The perfect laptop?
Did I just find the perfect laptop?
I've been on a crusade the last couple of months trying to find a laptop that has excellent battery life (priority #1), compact in size (no more than 14"), and powerful enough to satisfy the geek in me.
Back in October of 2020, Best Buy ran a sale on the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14. It is a high powered 14" laptop that has gotten rave reviews. BB had the base model on sale for $899. It had the AMD Ryzen 7 4800H CPU and a GTX 1650Ti GPU. I upgraded the RAM to 16 GB myself and it came with a 512 GB M.2 NVMe SSD. When I first powered it up and got it set up, I thought I'd hit the jackpot. It was definitely a high powered machine and I knew it would tackle anything I had to throw at it. It also had fantastic battery life for a machine that powerful. I was able to get almost 8 hours of internet surfing, some word processing and a bit of video streaming. I decided to use it for an online meeting and when I fired up Teams, I had no camera. It took me a few minutes to realize, this $1099 retail priced laptop didn't have a webcam... WHAT? Okay, I get it, it was my fault for not noticing that before I purchased, but seriously, even the cheapo laptops are putting cheapo webcams in. I thought I'd be okay but after a couple more times of wanting to use the laptop for meetings, I was annoyed. This laptop was now going to be a high priced nuisance. Also, the screen was terrible in low light. Not a deal breaker for me but it just is not a good display. Sometime close to the end of November, I decided to see if I could return it. I was expecting to be stuck with it or selling it for a loss but I saw that Best Buy was offering free returns until January 16, 2021. WOOHOO! I immediately started the return process and went shopping again.
Next up... Walmart ran a fantastic deal on an ASUS VivoBook 14". It had a Ryzen 5 3500U, 8 GB of dual channel (2 x 4GB) RAM and a 256 GB NVMe SSD. $474 with taxes. I jumped on it and had it in my hands in 2 days. I fired it up and initially thought that it was going to be okay for the price. I got it configured like I like and tested out some programs. It ran great... another speedy little AMD powered machine... oh, and it had a webcam! YES! A couple of nights later, I pulled it out and sat down on the couch to do some things... I was using the touchpad and every time I would touch it, it would make this very audible clunking sound... like it was traveling vertically before actually making contact. And, it started creating all these ghost touches. To top it off, I noticed that the monitor was very dim and the viewing angle was terrible. Grrr... After a couple days of trying to put up with those things, I got on to my Walmart account and started the return.
I was a little frustrated at this point. I was thinking that I was going to have to go over that $1000 mark and get a Dell XPS 13 or something very similar (possibly even an M1 MacBook Air). I was surfing around Slick Deals a couple of days later and saw an expired deal for Best Buy for a Lenovo Yoga 6 13". What caught my eye was a couple reviews and the fact it had a Ryzen 5 4650U. This is the 6 core, 12 thread processor and I immediately went to Best Buys site to see if this was still available. Unfortunately, I was not able to get the Black Friday price, but they still had it almost $100 cheaper than anywhere else.
I decided to do a little research. I didn't want to waste my time again ordering it, hating it and sending it back. Much to my excitement, this eccentric little laptop had very few reviews available, but the ones I found showed that it was probably worth checking out. The two things that really stood out to me in the reviews were the battery life being fantastic and the screen being beautiful. To top it off, the Ryzen 5 4650U processor is a beast and its a 2-in-1 with a touchscreen. I couldn't find a bad review on it so I decided to pull the trigger.
The Lenovo Yoga 6 13 is truly a phenomenal little laptop. It is everything I expected from the reviews and while I was a little skeptical on the denim (cloth) cover and the dark blue color, it is actually a very modern looking and attractive. The screen is beautiful and bright, the touchscreen seems to work very well, the trackpad is great (not a MacBook trackpad, but nothing matches up to that), the keyboard is great (I'm typing this up on it right now) and the battery life seems to be as good as advertised. It is very responsive and I look forward to putting it to the test over the next few weeks.
So, did I find the perfect laptop? Maybe not for you... but I think I did for me. I need this for the bit of side business I do. Some onsite IT work. I was trying to rely on a 17" gaming laptop that only had about 1.5 hours battery life. This will allow me to go all day on battery. It has 1 USB-C thunderbolt port and 1 USB-C with display. It has a headset jack and 2x USB 3.0 ports. I can easily plug in an adapter for ethernet if needed. Its lightweight and very portable. Thanks, Lenovo and Best Buy for finally hooking me up.
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