The biggest innovation in laptop tech this year is the arrival of ARM-powered devices, promising significant gains in power efficiency and AI capabilities. Leading the charge is the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7X, an ultraportable Windows Copilot+ laptop powered by Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon Elite X processor. Priced starting at $2,600, this laptop features a stunning 14-inch OLED touch display, a body as thin as a high school notebook, and the promise of up to 16 hours of battery life.
But the reality of this new tech is a terribly mixed bag of apps that either run sluggishly or don’t even run at all. Similar to when Apple made the move away from Intel, there is a teething period where many of your favorite apps just won’t be compatible with the new hardware. I’ve lived with the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7X for three weeks trying(and often failing) to test all the things and I learned the highs and lows of ARM-powered laptops.
Design and Display: Slim, Sleek, and Stunning
The Yoga Slim 7X is one of the most beautiful thin-and-light laptops on the market today. The metal chassis is just 12.9mm thick and weighs a mere 1.28kg, making it perfect for travel and on-the-go use. It’s available in a gorgeous cosmic blue color, though it does tend to attract smudges, so keep a polishing cloth handy. Lenovo’s commitment to sustainability is evident, with 50% of the chassis made from recycled aluminum and 90% of the adapter crafted from recycled plastics. The packaging is 100% bio-based, so you can feel good about your purchase from an environmental standpoint.
Port selection is limited, with only three USB 4.0 Type-C ports, all supporting 40Gbps data transfer, Power Delivery, and DisplayPort 1.4. If you’re planning to use multiple peripherals, be prepared to embrace the dongle life or stick with Bluetooth accessories. There’s no headphone jack, so wireless headphones are essential for privacy.
Opening the laptop is a breeze, thanks to a distinctive lip on the lid that allows for easy, single-handed operation. The hinge is reassuringly stiff, ensuring the display stays put without any wobble or droop, even though it can lay almost completely flat—not that I can imagine a scenario where you’d need it to.
Once open, you’re greeted by a large, smooth trackpad that’s responsive to touch, but the real star of the show is the keyboard. Despite the ultra-thin chassis, the Slim 7X offers one of the best typing experiences I’ve had. The keys are domed, large, and well-spaced, with 1.5mm of travel that provides satisfying tactile feedback. The keyboard is backlit, with legible legends that make it easy to use in the dark, though it doesn’t offer RGB lighting.
Flanking the keyboard are the speakers, which unfortunately don’t impress. They’re serviceable but lack volume and depth. These speakers are fine for quiet environments or close-up use, but it’s telling when a handheld device like the Asus ROG Ally delivers better sound quality.
The most impressive feature of the Slim 7X is its 14.5-inch, 3K, PureSight OLED touch display. The glossy panel offers superb color reproduction and vibrancy, with 100% DCI-P3 and sRGB color coverage, plus a Delta E<1. This makes it perfect for content creators and professionals who demand color accuracy. The 90Hz refresh rate adds a touch of smoothness, and the touch functionality is great for swiping through content like you would on a smartphone.
It’s also DisplayHDR True Black 600 certified, with a peak HDR brightness of 1000 nits which is insanely bright meaning HDR content looks spectacular, rivaling even LG’s OLED TVs. The fact that it’s a glossy panel makes it look stunning though the reflections will drive you nuts while outdoors in the sun. It’s a stunning display and one of the best on any laptop.
Performance: A Mixed Bag of Potential and Pitfalls
At the heart of the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7X is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Elite X processor, a 12-core ARM-based chip with an NPU capable of 45 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) of AI computing power. It’s also equipped with 32GB of soldered DDR5 RAM and a 1TB NVMe SSD. On paper, this combination promises impressive performance, but my real-world experience was a mix of excitement and frustration.
The transition from x86 to ARM architecture isn’t as smooth as I’d hoped. Windows 11 ARM edition includes an emulation layer called PRISM, designed to let unoptimized apps run, but it’s hit or miss. For example, Microsoft’s own software, like Office 365 and Edge, ran smoothly, as expected. Notion and Spotify also performed well, making the laptop ideal for basic productivity and entertainment.
However, the moment I ventured beyond these everyday apps, the cracks began to show. I use an M2 MacBook Pro 14 for my day job as a UI designer, so I was eager to test the Slim 7X with creative software. I installed Capcut and DaVinci Resolve to evaluate video editing performance. Capcut, despite being an ARM app, refused to run, citing that the computer didn’t meet the requirements—a frustrating experience given the machine’s specs.
DaVinci Resolve was another story. After some digging, I managed to install DaVinci Resolve 19 Beta 5, which supports ARM processors. While it did run, the timeline performance was really choppy and sluggish, rendering it nearly unusable for serious editing tasks. Worse still, the battery drained at an alarming rate—50% in just one hour of editing a 4K video reel for TikTok. This was a far cry from the “68% less power consumption” Lenovo claimed while delivering top-tier performance.
Even benchmark software struggled. When I tried running 3DMark11, the app didn’t recognize the Slim 7X as having a capable graphics card, despite the Snapdragon Elite X being more than competent on paper. This kind of inconsistency makes it hard to recommend the Slim 7X for anything beyond basic tasks, at least until more software is optimized for ARM architecture.
Gaming was equally disappointing. Knowing the Slim 7X isn’t a gaming laptop, I still hoped to run some light games or at least AAA games at very low settings. However, my current go-to game, Diablo IV, which runs smoothly on my Asus ROG Ally wouldn’t even launch. To add insult to injury, many games on the Xbox app, including some optimized for ARM, either ran poorly or didn’t run at all. This effectively reduced the Slim 7X to little more than a cloud gaming device.
AI isn’t compelling enough
A major selling point of the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7X and other Copilot+ PCs is the promise of AI-powered features designed to enhance daily use. Unfortunately, most of these features are currently underwhelming, offering little practical value for the average user.
Let’s start with Windows Copilot, the built-in ChatGPT assistant that Microsoft is heavily promoting (hence the dedicated shortcut key on the keyboard). Despite the hype, Copilot doesn’t leverage the onboard NPU for faster performance; it’s essentially just a wrapper for the online version of ChatGPT. The result is a lackluster experience that feels more like a gimmick than a genuinely useful tool.
Then there’s Windows Recall, the headline feature that supposedly allows you to search through your PC’s history using AI. Recall takes snapshots of your activity every few seconds, capturing everything you’ve done. However, this feature was pulled back before launch due to significant security concerns. Similarly, image generation features like Co-create in the Paint app remain inaccessible—I’m still on the waiting list to try them out.
If you spend a lot of time on video calls, the Slim 7X offers a few AI-enhanced features, such as camera tracking, eye contact correction, and background blur. While these sound impressive, they’re nothing special; similar features are already built into popular video conferencing apps like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet.
In the end, these AI features feel like a missed opportunity, especially considering the dedicated NPU processor that’s barely utilized. For now, the AI hype surrounding Copilot+ PCs doesn’t live up to the reality.
Battery Life: Not Quite “Multiday”
Lenovo claims “multiday” battery endurance, boasting 16.4 hours on the MobileMark 25 benchmark and 23.8 hours playing a 1080p video locally. However, in real-world usage—web browsing, streaming Spotify, watching YouTube, attempting video editing, and managing emails—my battery life ranged from 7 to 11 hours. This is decent but falls short of the “multiday” promise.
Yes, you can increase endurance if you lower refresh rate of the display, lower brightness and turn off HDR. In this way, with just light email and web browsing type activities, you could get up to 13 hours which I guess counts as a full workday and half. I like that the Slim 7X has Rapid Charge Express which will give you 3 hours of runtime with just 15 minutes of charging and you can use a USB charger too – as long as it’s over 65W.
I’m aware that not all the apps I used were native ARM apps, so they weren’t as power-efficient, but most users will want a laptop that just works, without having to hunt for optimized apps. My MacBook will easily last me through an entire workday on battery without apps being laggy or choppy. This is what Snapdragon promises but the reality just isn’t there yet.
Verdict: A Glimpse into the Future
At the end of the day, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7X offers a tantalizing glimpse into the future of Windows laptops—a future where all-day battery life and uncompromised performance on the go are the norm. Powered by the new Snapdragon chipset, this ultrathin and lightweight machine is the kind of device you’d be proud to carry around all day. But the reality, for now, is that software compatibility hasn’t caught up with the hardware, and depending on your professional needs, the experience can range from pure bliss to absolute frustration.
If your laptop use is centered around Microsoft Office, email, web browsing, and Netflix, the Slim 7X could be a perfect fit. But if you require more demanding applications, you might want to consider the new AMD Ryzen AI laptops, which offer similar efficiency with potentially better software support. For now, it’s wise to give these Snapdragon-powered PCs a bit of a pause. By next year, with more app compatibility and better game support likely to be in place, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7X could become one of the hottest laptops on the market.
Lenovo Australia kindly loaned the Yoga Slim 7X to PowerUp for the purpose of this review.
