Intro:

I’ve passed my Lenovo Flex 4 1480 Signature Edition IdeaPad on to my wife and made a significant upgrade.  When it became increasingly obvious that:

• my IdeaPad was no longer very snappy for all I was asking it to do
• my wife needed a laptop of her own in our new house computing configuration
• I wanted to be able to use both external monitors with my work in web development
• I had the funds to make the purchase

I splurged on a Lenovo X1 Yoga ThinkPad 6th Generation laptop.

My Rating:

For those who can’t wait:   4.5/5

My Needs:

• Small form factor/screen size – specifically, a 14″ screen is my sweet spot
• Be able to use 2 external monitors simultaneously
• Convert to a tablet (360° fold)
• High performance and capacity
  • Latest i7 (or better)
  • 32GB of ram (or better)
  • 1TB of disk space (or better)
• Backlit QWERTY keyboard (I live in France where AZERTY is the standard)
• At least 1920×1080 screen resolution (or better)
• Fingerprint reader (sort of a need )
• Webcam
• WIFI (preferably WIFI 6)
• RJ45/LAN connection
• Windows 10 Pro (or better)

Shopping Process:

I bought around Thanksgiving, so I thought I might get some sort of Black Friday deal that I couldn’t resist. Unfortunately, living in France, my needs were too far out of the mainstream to be well-served by some special “deal”.  When I bought my IdeaPad in the autumn of 2016, I happened to be in the States visiting family, so I could do a detailed search of deals and know that my machine would be QWERTY.  I was very pleased with that purchase and felt that I got a lot for the money I paid.

Because I had a Lenovo and I generally have a good opinion of the brand, I looked there first.  As I expected, I couldn’t get the configuration that I wanted just finding some deal at some store.  I went to the Lenovo site (if you’re in France you can’t buy from a non-French Lenovo site – they won’t ship to France) and set myself a budget of around 1,000-1,500€ (spoiler alert – I totally blew past that price!).  I couldn’t really find what I wanted for that price.

I then went to Dell.  Dell has, in the past, been good about offering a way to get exactly what you want in a configuration (if you’re willing to pay for it and work through one of their sales reps).  I finally got a machine specced-out and once I got the wrinkles ironed out of the configuration mistakes the rep made, the machine was around 3,500€ and didn’t even have an 11th generation Intel processor.

I looked at HP, ASUS, ACER and briefly at MSI – couldn’t really configure any of those the way I wanted.

I went back to Lenovo and somehow found a configuration that satisfied me, and I was able to do it directly online instead of fiddling around with a sales rep who would inevitably get some detail messed up ’cause I’m pretty “particular” and “feature hungry”!

One reason also that I didn’t originally go with Lenovo was that with the configuration that I selected, they said that it would be “more than 6 weeks” before the order could be filled (or “processed” or something – don’t remember the exact word).  Dell seemed to be more available, but even with them, it was a delay.  So I bit the bullet and went with Lenovo.

The first time I bought a Lenovo, it was not directly with them but through an electronics super-store in the States, and so I never really dealt with Lenovo except to complain about their STUPID charger design (for that model – see my review in the other post).  So this was my first time to deal with Lenovo’s online store…I’m unimpressed.  And their customer service…I’m unimpressed.  And their delivery…I’m unimpressed. 

Their organization of their “brands” is VERY confusing and their organization of their store is VERY confusing.  Their “Lenovo Pro” service is VERY confusing.  Once you’ve ordered, the order fulfillment is handled by “Digital River” in Ireland and checking up on your order with them is a hassle.  They gave me shipping updates, including twice saying that it was coming today and then NOTHING…  Then when calling them, I could barely understand them on the telephone and there was no apology for how shipping communication mess-ups.  This was their “pro service”.  A joke.

In the end, the good news was that the machine came much earlier than originally estimated, but the yo-yo order fulfillment and shipping process was VERY annoying. -5 stars for that!

The Configuration I Bought:

• Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-1185G7 11th generation with vPro™ (3,0 GHz, up to 4,80 GHz with Turbo Boost, 4 cores, 12 Mo de cache)
• Memory: 32 Go LPDDR4X 4266MHz
• Disk: 1TB SSD M.2 2280
• Screen: 14.0″ WUXGA (1920×1200) IPS, Anti-Reflection (matte surface), 400nits, Multitactile, thin panel, 100% sRGB
• Graphics Card: Integrated Intel® Iris® Xe Graphics
• Webcam: infrared camera 720p with microphone and physical privacy switch
• Wireless: Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX201 11AX (2×2) & Bluetooth® 5.0 vPro
• Keyboard: Backlit European English QWERTY keyboard
• Battery: 4 cells, 57Wh
• Power adaptor: 65W
• Integrated Stylus
• OS: Windows 11 Pro x64
• Warranty: 3 years

Pros:

Cons:

Summary: