The best Lenovo laptops in 2021

The best Lenovo laptops are portable and powerful enough to help you stay on top of whatever you’re working on. Robust batteries help you get through at least 8 hours of use without needing a charger, and displays vibrant enough to make work or play a beautiful experience. Many have a built-in styluses too, which is handy for note-taking and doodling.

Picking the best Lenovo laptop for your needs can be tricky, as the Chinese company now offers a broad variety of notebooks that can appeal to everyone from business professionals, who are always on the road, to serious gamers who prize performance over portability.

Best Lenovo laptop Black Friday deals

The best Black Friday deals can help you save a little money on a new laptop, as manufacturers like Dell, Samsung and Lenovo tend to put some of their best models on sale at a serious discount.

The best deals on Lenovo laptops tend to go in and out of stock, and won’t always last long, so keep an eye on our regularly-updated list of Black Friday laptop deals for the latest sales and discounts.

What are the best Lenovo laptops right now?

Currently, we recommend the Lenovo Yoga 9i as the best all-around Lenovo laptop for most people for it’s a slim, lightweight 2-in-1 (meaning the touchscreen can be spun around to lay flat, so it doubles as a tablet) that delivers good performance for an affordable price. The vibrant 1080p display and included stylus are nice to have. And the cool rotating speaker delivers surprisingly good sound quality in both laptop and tablet mode.

If you’re less worried about price than you are about being able to play the latest and greatest games, we recommend the Lenovo Legion Pro 5. It offers all the power of the latest Nvidia laptop GPUs in a well-built chassis, and the nice big 16-inch (2560 x 1600) display offers a 165Hz refresh rate for silky-smooth framerates. While its big, bulky design and mushy keyboard are disappointing, they’re par for the course in the gaming laptop market, and easy to ignore if you’re okay leaving this laptop plugged in on a desk with an external keyboard plugged in. 

If all you need is an inexpensive laptop to browse the web and handle some light work, consider the AMD-powered Lenovo ThinkPad X13. It’s a small, speedy notebook that’s light on frills, but it’s affordable and easy to tuck in a bag or under an external monitor when setting it up at the office (or home office). If you really want to keep costs low, check out the Lenovo Chromebook Duet. It’s a ChromeOS tablet that comes with an external keyboard, so it doubles as a surprisingly decent laptop if you can work within the limitations of Chrome. And at less than $300, it’s an incredible value.

The best Lenovo laptops you can buy today

The Lenovo Yoga 9i entered a crowded field of 2-in-1s and made a splash with a slick, svelte design and competitive price. Not only does it have latest 11th Gen Core i7 processor, a built-in stylus and long (11+ hour) battery life, but its display is plenty colorful and its neat rotating speaker packs a surprising amount of punch.

Its port selection is thin, especially when compared with some of the bigger and more business-minded Lenovo laptops on this list. And while it delivers decent performance, the Yoga 9i isn’t quite as speedy as some of its competitors. But when it’s hundreds of dollars less than a similar Dell XPS 2-in-1 or an HP Spectre x360, and it comes with a built-in stylus, the Lenovo Yoga 9i is an excellent value and one of the best all-around Lenovo laptops you can buy.

Read our full Lenovo Yoga 9i review.

The Lenovo Legion 5 Pro delivers enough power to play the latest games in an understated, well-built chassis for a fair price. With an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H CPU and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 GPU, it can handle nearly any game out there, and its big 16-inch display with slim bezels gives you plenty of room to appreciate them. The 165Hz refresh rate is also nice to have, especially for fast-paced action and driving games.

The Legion 5 Pro shares a lot of weaknesses with older gaming laptops. It’s big and bulky, and the huge 300W charger is a pain to carry around, which is a hassle, since, in our testing, the battery lasted less than seven hours on a full charge. The speakers aren’t amazing and the keyboard feels unsatisfying to type on, so plugging in your own headset and keyboard would be a good idea. But if you just want a powerful laptop that can play the latest PC games, Lenovo’s Legion 5 Pro is a great choice.

Read our full Lenovo Legion 5 Pro review.

When we hear a laptop is incredibly thin and light, it makes us worry about how long it will last on a single charge. That’s not the case here, as the 2-pound Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano lasted 12 hours on our battery test, which puts it up there against some of the very best laptops on the market today. And that’s quite impressive when you remember that the 2.9-pound XPS 13 is almost a whole pound heavier. 

Lenovo didn’t sacrifice on performance or usability either. The Nano’s Intel 11th Gen Tiger Lake processors provide the speed you need for tons of productivity — and its keyboard provides a snappy and comfortable typing experience that lives up to the ThinkPad brand. You just might need to pack a USB-C hub, though, as it’s a little light on ports.

Read our full Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano review.

At just 0.45 inches in height, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Titanium Yoga is one of the thinnest laptops you can buy. Despite the small size, this attractive, lightweight 2-in-1 packs enough oomph to get work done. But shaving off inches came at the cost of battery life, and premium materials inflates the price tag into the realm of competitors that offer more value for your dollar. 

But if you don’t mind paying the price, the ThinkPad X1 Titanium Yoga offers a premium experience for folks who want a light, thin, attractive convertible for working on the go. This laptop has a beautiful 2K display, surprisingly great speakers, and a Precision Pen stylus included at no extra charge. While the battery managed to last nearly 10 hours on a single charge in our performance tests, in practice we found it could only last for 5 to 6 hours of heavy use (photo editing) at maximum brightness, so consider packing a charger for a day at the office.

Read our full Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Titanium Yoga review.

At $279, the Lenovo Chromebook Duet storms into the front of the conversation when it comes to value. Not only is it a tablet Chromebook, but its keyboard comes free — something that we don’t see from any iPad or Surface tablet. Oh, and it’s also a solid tablet too, thanks to strong color output and a sharp resolution that you rarely see at this price point. 

The Chromebook Duet also sees ChromeOS gain some touchscreen tablet optimizations that been needed for a while, making it easier to navigate all of your tabs. Oh, and as if that wasn’t enough, it’s got amazing battery life, lasting 12 hours and 47 minutes on our web-surfing test. The only knock against it? Its keyboard might take some getting used to for larger handed-folks. 

Read our full Lenovo Chromebook Duet review.

Lenovo’s AMD-powered ThinkPad X13 is a compact, fast productivity laptop that’s a little light on frills. It offers a great keyboard (replete with the trademark ThinkPad TrackPoint mouse nub) that’s satisfying to type on, and with both a USB-A port and USB-C ports it can support your favorite accessories, old and new.

However, the display’s a bit on the dim side and the battery life is somehwat disappointing. In our battery tests it was able to last just under 8 hours on a full charge, so make sure to carry a charger if you take this laptop out for a full day of working remotely. 

Read our full Lenovo ThinkPad X13 (AMD) review.

The Lenovo ThinkBook 14s Yoga is another great business-minded 2-in-1 from Lenovo that comes with a handy Smart Pen stylus which tucks away into a little slot on the laptop’s right side when not in use.

The 14-inch 1080p display is also nice and vivid, and the plethora of port options (including HDMI out, USB-C and USB-A ports) gives this laptop a lot of versatility. However, we were a bit disappointed with the sound quality of the speakers, and the 9.5 hours of tested battery life we observed was good, but not amazing. Still, if you’re in the market for a slick, versatile 2-in-1 with a packed-in stylus, the ThinkBook 14s Yoga is a great choice.

Read our full Lenovo ThinkBook 14s Yoga review. 

How to choose the best Lenovo laptop for you

Performance: If you only need something basic for surfing the web, consider a Chromebook like the Lenovo Chromebook Duet or a cheap Windows laptop like the AMD-powered Lenovo ThinkPad X13. If you plan on getting more intensive work done, consider starting specs such as a Core i5 CPU, 8 to 16GB of RAM and a 256GB to 512GB SSD, which you’ll find on most of the major Lenovo ThinkPad laptops.

Graphics and gaming: Most Lenovo laptops feature integrated graphics, which can handle lightweight titles such as Minecraft and Fortnite, but aren’t ideal for intensive AAA games or heavy visual work. For that, you’ll want a laptop with a discrete graphics card, like the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro with its discrete Nvidia GPU options.

Size: Consider how mobile you want your laptop to be. Machines such as the ThinkPad X1 Nano or ThinkPad X1 Titanium Yoga are incredibly light or thin (respectively) but struggle to handle demanding tasks like gaming or video editing. Gaming laptops like the Legion 5 Pro are bulkier but offer far more power.

Operating system: Windows 10 is the most common operating system on laptops, but now that Windows 11 is out, you can probably buy a new Lenovo notebook with Windows 11 pre-installed. Either version of Windows will serve you well, so unless you have strong personal feelings, just get whichever is easier to find. Chrome OS is a lightweight operating system built to allow for cheap, fast systems, and you can find some good Lenovo ChromeOS devices like the Chromebook Duet. Though ChromeOS is more limited than Windows, it’s gotten much more robust over the years with support for full Android apps.

How we test the best Lenovo laptops

To find the best laptop, we run every machine through a rigorous suite of benchmarks and real-world tests to gauge how it will perform during everyday use. 

We measure the average brightness and color quality of each laptop’s display using our in-house light meter and colorimeter. For general performance, we run our machines through tests that include Geekbench 5 (CPU performance), as well as various 3DMark tests to measure graphics capabilities. We also run a file transfer test to measure how fast a machine’s hard drive is, and a custom battery test that has the machine browse the internet over Wi-Fi until it runs out of juice.

When testing dedicated gaming laptops, we run benchmarks for popular games such as Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Hitman 2 and Far Cry 6.