Yes, Amazon Prime Day is next week (see our roundup of early deals), but Amazon isn’t the only company running sales right now. Lenovo is having a sale on its ThinkBook laptops, with the opportunity to pick up an AMD Ryzen 7 6800U processor and AMD’s integrated Radeon 680M graphics for well under $1,000, something we’ve not seen previously.
Lenovo’s ThinkBook 13S Gen 4 features the 6000-series Ryzen 7 chip, 16 gigabytes of RAM (soldered), a 512-GB SSD, plus a 13-inch IPS screen for $862 ($209 off). To see this discount at checkout, you’ll need to enter two promo codes: SUPERTHINKJULY and BFIJTHINKOFFER.
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Why We Like the ThinkBook 13S
Photograph: Lenovo
The ThinkBook line, Lenovo’s lower-cost alternative to its iconic ThinkPads, looks a bit like a Dell XPS or MacBook, but it beats both when it comes to ports. You get a USB-C 4.0 port (which doubles as the charging port), a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port, a USB-A port, an HDMI 2.0 port, and a headphone jack. There’s also a fingerprint reader.
We haven’t tested this particular model, but we did like last year’s version (we tested it with the Intel chip). The Ryzen 7 chip inside the Gen 4 is AMD’s most powerful option for laptops and should be able to handle about anything you throw at it. It lacks a discrete graphics card, but the integrated Radeon 680M graphics is plenty for most people (if you’re looking for a video editing rig, look elsewhere). AMD’s 6000-series Ryzen chips are also noted for their improved battery life. Lenovo claims 11 hours, but that’s under ideal conditions; expect eight to nine hours.
The keyboard is on the flat side, closer to the experience of a MacBook than a ThinkPad, but still quite comfortable to type on. The laptop is just about the weight of a MacBook Air, so it’s quite easy to tote around. The only place this ThinkBook cuts corners is the screen, which is a 13-inch, 1,920 x 1,200 pixel anti-glare IPS panel. It’s not the brightest at 300 nits, but I still prefer a lower resolution anti-glare panel to a higher resolution shiny panel, and the 16:10 screen ratio gives you some extra vertical screen space.
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