Table of Contents
It's going on two decades since IBM stopped making ThinkPad laptops, but Lenovo has carried the "Think" torch since it acquired IBM's business 19 years ago. PCMag was reviewing Windows laptops long before that. With more than 40 years as an authority in the field, we have the experience and expertise to publish laptop reviews with verdicts you can trust. Indeed, over the years, we've tested nearly every major Lenovo laptop for performance, usability, design, and value. At the moment, the Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 9 is our choice as the best Lenovo laptop for most people; it's the company's flagship consumer laptop and merits that title. We've reviewed loads more Lenovos, though, and have winnowed them down to the best models in all the categories the company competes in, including business and gaming. Read on for those picks, plus a detailed explainer to help you untangle Lenovo's many laptop lines.
Our Top Tested Picks
Lenovo Yoga 9i 14 Gen 9 (2024)
Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8
Lenovo Flex 5i Chromebook Plus
Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i 14 (2023)
Lenovo IdeaPad 1 14
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 12
Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 4
Lenovo ThinkPad E14 Gen 5
Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 6
Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 3 Chromebook
The Best Laptop Deals This Week*
- Dell Inspiron 15 3535 Ryzen 7 1TB SSD 16GB RAM Laptop — $449.99 With Code SAVE10
- Lenovo ThinkBook 16 Intel i7 512GB SSD 16" Touch Laptop — $812.63 (List Price $1,729)
- Dell Inspiron 16 5640 Intel 7 1TB SSD 16GB RAM Touch Laptop — $584.99 With Code SAVE10
- LG Gram 16 Intel i7 1TB SSD 16GB RAM 16" Touch Laptop — $999.99 (List Price $1,299.99)
- Dell XPS 13 9340 Intel Ultra 7 512GB SSD 16GB RAM 13.4" Laptop — $1,034.10 With Code SAVE10
*Deals are selected by our commerce team
Best Lenovo Laptop for Most People
Lenovo Yoga 9i 14 Gen 9 (2024)
- Striking OLED touch screen
- Snappy performance
- Lengthy battery life
- Svelte design with remarkable soundbar hinge
- USB-A and USB-C ports
- Slightly pricey
- No HDMI port or SD/microSD card slot
- No mobile broadband option
- Can't cap the stylus pen
Making room for two on the top rung of the convertible laptop ladder, Lenovo's Yoga 9i joins HP's Spectre x360 14 in moving to Intel's newest chips with AI hardware inside.
Best Lenovo Gaming Laptop for Most People
Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8
- High-TDP GPU
- Well-cooled for its thickness
- Sharp and fast display
- Excellent keyboard layout
- Sturdy build
- Cheaper than a lot of competitors
- No USB4 or Thunderbolt 4
- Still fairly long front to back
With the Legion Slim 5 Gen 8, Lenovo shrunk its mainstream gaming laptop while maximizing performance. It's also aggressively priced, making its souped-up GPU and ace display that much more appealing.
Best Lenovo Chromebook for Most People
Lenovo Flex 5i Chromebook Plus
- Sturdy 2-in-1 design mixes durability, flexibility
- Above-average ChromeOS performance
- Crisp display with touch and pen support
- Backlit keyboard
- Decent variety of ports
- Budget-feeling plastic construction
- Merely average battery life
- Stylus pen not included
Lenovo's Flex 5i Chromebook Plus is an affordable 2-in-1 that showcases the Chromebook Plus generation with speedy performance and flashy features at a reasonable price.
Best Budget Lenovo Laptop
Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i 14 (2023)
- Strong application performance
- Right-size screen for 2-in-1 versatility
- Crisp, accurate 1080p webcam
- Varied and useful port selection
- Long runtime
- No CPU or screen upgrades
- Display's color coverage is lacking
- Gray keys clash with deep blue chassis
Lenovo's IdeaPad Flex 5i 14 provides enough performance and build quality to deliver strong value for shoppers seeking a budget convertible.
Best Extreme-Budget Lenovo Laptop
Lenovo IdeaPad 1 14
- Crisp 1080p display
- Comfortable keyboard
- HDMI port
- Multiple color options
- Lightweight
- Long battery life and snappy storage
- No USB-C ports
- Dim 220-nit screen backlight
- Uses relatively slow AMD Athlon Silver processor
Lenovo's IdeaPad 1 14 proves that you can have a decent, and even enjoyable, Windows 10 experience on an under-$300 laptop, as long as you don't need USB-C ports and can make do with a basic processor.
Best Lenovo Business Laptop for Executives
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 12
- Elegant and light design
- Fabulous keyboard
- Sharp, vivid OLED screen
- USB-A, HDMI, and USB-C ports
- Sky-high price
- Decent but not class-leading performance and battery life
- No SD or microSD card slot
You'll still find no finer business ultraportable than Lenovo's 12th-generation ThinkPad X1 Carbon, but the latest model suffers from terminal sticker shock for simply decent performance.
Best Lenovo Business Laptop for Fleets
Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 4
- Exemplary build quality
- World-class keyboard
- Long battery life
- Ample ports
- Lots of configuration options including mobile broadband
- No SD or microSD card slot
- IPS screen is just okay compared with OLED
It's no longer thinner and lighter than the T14, but Lenovo's ThinkPad T14s is a superb business ultraportable with the brand's trademark build quality, keyboard, and connectivity.
Best Lenovo Small-Business Laptop
Lenovo ThinkPad E14 Gen 5
- Reasonably priced
- Long battery life
- Gold standard ThinkPad keyboard
- Thunderbolt 4 uncommon for the price
- Just $50 for touch-screen upgrade
- Three-year warranty as tested
- Middling performance, even with Core i7
- Screen needs more color
- Tinny speakers
Lenovo’s 14-inch ThinkPad E-series is an impressive productivity laptop for the money, with long battery life, a lengthy warranty, and Thunderbolt 4 connectivity.
Best Lenovo Mobile Workstation
Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 6
- Extreme processing and graphics power
- Gorgeous 4K OLED touch screen
- Splendid keyboard
- Choice of pro or gaming Nvidia GPUs
- No Ethernet port
- ECC memory not available
- Expensive
Relatively slim and light for a superpowered mobile workstation, Lenovo's ThinkPad P1 Gen 6 is a standout laptop for the most formidable tasks.
Best Lenovo Detachable 2-in-1 Chromebook
Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 3 Chromebook
- Compact, totable design
- Keyboard cover offers good typing feel
- Handy kickstand
- Great flexibility for Chrome and Android apps
- Solid performance from Qualcomm CPU
- No headphone jack
- Pen sold separately
- Short battery life
Shedding the stigma of small, cheap Chromebooks, the Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 3 is a compact 2-in-1 detachable Chromebook that offers both laptop and tablet functions, though its battery life is disappointing.
Which Series of Lenovo Laptops Is Best?
Because Lenovo makes every one of its laptops with a specific set of customers in mind, we can't point you to one line of Lenovo laptops as the absolute "best" for every situation. With that in mind, we've listed and covered each of Lenovo's laptop series below to help you decide which type of Lenovo laptop is best for you.
Lenovo's conventional laptops include ThinkPads (business laptops), ThinkBooks (higher power work machines), and IdeaPads (general-use laptops). Gaming machines fall under Lenovo's Legion (high-end) and LOQ (budget) lines, while 2-in-1 hybrids come in Yoga (premium) and Flex (budget) varieties. First, let’s look at the laptops that started it all: the ThinkPads.
Professional Classics: ThinkPads and ThinkBooks
ThinkPads are Lenovo's classically styled, business-oriented laptops, with a wide range of configurable features: touch screens, cellular connectivity, biometric login hardware, and docking options. Their primary commonality? They almost always come colored in Lenovo's classic matte black.
These machines tend to provide more in the way of IT-friendly features for monitoring, management and business-oriented wired and wireless connectivity. To help position certain models within the larger laptop market, Lenovo divides its ThinkPads into a host of sub-classes indicated by a letter. These include the ultraportable ThinkPad X and top-of-the-line X1 lines, the entry-level ThinkPad L family, and the ThinkPad P mobile workstations. The 14-inch X1 Carbon is the company's executive flagship, joined by the 13-inch X1 Nano, which is the lightest ThinkPad at 2.13 pounds.
The bread-and-butter ThinkPads, though, are the T series, widely deployed business laptops that deliver a decent balance of cost, durability, and feature set, along with the famous ThinkPad keyboard. Current T-series models include 14- and 16-inch notebooks, which have replaced the 13- and- 15-inch models of old, and they often feature an "s" suffix after their model numbers to indicate a slimmer and lighter system.
Beyond L, P, T, and X, Lenovo has also pushed two other, newer lines: E and Z. The E series is more of a hodgepodge than most, resolutely budget-minded, with CPUs from both Intel and AMD and models in both 14- and 16-inch screen sizes, which have replaced the traditional 13- and- 15-inch sizes. The newest ThinkPad expansion, the Z line, emphasizes aesthetics and sustainability and employs AMD Ryzen processors. You can still find 13-inch screens within the Z series in addition to a more contemporary 16-inch size.
You'll need a quick decoder to ThinkPad model numbers, whose logic changes every few years according to the moods of Lenovo's marketing brain trust. Current models carry a letter such as E, T, or X plus two digits marking the screen size. So a ThinkPad E15 is a budget-minded model with a 15.6-inch screen, while the ThinkPad T14 is the classic business fleet machine with a 14-inch panel. The premium ThinkPad X1 models don't indicate a screen size in their model names, since most of them are 14 inches.
Meanwhile, Lenovo ThinkBooks are a distinct line from ThinkPads. They serve small and medium business (SMB) customers and also lean toward the value end of the spectrum. (See our picks for the best business laptops overall.) Like most, the ThinkBook line has consolidated down to 14- and 16-inch screen sizes, but even further down to solely normal-thickness variants—no more "s" models here. ThinkBooks simply use two digits in their names for the screen size.
The IdeaPad Line: Consumer Clamshells
Lenovo IdeaPads, on the other hand, are aimed mainly at consumers, though design-forward business users and entrepreneurs may gravitate toward using an IdeaPad as a primary PC. You'll find some preloaded apps on many IdeaPad systems, particularly those bought from big-box stores.
Current IdeaPad models range from the extreme-budget IdeaPad 1 series to the IdeaPad 3 and IdeaPad 5 at the high end of this midrange lineup. The higher the number, the more premium the laptop. An "i" in the model name denotes an Intel processor, while some models have "Gaming," "Slim," or "Pro added to their names to denote their intended uses. Screen size isn't specified; for example, you can find IdeaPad 5 models with both 14- and 16-inch displays, Lenovo having also dropped the 15.6-inch screen size.
Lenovo also sells a host of IdeaPad Chromebooks, which are popular choices for buyers on a budget. Google's ChromeOS is simple to manage and use since it centers on the Chrome Web browser and related apps. Lenovo's Chromebook lineup includes inexpensive IdeaPad consumer models, as well as more rugged ThinkPad-branded Chromebooks for businesses and schools. Most recently, Lenovo joined the Chromebook Plus program that Google launched to elevate budget Chromebook laptops with better specs and features as a baseline. (See our picks for the best Chromebooks.)
Yoga and Flex: Lenovo's Hybrids
Under the larger ThinkPad and IdeaPad umbrellas fall most of Lenovo's wide range of touch-screen hybrids, which can function as both laptops and tablets: the Yoga and Flex laptops. Introduced in 2012, the first Yoga pioneered the 2-in-1 convertible-laptop concept. Yoga laptops' 360-degree screen hinges let you flip and fold the system into four positions: a conventional laptop mode, an easel-like stand mode for presentations, an A-frame or tent mode for viewing videos or using touch apps on an airline tray table, and a tablet mode for reading or for scribbling and sketching with a stylus.
In addition to high-end consumer systems called simply Lenovo Yogas, you'll find ThinkPad Yogas and ThinkBook Yogas that target a business audience. They follow the naming and numbering schemes for the lines they fit into, such as the ThinkPad X1 series.
The Flex models, meanwhile, are broadly similar but tend to be cheaper than Yogas. At various times, the Flexes have been their own brand, though at this writing they're marketed under the IdeaPad banner. The latest Yogas and Flexes generally follow the single-digit naming scheme of the IdeaPads, though you'll find occasional exceptions, like the Yoga 6.
With these machines, the screen stays attached to the keyboard, meaning they're 2-in-1 convertibles as opposed to detachables—Windows tablets with removable keyboards akin to Microsoft's Surface Pro slates. Lenovo also sells a ThinkPad X12 Detachable tablet, a business device with one of the best detachable keyboards on the market. The other prominent detachable 2-in-1s we've seen of late from Lenovo are the company's consumer-oriented Chromebook Duet tablets.
Legion and LOQ: Meet Lenovo's Gaming Brigade
Finally, to keep up with the growing popularity of PC gaming, Lenovo launched an all-new laptop line, the Legion family, in 2017. It did this to differentiate its gaming systems from the main IdeaPad line, where the gaming rigs were until then known as "IdeaPad Y"-family models. The Legion brand includes both gaming laptops and desktops. (Note: Some IdeaPad Gaming models continue to be offered for players on tight budgets.)
Current models bear single digits (a "5," a "7," or a "9") that indicate a range from mainstream to flagship gaming, respectively. Legions with an "i" suffix use Intel Core processors, while others rely on AMD Ryzen CPU power. The Legion family's pricing, given the models' specs and feature sets, has been attractive. Today, you'll see Legion laptops in the more modern 14- and 16-inch screen sizes and in a mix of distinctive designs, with more features specifically aimed at a gaming audience than the IdeaPad Gaming models offer.
Last year, Lenovo also began to sell a revamped budget line of gaming laptops known as LOQ, most of which contain entry-level graphics and processing hardware focused on fast and responsive 1080p play. They're one of the more attractive lines of budget gaming laptops, but it will take another update generation or two to see whether LOQ can rise to the top.
Which Lenovo Laptop Is Most Durable?
According to Lenovo's website, "ThinkPad products are currently tested for 12 total methods and 20 procedures" under the US Department of Defense’s MIL-STD 810G standards. These include tolerance for mechanical shock, humidity, sand, dust, and even fungus, among other hazards and contaminants. Like most laptop brands, Lenovo doesn't emphasize durability to the same degree in its general-use, budget, ultraportable, hybrid 2-in-1, and gaming laptop categories.
However, Lenovo isn't known for producing "true rugged" machines that can resist significant damage and weather exposure. Dell, Durabook, Getac, and Panasonic are players in that market. For those, check out our buying guide for the best rugged laptops.
Which Lenovo Laptop Is Best for Students?
While we often recommend students buy a MacBook Air for school, or a Dell XPS laptop if they're set on Windows, Lenovo has comparable models in its Yoga and Slim series that would serve much of the same function. Currently, these are the Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8 and the Lenovo Slim Pro 9i.
If you're on a tighter budget, or your coursework doesn't require such a well-equipped machine, Lenovo's IdeaPad line would serve you better. This series serves up budget-to-midrange systems for basic workloads and entertainment needs.
Finally, Lenovo's ThinkPad and ThinkBook lines feature laptops with top-end processing hardware and even professional-grade parts for academic workloads in the areas of computer science, software engineering, and media editing, to name a few. (The high-end engineering stuff is best reserved for workstation models like the ThinkPad P line.)
Ready to Buy the Right Lenovo Laptop for You?
We trust our explainer and our product picks have simplified things. For more of our favorite laptops (that is, including ones outside the Lenovo-sphere), check out our roundup of best laptops overall, as well as our guides to the best cheap laptops and business laptops. But for our current, ever-evolving list of Lenovo favorites, check out our detailed spec breakout, and don't forget to check back as we test and add new models.
