A stunning looking machine, that combines power and portability but falls short on connectivity.

I have to say straight off the bat that there is so much to love about this machine, there really is. Opening up the box the first thing that hits you is the curves, curves, curves and more curves; it seems like any sharp 90 degree angle they wanted to smoothen and soften it, and it gives you this real prestige feeling; the feeling you get when someone pays attention to detail. The smooth curves  extend to the Bezel which houses the webcam. The second thing that hit me was the lightweight of it. Holding it in my palm it felt light, balanced, but not flimsy.

Looking at its size, It is undeniable what market this ThinkPad is aimed at. At 0.55 by 11.59 by 7.86 inches (HWD), it’s similar in dimensions to the Dell XPS 13 Plus (0.6 by 11.63 by 7.84 inches) and the Apple MacBook Air (0.44 by 11.97 by 8.46 inches), it’s a market for those that crave a powerhouse on the go. This is further evidenced by the designs available, the all-metal aluminum construction version or the discerning vegan leather edition. It’s also evidenced by its price; the bog standard 16gb ram edition arrives at a near £2k price point. Put simply, this is a laptop geared at people in business, where time is money and money is time.

Connectivity

OK so I have to get this out of the way, one of my biggest disappointments with this machine was the lack of connectivity on the machines. I appreciate that what Lenovo is trying to do here is challenge the Dells and the Apple Macbooks; limiting the connections space probably to keep the the speed and size of the machine compete against its rivals, but to only have two USB-C connectors (that’s right they are the only connectors you have) is just absolutely terrible. Remember back in those days when the Macbooks were relatively new, where you turn up at a training course or meeting and there would be the one person who had one but they needed completely different wires and leads to everyone else? Do you remember what a headache it became and sometimes you would have to make do and watch it off their laptop because they wanted to be different. Yes you get that type of feeling. Out of the box, if you don’t have a multiport adapter you cannot even run a third party mouse with this.  There is no USB, HDMI, or even a card reader. Fine, you can get an adaptor but that costs and you have to carry it as well, which kind of well adds to what you’re carrying which beats the idea of having a laptop in the first place if you have to pitch up with more stuff on the train and in the meeting spaces that would expect to use it.

Visuals

The laptop’s display very good, It houses 13.3-inch IPS panel with a 16:10 aspect ratio. The slimness of the screen and its surrounding frame is also impressive, the laptop has a 91.6% screen-to-body ratio, and the quality of the visuals is great. Colours are vibrant and bright, contrast making details pop, and the laptop has great wide viewing angles.

On the top of the display is a bump that Lenovo Communications calls a bar. This is a prominent housing for a Full HD webcam with an electronic shutter and his IR capabilities for facial recognition. Next to it are two microphones with Dolby Voice noise cancellation to filter out unwanted ambient noise. While the Z13 serves a definite purpose when open, the bar also has a handy lip that easily opens and closes the slim laptop.

Usability

Almost into a week in using it and it has to be said that typing on the keyboard is a lot of fun. The keys have some base lighting which helps in darker conditions and I found that the keytrokes aren’t very deep, which is probrably down to the slim nature of the machine but each key is well separated out. Lenovo have this thing and the full-size keyboard layout is comfortable to type on.There’s also a fingerprint reader lock for basic biometric security. For those familiar with think pads, Lenovo has developed the TrackPoint; a red button in-between the keys which acts like a mouse, although it has to be said takes some getting used to. Here they have added a new double-tap feature that brings up a range of tools including adjusting camera settings, muting the mic, and even a tool to transcribe speech right into a document. All very good.

Testing the Lenovo ThinkPad Z13:

Testing of the Lenovo ThinkPad was carried out with UserBenchmark software using their freely available speed test tool tests. The software not only tests each component such as graphics cards and processing chips individually but compares the results to other users with the same and similar components. This provides the extra benefit of being able to size up a machine, identify hardware problems and explore the best upgrades. My review unit was equipped with the AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 6850U processor and integrated Radeon 680M graphics, paired with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB solid-state drive for storage. For benchmark comparisons, I compared the Lenovo ThinkPad Z13 with other premium 13-and 14-inch laptops. Among those are top models like the Apple MacBook Air (2022, M2) and Dell XPS 13 Plus, two of the best high-end thin-and-lights on the market. For a side by side comparison I also looked at the business-oriented Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10.

Areas of Excel

The ThinkPad Z13 pits its AMD Ryzen 7 Pro processor against the Core i7 CPUs used in most competing systems and Apple`s M2 processor, making it an interesting alternative to most laptops in this price range. But as Intel and Apple move toward architectures that attempt to balance performance with efficiency by using a mix of different processing cores, AMD sticks to the more traditional approach, with every processing core equally yoked for different tasks. The result is a mix of leading scores in tests like PCMark and Cinebench, but the ThinkPad Z13 lands in the middle of the pack in tests. Not being the best but not being the worst. I found the overall performance to still be incredibly fast and this makes it extremely competitive, the 16GB of RAM delivering pure power when it came to resource heavy tasks.  Complex video and photo editing tasks were not a problem, even some FX files and Adobe After-effects at HD levels were handled with ease, which easily matched the performance of other premium ultra portables. Moving into the UHD level though did slow the machine down in terms of rendering times. Here the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 with its 32GB RAM outstripped the competition with only the Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio left as its competitor but given that these are different machines in terms of the processing power it’s not the one-to-one comparison that you would usually benchmark against.

Another area where the Lenovo ThinkPad Z13 stands out was in the battery test, astonishingly the thin, small laptop lasted nearly 18 hours on a single charge. This easily outperformed its competitors, and here the USB-C brought an added bonus, as the battery supports fast charging, which means you can quickly recharge when you need to. In comparison against the MacBook I found the display to also be brighter and with a wider viewing angle too, this beats its competitors, especially given the size of the machine. That’s impressive.

FINAL Verdict: Premium Price with Premium Performance

I have to be honest, these are tough times for a consumer, regardless of where you are, everyone is looking to cut costs and make savings. The Lenovo ThinkPad Z13 is proud not to be the cheapest out there. BUT, if you are in the market looking for premium ultraportable space and most importantly, power, the Lenovo ThinkPad Z13 vindicates the real truth that you what you pay for. It easily competes with the best of the best. Its size, its shape, its design is impressive, and the AMD-powered system has performance that’s delivers. At well under 3 pounds, with nearly 18 hours of battery life, the Lenovo ThinkPad Z13 is a powerhouse, and if you can look past the lack of connectivity is an ultraportable laptop, with fantastic performance to go with it. In terms of the score, it’s a solid 4 out of 5 just missing out on the top score owing to the lack of connections and optical drives.