Where the Blade comes ahead in performance, the Zephyrus wins on value.

Fourteen-inch gaming laptops are the best gaming laptops. They can run most PC games over 60fps on high settings, but at under four pounds and less than an inch thick, they’re still easy to carry around. There are compromises: their size limits how much power they can handle before the components melt into goo, they have loud cooling fans, and they can’t match the battery life of thinner, lighter non-gaming laptops. But they’re the right compromises for a gaming laptop that can also be your lecture hall or coffee shop laptop.

The Razer Blade 14 and Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 are two of the most highly regarded 14-inch gaming laptops. The Zephyrus — one of our longtime favorites — has a redesigned chassis and new OLED panel, while the 2024 Blade 14 is a small spec bump over the previous generation. It made sense to pit them against each other in a benchmark brawl.

Just a nudge: Razer’s Blade 14 has better performance

The $2,700 Blade I tested comes with an AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS, RTX 4070, 32GB of memory, and 1TB of storage. I also tested two different configurations of the Zephyrus G14: one $2,200 version with the same hardware specs as the Blade 14 and a $1,700 version with an RTX 4060 and 16GB of memory. The Blade and higher-end Zephyrus have different memory and storage speeds but nothing that would produce a meaningful difference.

At 1080p on the highest presets, all three can push over 60fps in most games. Cyberpunk 2077 is an outlier if ray tracing is enabled and DLSS 3.5 is off — but turning DLSS on more than triples the frame rate.

The Blade outperformed the 4070 Zephyrus by between 9 and 18 percent in every benchmark, despite having the same CPU and GPU and the same amount of memory. Razer gives the RTX 4070 as much juice as the GPU can handle, up to 115W, or 140W with Dynamic Boost enabled. Asus caps the Zephyrus’ total graphics power at 65W, with Dynamic Boost up to 90W. The Blade 14 can generate more frames because it literally has more power.

Winner: Razer Blade 14

OH-LED-LA: the Zephyrus G14 has a better display

The Blade 14 uses that extra GPU power to drive its 2560 x 1600 IPS display as close as possible to its 240Hz refresh rate — useful if you’re playing competitive esports (or just like fast refresh rates). It reaches about 500 nits of brightness, so it can handle any normal lighting situation inside or outside with minimal glare.

But the Zephyrus has a 2880 x 1800 OLED display with visibly richer colors and bolder contrasts. Its 120Hz refresh rate balances nicely with its graphical capabilities for gaming and creative work. It only hits 400 nits, but that’s a nonissue indoors.

Both laptops hit 100 percent of sRGB and P3 color gamuts; the Zephyrus also covers 100 percent of AdobeRGB while the Blade only hits 89. (AdobeRGB matters more for print work, not gaming.)

The Zephyrus’ display is HDR500-certified and supports G-Sync; the Blade 14 does not have HDR, and even though the display supports AMD FreeSync Premium, it doesn’t work with the discrete GPU. Razer’s website says the Blade 14 supports G-Sync on external monitors, but that didn’t work in my testing.

Winner: Asus Rog Zephyrus G14

Design: one of them still looks like a MacBook

The Blade 14 has always looked like a MacBook Pro, and it looks even more like one in silver. (The Blade still comes in black, of course — but now, so does the MacBook Pro.) Its black keys have rounded edges that contrast with the clean, straight lines of the chassis. The keys feel a touch too small, and the silver gaps between them further accentuate how spaced out they are.

The Blade’s trackpad looks smoother than it feels; my fingertips sometimes caught and skipped. The Blade is also a little thicker and larger: 0.70 inches thick compared to the Pro’s 0.61 inches and 4.05 pounds compared to 3.4 pounds. But it comes with a treat: two slots for up to 96GB of socketed RAM; the Zephyrus’ memory is soldered to the board.

Monica Chin, The Verge’s former laptop reviewer, was worried that the new Zephyrus would look too much like a MacBook, but it pleases me to report that it doesn’t. Even though the dot matrix on the lid is gone, the diagonal LED strip still adds flair. It’s slimmer and lighter than the Blade 14, too: 12.76 x 8.66 x 0.70 inches, weighing 3.53 pounds, and it comes in either white or dark gray. The only MacBook-like thing about the Zephyrus G14 is its smooth trackpad.

Both versions of the Zephyrus I tested had good battery life for a gaming laptop — an average of 6.5 hours when used only for web browsing, word processing, and video streaming. It can last up to three hours while gaming, depending on the game and graphics settings. (On high graphics at 1080p, Cyberpunk 2077 drained the battery in an hour, while Botany Manor drained it in just under three.) As for the Blade 14, its battery lasts only up to four hours, even on simple tasks.

Winner: Asus Rog Zephyrus G14

Thermals: both handle the heat, but the Blade handles more

Small gaming laptops often have trouble cooling their components, but both the Blade 14 and Zephyrus G14 have a handle on their thermals. HWInfo reported no throttling on either during the Cinebench 2024 benchmark.

While not uncomfortable, the Blade 14’s S and D keys, and the left side of the spacebar, become noticeably warmer than the rest of the keyboard after gaming for two hours straight.

But I’ll take that over the dozens of small vents that span the Zephyrus G14’s bottom chassis. I was fine using the Zephyrus in my lap to dash off a few emails or watch an episode of Shōgun, but gaming felt like getting blasted by hot desert air.

The Blade 14 handles a lot more GPU wattage in a chassis nearly the same size as the Zephyrus, with fewer vents on the bottom.

Winner: Razer Blade 14

The Blade is gaming-first, but the Zephyrus is better balanced

The Zephyrus G14 — with an RTX 4070 — is still the best 14-inch gaming laptop.

For $2,000 to $2,200, it maintains a fine balance between features, performance, and price. You get a quality OLED HDR display, commendable battery life, a fun but not too flashy design; and high frame rates despite the GPU power cap. The only true fault with this laptop are the friggin’ vents that span the entire bottom. The 90W TGP limit and soldered-in memory are disappointing, but I’m happy to accept those small concessions for everything else the Zephyrus G14 offers.

The similarly configured Razer Blade costs up to $700 more. It has a higher refresh rate but no HDR or G-Sync support, and its 9 to 17 percent higher frame rate at 1080p is barely noticeable. The Blade 14 is also a little heavier than the Zephyrus G14, its battery life is significantly shorter, and it looks even more like a MacBook with its new mercury colorway.

Winner: Asus ROG Zephyrus G14

Photography by Joanna Nelius / The Verge

Their small variations in design make a big difference.

There’s no getting around owning a laptop these days, especially if we travel often or don’t have the space for a desktop computer. But as time has gone on, many of us have invested in an external monitor or two to better handle all the windows we need to have visible at the same time. We could arrange them all on one screen, but the smaller the laptop, the harder it is to read two windows side by side, let alone scroll through them. But who wants the hassle of traveling with a portable monitor? I sure don’t. So I tested the Asus Zenbook Duo and the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i head to head to see which ones would alleviate those issues the best.

The Zenbook Duo looks like a regular laptop until you remove the keyboard and trackpad that cover the entire bottom screen. I enjoyed the look of awe on my friends’ faces every time I did that. It felt like performing a magic trick. The Yoga Book, meanwhile, looks like two tablets stuck together, and its keyboard hides only half of the bottom screen, so you know right away that it’s different. “What is that? Is that a laptop?!” is the most common response I received from people when they first saw it. These and other small design differences have a big effect on the overall experience of using them.

Design features: the Yoga Book 9i has more form factors

The dual screens give you lots of options. Both the Zenbook Duo and Yoga Book 9i can be used as traditional laptops with either a physical keyboard and trackpad (Zenbook) or a physical keyboard and mouse (Yoga Book); taking notes on the bottom display in clamshell mode; or with their displays oriented vertically or horizontally. They both also have virtual keyboards and trackpads.

For the dual screens to remain stable while upright, the Zenbook Duo has a kickstand attached to the bottom chassis, while the Yoga Book comes with a keyboard folio cover that transforms into a stand with a flat, triangular back and a thick lip at the bottom to keep the laptop in place.

Only the Yoga Book has a 360-degree hinge that rotates the displays back to back, so you can use it as a tablet. (The Zenbook Duo’s top display folds back 180 degrees.) It’s thick for a tablet, but when I need to walk around my classroom as I’m teaching, it’s far less unwieldy than the Zenbook. The Yoga Book is also lighter and thinner when folded, at 2.95lbs and 0.63 inches compared to the Zenbook’s 3.62lbs and 0.78 inches.

Neither of these laptops is great for using directly on your lap, though. The Zenbook Duo can get uncomfortably hot if the processor is running as fast as it can, and there’s a vent that blows hot air directly into your lap. The Yoga Book is fine temperature-wise, but the keyboard can easily shift and twist a few centimeters despite attaching magnetically over the bottom display.

Winner: Lenovo Yoga Book 9i

Tech specs: the Zenbook has more power and ports

The Zenbook can be configured with either an Intel Core Ultra 7 or 9 H-series processor, while the Yoga Book has only an Intel Core Ultra 7 U-series option. Both can be configured with 16GB or 32GB of memory, but the Zenbook offers larger storage options, 1TB and 2TB, compared to the Yoga Book’s 512GB and 1TB.

Both laptops have OLED displays, but the Zenbook’s are physically larger at 14 inches, with higher resolution and refresh rate: up to 2880 x 1800 at 120Hz, compared to the Yoga Book’s twin 13.3-inch, 1920 x 1200 at 60Hz. (The Zenbook also has a 1920 x 1200, 60Hz option.) The Zenbook’s displays get brighter, at 500 nits compared to 400.

The Zenbook Duo takes a Swiss Army knife approach with its port options: one USB-A, two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C, one HDMI, and even a 3.5mm combo audio jack. The Yoga Book has only three Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, so you’re more reliant on hubs, dongles, and Bluetooth if you connect a lot of accessories to your laptop.

Winner: Asus Zenbook Duo

Dual-screen gestures: the Yoga Book’s work consistently

Both laptops use tap or swipe gestures to pull up and put away the virtual keyboard and trackpad, flick windows from one screen to the other, extend a window across both screens and launch more than one app at the same time. The exact number of fingers or swiping motion for the gestures differ between the laptops — and Lenovo does a better job at teaching you how to use those gestures.

The Yoga Book’s User Center software is one of the first things that pops up the first time you power on the laptop. It’s both a guide and a setting portal with clear instructions and visuals and lets you turn any of the gestures on or off, including the option to automatically launch its bespoke notetaking app when you open Microsoft Teams or Zoom.

Lenovo also recently added an app group launcher that lets you launch two apps at the same time, one on the top and one on the bottom. You can customize up to four pairs or let the computer do it for you, but Zenbook one-ups the Yoga Book here. You can launch more than two apps at the same time and assign them to a specific Window’s layout.

But when it comes to teaching you how to use all the gestures and features, the Zenbook tosses you into a pool and says “Swim.” Its instructions are buried within ScreenXpert, Asus’ equivalent to Lenovo’s program. Some of its gestures don’t work consistently, either, like the five-finger gesture for expanding a window across both displays. It would zoom in on the page at the same time because it thought I was also using the two-finger gesture for zooming in and out.

Winner: Lenovo Yoga Book 9i

Stowing and traveling: the Zenbook Duo makes it easier

The 14-inch Zenbook and 13.3-inch Yoga Book are both compact enough to fit inside most bags, but the Zenbook is more convenient to stow because its lid folds right over the physical keyboard and trackpad, like a regular laptop. If the kickstand is popped out, just give it a firm pushback in and — bada bing — you’re done.

For the Yoga Book, you have to detach the keyboard from the bottom screen, fold up the laptop and place it to the side, attach the keyboard to the magnetic portion of the folio stand (if not already attached), and then wrap the folio around the keyboard before you can put both in your bag. That doesn’t include finding a pocket inside your bag for the mouse that comes with the laptop.

Lenovo does win a few points for attaching an elastic band to the folio that holds the included stylus. The Zenbook includes a stylus, but you’ll have to figure out where you’re going to put it when you pack up your things to go to Narnia or wherever.

Winner: Asus Zenbook Duo

Speakers and more: the Yoga Book brings the bass

Virtual trackpads suck, straight-up, and they suck on both the Zenbook and Yoga Book for the same reason: it’s too easy to accidentally minimize or close the active window when all you’re trying to do is “click” on a link or something else on the screen. This happened frequently when I was using either laptop.

Both virtual keyboards are fine for tapping out quick messages, but I prefer the larger surface area of the Yoga Book’s keys. I had fewer mistypes compared to the Zenbook, but I liked the Zenbook’s physical low-profile keys more. Their subtle, clicky sound and tactile feel were similar to the Yoga Book’s, but my presses traveled further and made me feel like I had more control over how fast I typed. (I’m a heavy-fingered typist.)

The biggest surprise was the terrible quality of the Zenbook’s Harman Kardon-branded speakers. They made my favorite playlist with a lot of bass-heavy songs sound surprisingly tinny. Spoken dialogue comes through loud and clear, but how they handled my favorite styles of music made me want to cry. The Bowers & Wilkins-branded system in the Yoga Book is well-balanced right out of the box.

Winner: Lenovo Yoga Book 9i

The Lenovo Yoga Book 9i is a better package deal

These laptops have different personalities and are appealing for different reasons. The Zenbook Duo is for people who want a traditional laptop with a variety of ports and the option to dual-screen drive if they want to. It’s for the people who want the best specs for the price and don’t want to stand out while using it.

But the Yoga Book 9i is the winner for me. It’s for people who want to get away from the traditional laptop form factor without losing all of its essential comforts and dual-screen drive all day long. It’s thinner, lighter, and prettier, and — while it takes a little longer to pack up — the keyboard folio doubling as a laptop stand is a clever design. The touchscreen gestures work consistently, and it’s clear Lenovo put a lot of thought into making sure it provided clear and easily accessible instructions on how to use them.

Photos by Joanna Nelius / The Verge

The 13-inch and 15-inch Air are better than ever, but Apple needs to do something about the upgrade funnel.

The MacBook lineup has fallen deeper into an identity crisis. The new MacBook Air M3 is a straightforward improvement over its predecessor, with the same sleek, Pro-like design with tucked-away speakers and four-color options. The trackpad is still smooth as a Zamboni’d ice rink. Combined with a few new quality-of-life features, the experience has only gotten more refined.

But the MacBook lineup is more crowded than ever, with the 13-inch Air, 15-inch Air, and base model 14-inch Pro jostling for space. And the base models, which start at $1,099 for the 13-inch and $1,299 for the 15-inch, still don’t come with enough memory or storage for the price. That makes it easy to get sucked into a dizzying array of upgrades that can cost you hundreds of dollars. So even though the MacBook Air itself is better than ever, it’s the hardest it’s ever been to figure out what MacBook you should buy.

The Air M3s are nearly identical to the still-great Air M2s, which remain on sale for $100 less. They have the same chassis, display, battery, speakers, webcam, ports, and configuration options — and the midnight color still collects so many fingerprints it might as well become a hobby. But a few key upgrades make the new model easily worth the extra $100: the M3 processor is a little faster, the microphone and Wi-Fi are better, and most importantly, Apple doubled the storage speed on the 256GB version, fixing a major flaw with the base M2 Air.

The most exciting new feature for some is that the MacBook Air M3 can now power two external monitors with the lid closed, whereas the M2 and M1 can only ever power one. I don’t think I’m capable of matching the level of enthusiasm some people have about this new feature, but I do like how quickly the main display switches from the MacBook Air to the second monitor after the lid is closed. I tested this new feature with two 27-inch Studio Displays, and yup — worked seamlessly. Every multi-monitor Windows setup I’ve encountered, including my own, takes longer to register when a new display has been connected.

The Air is available in both 13-inch and 15-inch models; aside from the display size, the differences are minor. The speakers on the 15-inch Air M3 are noticeably louder, with a wider frequency response on the low end. Blasting Rob Zombie’s Dragula while I sauteed onions in my kitchen sounded nearly indistinguishable from playing the same song on my partner’s MacBook Pro 14 M2 Max. The 15-inch also has a larger battery (66.5 Whr versus 52.6 Whr) to accommodate its larger display, but it lasts just as long as the 13-inch, from sunup to past my bedtime. Their displays are identical except in size, and the rest of their configuration options are the same, save for the low-end eight-core CPU / eight-core GPU combo that’s only on the $1,099 configuration of the 13-inch Air M3 (or, as I like to call it, the base-base version).

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Apple sent me both MacBook Air sizes, with 16GB of memory and 512GB of storage in each, and an eight-core CPU / 10-core GPU. The Air M3s are 16 to 18 percent faster in single- and multicore processing than the M2s with the same CPU and GPU core counts. So, anything you can do on a base MacBook Pro, you can do on a MacBook Air. The base MacBook Pro M3 with the same processor does have slightly better multicore performance than the 13-inch Air, likely due to its active cooling, but it’s actually beaten by the 15-inch Air, likely due to that Air’s larger, passive heatsink. None of these machines is designed for heavy, multicore workloads, though. That’s Pro territory, where the M3s have more cores and more memory for more money.

Loading and editing Illustrator files was just as snappy as doing the same on the MacBook Pro M2 Max, as were the usual doom scrolling, browser tab hoarding, and other things that enhance your productivity and take it away at the same time. I was surprised with the gaming performance in Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Death Stranding, albeit the graphics need to be at their lowest settings to get close to 60 fps. The highest settings tanked the performance to an average of 25 fps.

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Apple is making a big deal about hardware-accelerated ray tracing coming to the MacBook Air for the first time by way of its M3 chip. But there aren’t any ray-traced games available to play natively on macOS — and even if there were, it just doesn’t mean much on the base M3 chips because they don’t have enough GPU cores or memory to render those effects. Apple uses unified memory in its processors, so the CPU and GPU cores are borrowing from the same pool. If you try to render a complex 3D scene with lots of light sources and detailed textures, like Blender’s Barbershop path tracing demo, the machine will run out of available GPU memory before it can finish. (I tried this on both M3 Airs, and that’s what happened, even with 16GB of memory.) And because the MacBook Airs are passively cooled, there’s nothing to prevent the processor from throttling when it gets too hot.

I’m not the first person to say this at The Verge, but just because Apple’s M-series processors have unified memory, that doesn’t mean they can do more with less. Putting the computer’s memory on the same chip with the processor and integrated graphics simply shortens the communication distance between those components. The amount of data being transferred doesn’t change, and that’s why it’s maddening Apple is still configuring its base Air models with a measly 8GB of memory and still charging exorbitant prices to add more.

All of the M3’s small but nice upgrades are worth an extra $100 over the M2 Air, especially at the base model for faster storage. But that’s also where you start to enter Apple’s upgrade funnel: 8GB of memory and 256GB of storage is still not enough for a modern laptop you can’t upgrade. If you plan on keeping your computer for more than a couple years, you’ll want to spend another $400 to double the memory and storage — and that’s how a $1,099 MacBook Air becomes a $1,499 MacBook Air. I’m still peeved Apple is asking for $200 to increase the storage to 512GB when its speed is equivalent to a five-year-old off-the-shelf M.2 PCIe 3.0 SSD that costs around $80.

When you look at the entire MacBook ecosystem, the more you upgrade an Air, the easier it is to justify spending a bit more on something more powerful. For example, the 15-inch Air starts at $1,299. Upgrading to 16GB of memory and 512GB of storage (my recommended configuration) brings it up to $1,699. But for only $100 more, you can get the MacBook Pro 14 M3, which costs $1,799 for the same hardware configuration with a smaller display, but it has more quality-of-life features: a higher-quality, high-refresh-rate display, plus an SDXC card reader and HDMI port and the same speaker system. Not to mention a cooling fan that will help keep the M3 thermals in check.

Well, hang on a second. If you’re looking at spending $1,799 for a MacBook Pro with a base M3 chip, you might as well look at the M3 Pro version for $1,999. That’s the best value for your money… right? But 16GB of memory doesn’t feel Pro enough. Better spend another $200 on an upgrade to 24GB. See — once Apple’s upselling strategy kicks in, it’s too easy to spend more than you actually need on a laptop.

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

There are people like my mother for whom a base 13- or 15-inch MacBook Air M3 would be fine for now. She mostly writes emails and watches movies with her current MacBook, but since the memory can’t be upgraded later, it’s worth spending an extra $200 to extend its usable lifespan by several years. Most high school students and humanities majors can get by with the same, too, but again: anything less than 16GB of memory and 512GB of storage is not ideal, especially in the long term.

The MacBook Air is still one of the best laptops you can buy for general-purpose use, and since you can’t completely avoid Apple’s upgrade funnel, spending an extra $100 to get the M3 instead of the M2 is small potatoes compared to how far the upgrade funnel could take you. If you have an M1 Air or earlier and are fine giving up the wedge shape, you’re going to have a great time with the M3 Air, as long as you upgrade the memory. And maybe the storage. Or maybe spend even more to get the Pro instead.

Correction April 3, 2024, 11:45am ET: The benchmark chart for this article has been updated to correct transposition errors. The Verge regrets the errors.

Correction April 3, 2024 5:33pm ET: A previous version of this story included one potentially odd benchmark result. We’ve removed it for clarity while we test further.

Its beautiful 16-inch OLED display morphs into a 12-inch laptop, but do splurge for the ‘optional’ keyboard and folio.

Early into testing Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Fold 16 Gen 1, I briefly regretted purchasing its dual-display Yoga Book 9i. I bought it months ago, and it improved my day-to-day life in so many unexpected ways, I told myself I’d never buy another single-screen laptop. But then, the X1 Fold showed up with its folding OLED screen and tried to turn me into that Distracted Boyfriend meme as I transformed it from a 12-inch netbook to a 16-inch drawing tablet while shouting to my partner from downstairs, “Come look at this laptop!”

We spent some time folding and unfolding the laptop, sticking the curved centerfold close to our eyeballs so we could see how smooth the seam was. We quickly forgot that it folded in half as we played games and watched movies with it unfolded. I ultimately realized I had already bought the right laptop for me, but the ThinkPad X1 Fold is a folding laptop done right, so hell yeah, I wanted it.

Lenovo released its first X1 Fold in 2020, but it was too ahead of its time. Its well-built and beautiful OLED display couldn’t make up for a host of issues: short battery life; a small and dim display; an underpowered processor; a $2,500 starting price sans stylus or keyboard; and the fact that it didn’t always recognize whether it was being used as a tablet or as a laptop. Lenovo fixed almost all of those issues with its 2024 Fold.

The display is much bigger and much brighter. The battery life has doubled. The processing and integrated graphics performance have shot up like a puck hitting the bell atop a strongman carnival game. The design is even more gorgeous. Lenovo also threw in a stylus, and thank goodness it did because this laptop is as good a drawing tablet as it is a netbook. It is a better laptop in every way, except in price.

Lenovo is still asking for $2,500, minimum, but the price is more justified this time around. The one caveat being it wants another $300 for a Bluetooth keyboard and kickstand folio, which are both crucial to the Fold experience. Its virtual keyboard works fine, but it’s not ideal for typing anything more than a few search phrases into Google. Plus I needed the folio to prop the ThinkPad Fold up next to my 27-inch monitor, which is how I use my Yoga Book.

Sure, I could drop $20 on a tablet stand big enough to accommodate the Fold’s 16-inch display, but it wouldn’t double as a keyboard cover, and it most certainly wouldn’t be as portable. I spent about an hour searching for a third-party magnetic keyboard but couldn’t find something suitable. Even if I did find one (I’m convinced they don’t exist) and it precisely covered the Fold’s bottom half, it probably wouldn’t tell the device to switch into laptop mode when attached. (I tried this with the Yoga Book’s included keyboard — no dice, and it’s too big for the Fold.)

So not only is it annoying that I’d have to buy Lenovo’s “optional” keyboard and folio to get the most out of this foldable laptop, but also the trackpad was frustrating to use. I had to clean my finger oils off the trackpad frequently or else it would miss too many swipes. That’s disappointing since typing on the keyboard is as nice as you’d expect from a ThinkPad or any other Lenovo laptop.

Lucky for me that I most often used the ThinkPad X1 Fold the same way I use my Yoga Book 9i: connected to my monitor with a standalone keyboard and mouse. In that mode, the Fold worked better than my Yoga Book in some ways. Unlike the Yoga Book, which has two separate screens, the Fold’s hinge is behind its display and doesn’t create a gap in the middle of a paragraph, and I cannot emphasize enough how nice it was not to have to deal with any kind of screen gap during my time with the Fold.

However, my Yoga Book 9i’s two 13.3-inch physical displays do provide a larger workspace than the Fold, whether oriented horizontally or vertically. I also prefer how I can adjust the angle of the Book’s top screen to match my external monitor. Because the Book’s dual displays are connected with a visible center hinge, it doesn’t warp what’s in the center of the display like the ThinkPad Fold when I have one or two windows open. So I had to keep the Fold tilted at a similar angle to the Yoga Book’s bottom display, which was sort of awkward, but I forgot about it after a while.

And that’s where my issues with the Fold end. One of my favorite Fold features is the fluidity of opening the laptop into desktop mode. When the keyboard is wrapped inside the folio cover, which attaches to the keyboard via a magnetic hinge, you simply open the ThinkPad Fold like a book until it’s totally flat, prop it up against the stand, and ta-da! All you need is a Starfleet uniform and a LCARS background, and you’re ready to go where not many laptops have gone before. (No? Just me?)

The outside surfaces of the laptop are adorned with finely woven strips of black recycled synthetic fiber (PET), and the texture is pleasantly tactile. Running my fingertips over it felt like a fabric-woven tote bag but smoother. It’s an elegant surface that hides fingerprints in its tiny crevices, too. Forget flat laptop lids, forget fun colors — I want more fun, classy textures in black! (Sorry, Yoga Book!) Those crevices do catch crumbs, so eating around the Fold is a no-go. The smaller the crumbs, the harder they are to pick out with your fingernail, but a small brush, about the size of a kid’s toothbrush, works to get them out if you have to get your snack on.

The Fold’s dimensions are well-balanced, which makes it feel lighter than it is while carrying with one hand or tucked into the crook of your arm. It’s only 0.68 inches thick and weighs 2.82 pounds (without the folio keyboard), which makes it one of the lightest laptops on the market — as light as a MacBook Air. I also liked how the magnetic stylus conveniently attaches to the bottom-right side in laptop mode.

I’m glad Lenovo ships a stylus with this laptop because, as a drawing tablet, this device is marvelously massive. Unfolded, it’s over 16 inches of OLED canvas that didn’t make my desk feel cluttered.

I’m not an artist, but I gave drawing and painting a go with the Fold and didn’t find much to complain about. The experience felt nearly identical to Lenovo 2-in-1s and convertible laptops from other brands I’ve tested over the years, and the 2560 x 2024 display covers 96 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut, so whatever paints Bob Ross decided to mix in the video, I could create a close digital version of his colors.

I could sometimes feel long, slender bumps spanning the length of the centerfold, which is not uncommon for folding displays. But once the entire device warmed up, it evened out, so that didn’t affect my ability to write and draw. The stylus itself was what gave me the most trouble.

Well, most styluses give me trouble (thanks, dysgraphia), but the extra-pointy tip made it less fun to oil paint with Bob Ross in Adobe Fresco than it was to sketch an eye because it was difficult to find the right angle to mimic painting with a two-inch brush. To be fair to Lenovo, oil painting with any stylus feels totally different compared to the real thing, for obvious reasons, but once I figured out how to tweak the Fresco settings to get as close to Ross’ tried-and-true flat brushes as possible, I felt mostly good about my happy digital clouds.

Watching movies and cloud gaming with ray tracing on was *chef’s kiss* thanks to the display’s color gamut, too, despite the 4:3 aspect ratio. Cyberpunk 2077 (I’m finally getting around to playing Phantom Liberty) looked better on the Fold than my Gigabyte M28U gaming monitor, although I did have to mess around with the in-game resolution settings so everything didn’t look so squished.

Overall, Lenovo did a phenomenal job balancing the ThinkPad X1 Fold’s design with its hardware needs. I never had an issue with drawing applications lagging or running too many browser tabs (within reason). Its 12th Gen Intel U-series processor is miles ahead of the original’s Intel Core i5-L16G7, which was a sluggish five-core, five-thread processor designed to handle about 7W of power. (That’s right, no Hyper-Threading.)

In contrast, the Intel Core i5-1230U’s two performance cores are hyperthreaded (10-core, 12-thread), and its eight efficiency cores immensely helped with doubling the new Fold’s battery life; I was able to play Cyberpunk 2077 on GeForce Now with the display brightness maxed out (446 nits, as tested) for an average of five hours but averaged about nine to 10 hours at about 50 to 60 percent brightness if I was only using my computer for work-related tasks.

Even with the stylus covering one of the three vents in laptop mode (there’s only one spot where it can magnetically attach, and that’s it), the Fold never got hotter than a lukewarm bath. The CPU’s power draw is capped at 26W, even though it’s designed to draw up to 29W. The chassis never went above 31 degrees Celsius, either, so I could comfortably leave it flat on my lap for an hour while Bob Ross helped me brush up on my digital painting skills.

Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Fold 16 Gen 1 has set the bar as the foldable laptop to beat, even if the keyboard and folio are critical add-ons to an already not-cheap laptop. The only other folding screen laptops that could provide a comparable experience are the HP Spectre Fold and LG Gram Fold, but the latter is only available in South Korea, and we have not tested the former — not to mention that the Spectre Fold is twice the price of the ThinkPad Fold.

Still, if this Lenovo foldable is a sign of where more laptop designs are headed, I’m all in. If the company can make a folding laptop the same size as its Yoga Book and include a keyboard and folio in the future, even if the price were still $2,500, I’d buy it.

Photography by Joanna Nelius / The Verge