The Lenovo IdeaPad S940 is a fantastic looking windows laptop, honestly one of the best.
The display is very nice, and the keyboard is a joy to type on.
With that said, for the asking price, would suggest looking elsewhere, and there are a
few things that disappointed us, but with that said there is one specific group that
this machine will be fantastic for, and also a way you can get some solid discounts that
make this 14” laptop a lot more desirable.
It’s obvious that we are Mac fans around here, and coming from that background I have
to say I love the design.
It’s very MacBook without copying the design.
In fact, many will even prefer it.
I love how the back and front slope forward, the minimally beveled edges, the Lenovo badging
on the lower right hand side of both the lid and the inside, along with slightly curved
and shaped display display bezels presenting a flat center on the lid for easy opening
with 9 series elegantly embossed.
The unibody aluminum chassis feels great in the hand but has a bit too much flex for our
liking, and the overall build quality is below Apples with some mis-aligned panels.
The touchpad is a decent size with very good almost uniform clicking but cursor control
is below average.
At the top right we have a slim power button with led indicator which doesn’t include
a fingerprint scanner but that's totally fine by us since the s940 offers windows hello
facial unlocking that we absolutely love.
Below the 720P HD Webcam and IR sensor our model has a gorgeous not touch 500 nit 100%
SRGB 4K display capable of HDR playback, but there is a 400 Nit 1080P option that will
help with battery life, but more on the battery in just a bit.
The quad speakers are user facing with Dolby tuning and sound above average for ultra light
windows laptop, a surprising 2.6 pounds in this case, but can’t keep up with Apple’s
$1100 Macbook Air or similarly priced 13” Macbook Pro.
At the center of the laptop is probably the best feature of this laptop, the backlit keyboard.
The key travel is just long enough to feel great but still stay thin, with enough pressure
required to eliminate mis types without feeling too clicky or damping without being too mushy.
If you type a lot this is one of the best keyboards in any laptop this thin and light.
One the sides we have a headphone mic combo jack along with three ports, two being full
speed Thunderbolt 3 and the other USB-C but for some reason only gen 1 meaning the speed
is only half of what it could be.
Now being MacBook fans we’re used to only having USB-C ports, but it still is a bit
disappointing to see a $2000 laptop with less ports than Apples equivalent that gets so
much hate for being a donglebook.
Our S940 has 512GB of SSD NVME SSD running at a super fast 3341 MB/s Read and 1939 write
which is refreshing compared to other ultrabooks that skimp on SSD’s.
So far this lenovo is getting sounding very good overall, but this is where I have to
get the few weak stops of this beautiful ultrabook, and even though there’s not too much to
complain about these can really make or break your decision.
First off, the webcam both looks poor and sounds really muffled.
Second is the battery life.
It makes sense that Lenovo could only fit a 52watt hour battery in this ultra thin machine,
but pairing it to 500 nit 4K display results in really poor battery life.
Lenovo rates it at 7.5 hours of battery life which in the real world is closer to 5 hours
with at usable display brightness levels.
This places it at the bottom of the market for battery life if you want the gorgeous
color accurate HDR display.
Opting for the 1080P option will about double your battery life, but that’s a big trade
off since its not as bright and much lower quality overall.
Personally we wish they would have split it right in the middle like Huawai or Apple with
resolution in the middle of 1080P and 4K for a detailed image and 10 hour battery life
while maintaining 500 bit brightness, but instead you have to choose from a top notch
bright 4K display with poor battery life or an average 1080P display with good battery
life which is hard choice to make.
The last downside is performance.
The spec sheet sounds very promising with an 8th gen quad core 1.8Ghz processor that
can boost up to 4.6Ghz but running a few tests gave us disappointing results.
The similarly priced 13” Macbook Pro scored about 40% higher in Geekbench 4 and almost
60% higher in Cinebench R20 where all the cores are maxed out, even though the MacBook
is an i5 CPU not an i7.
Even comparing it to a $1299 base 1.4Ghz i5 MacBook Pro the Lenovo S940 falls really far
behind.
How is that possible you ask?
Well The CPU’s in these machines are all rated at 15Watts, but the Lenovo is not letting
the i7 run higher than that where the MacBooks can continuously run at about 30watts which
makes a huge difference in performance.
And yes, thats with all power saving features turned off and with the S940 plugged in, while
the Macbook Pro’s are on battery power without having to find and change power options.
Other windows laptops don’t limit the CPU as much, but I can see why Lenovo is doing
this giving the power draw of the bright 4K display and the smaller battery capacity.
Processor performance isn’t the only downside, but the intel UHD Graphics 620 did struggle
a bit with the 4K display causing occasional UI stutters and also sometimes when playing
back 4K Youtube videos.
Of course this same GPU is used in most windows equivalents but most of those have lower resolutions,
and the 1080P version of the s940 shouldn’t have these issues.
On the Mac side, Apple pays more for intel chips with IRIS graphics which provide more
than double the performance as you can see in our Geekbench OpenCL test.
These downsides paired with a $2000 msrp make the s940 a laptop that’s hard to recommend
even though we really like a lot about it.
This is a really nice aluminum ultra thin and light machine with only USB-C ports and
a gorgeous display at a premium price, Almost like you’re buying a windows version of
a Macbook.
We did a side by side comparison that you can check out by using the card at the end
of this video, but the Macbook pro has much better performance, 4 thunderbolt 3 ports,
much better speakers and trackpad, a better webcam and touch ID instead of windows hello
and about double the battery life while having an almost as sharp display with better color
accuracy and similar brightness.
You don’t have HDR for videos and the keyboard is a way’s behind, but overall it provides
a much better value for the price.
And if you’re going for a lower priced model Apple now sells the base model with almost
identical CPU and GPU performance and the same display, so even then the competition
is strong.
Now the main reason why we’re comparing it to a MacBook is because Lenovo prioritized
many things that Apple does and at a similar price point, But of course not everyone wants
a Mac and that’s where the new XPS 9580 or Razer Blade stealth come in, both having
better port options, improved performance and a lower regular price which make the S940
a hard sell.
But there is one reading factor, and that’s the good discounts that lenovo offers on their
site, which we’ll link in the description.
Prices change but right now the $1800 model is $360 off, which is only $60 cheaper than
a similarly specced full price MacBook pro, but at least at that price I can actually
recommend it to one group of people, those who do a lot of typing.
For most even at that price a MacBook or XPS is probably a better choice, but if you prioritize
design and want a thin and light windows laptop that had a gorgeous screen to look at while
you type away on the top notch keyboard for up to 5 hours at a time the Lenovo S940 will
be a fantastic laptop for your needs, but if you care about performance, battery life,
ports and value more than design then you should look elsewhere.
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