch laptop. AMD’s Ryzen processors have been pretty good, but that power-hungry OLED display needs to be taken into account.

Most of the time, we were wrong. The IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon lasted just over 10 hours on our web browsing test, which cycles through a number of popular and complex sites. That’s a good result, and it’s 2.5 hours better than the ZenBook 14X OLED and the IdeaPad Slim 7i Pro.

In our video test, which loops a local Full HD Avengers trailer, the IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon lasted about 11.25 hours, 30 minutes longer than the ZenBook 14X OLED and 1.5 hours less than the IdeaPad Slim 7i Pro. We would have liked to see longer in this test, but this was a good result for a high-resolution OLED display.

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon review: Price

If you want the expensive X1 Carbon but can’t afford it, I’d suggest looking at the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon. It’s cheaper than the X1 Carbon but has many of the same features. It does well with multimedia and has good sound, but its keyboard isn’t as good as a ThinkPad’s. The display, an OLED panel with great contrast and bright colors, helps make up for the average keyboard. It also has what Lenovo calls a 2.8K resolution, which is 2880 x 1800 and makes for a very clear picture.

OLED screens used to only be found on expensive laptops for creative professionals or C-suite executives, but now we’re seeing more of them on laptops for general use that are priced in a way that makes sense. The IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon is a great value for home users because it has one of the best screens you can find on a laptop that costs less than $2,499.

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon review: Conclusion

The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon is hard to turn down because it works well and has a beautiful screen. But the battery life could be better, and there are a lot of great machines that do much better in that area.

The MSI Prestige 14 Evo is a good buy if you want to add an hour to your battery life. But the screen will be darker and less interesting. Overall, the IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon is a great machine, and it would be a shame to miss out on it just because its battery life isn’t as good as the competition.