50 PCWorld NOVEMBER 2019REVIEWS LENOVO THINKBOOK 13S
Lenovo ThinkBook 13s
PROS- Surprisingly good audio quality.
- 10 hours of battery life.
- Affordable price.
CONS - Middling performance.
BOTTOM LINE
Lenovo tweaks its business notebook PC platform
with consumer-friendly touches, such as a robust
audio experience.
$754
on the complexity of the scene, with the R20
test being the more difficult of the two. We’ve
used the older R15 test for our comparison.
The open-source HandBrake tool is a
prolonged CPU test that transcodes a
Hollywood movie into a format suitable for
watching on an Android tablet. Though it’s
possible that more and more people are
watching movies on their laptops, it’s still a
practical task that shows how a prolonged
activity stresses the CPU on the ThinkBook 13s.
Don’t expect to play many quick, action-
oriented games on Lenovo’s business-consumer
notebook, because of the integrated graphics.
There’s an enormous cluster of laptops that all
use the UHD 620 chipset, which will be good
for some basic, older games. Still, if you’re
willing to dial down the details, you can
probably still have good experiences on Fallout
4 (go.pcworld.com/flo4), for example, or
Batman Arkham: Origins (go.pcworld.com/
bark), neither of which are especially ancient.Finally, there’s battery life, one of the more
important measures of a laptop. The
ThinkBook13s fares pretty well here with just
over 10 hours, about enough for a day of work
and then some. (To test, we take a 4K movie and
loop it over and over until the battery expires.)
Some of the consumer laptops pull in much
higher numbers, but laptop manufacturers have
begun taking advantage of low-power displays
that extend battery life further.BOTTOM LINE
While Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Carbon (go.
pcworld.com/crbn) 6th-Gen remains the
superior business notebook in Lenovo’s stable,
the MSRP is well over $1,000. (Prices on the base
models have fallen to $999, as the 7th-Gen
models [go.pcworld.com/crb7] have begun to
ship.) It’s probably worth considering picking up
a deal on the older X1 Carbon generation as well
as considering the new ThinkBooks.
There’s a lot to like about Lenovo’s consumer-
business hybrid, though. Save for a lack of a
dedicated ethernet port, there’s a business-
friendly mix of connectivity options, and good
battery life, with consumer-friendly multimedia
options. Though the performance is relatively
average, being able to buy the ThinkBook 13s at
an affordable price helps elevate it. So pay
attention: if the price is close to MSRP, look
elsewhere. At prices near the $800 or so that
Lenovo is currently charging, the ThinkBook 13s is
a solidly well-rounded notebook that we’d
recommend buying.