Yes, Amazon Prime It’s next week (see our roundup of early deals), but Amazon isn’t the only company running a sale right now. Lenovo is having a sale on its ThinkBook laptops, with the option to buy an AMD Ryzen 7 6800U processor and AMD’s integrated Radeon 680M graphics for under $1,000, something we haven’t seen before.
The Lenovo ThinkBook 13S Gen 4 features a Ryzen 7 6000-series chip, 16 gigabytes of RAM (soldered), a 512GB SSD, plus a 13-inch IPS display 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
Photo: Lenovo
The ThinkBook line, Lenovo’s cheaper alternative to its legendary ThinkPads, looks a bit like the Dell XPS or MacBook, but beats both when it comes to ports. You get a USB-C 4.0 port (which doubles as a charging port), a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port, a USB-A port, an HDMI 2.0 port, and a headphone jack. There is also a fingerprint reader.
We haven’t tested this model, but we liked last year’s version (we tested it with an Intel chip). The Ryzen 7 chip inside the Gen 4 is AMD’s most powerful laptop option and should be able to handle anything you throw at it. It lacks a discrete graphics card, but the integrated Radeon 680M graphics is enough for most people (if you’re looking for a video editing device, look elsewhere). AMD’s Ryzen 6000 series chips are also known for 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 a MacBook experience than a ThinkPad, but still quite comfortable to type on. The laptop weighs about the same as a MacBook Air, so it’s pretty easy to carry around. The only place this ThinkBook draws attention is the screen, which is a 13-inch 1920 x 1200 anti-glare IPS panel. It’s not the brightest at 300 nits, but I still prefer a lower-res anti-glare panel to a higher-res glossy panel, and the 16:10 aspect ratio gives you extra vertical screen space.
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