I review laptops for a living and this is the best business laptop – 15 hour battery life!
What makes a good business notebook? It must have excellent security features to keep nosy pams and nosy nancies at bay. Second, it needs to offer snappy, fast performance to keep up with your day-to-day demands. And third it must have good battery life. Boss men and women have far too busy to be plugged into an outlet.
As a laptop reviewer, it’s been a while since I’ve come across a business laptop that meets – and even exceeds – all three of these requirements. However, Lenovo changed all that when it released this spectacular Lenovo ThinkPad Z16. To be honest, this company has been hit or miss lately, but the ThinkPad Z16 knocks it out of the park.
Let me give you three reasons why the ThinkPad Z16 is the best business laptop you can get.
Which laptop configuration am I praising?
The impressive Lenovo ThinkPad Z16 I reviewed and reviewed features an AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850H CPU, AMD Radeon graphics, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD storage and a 16-inch, 1920 x 1200 pixel display .
The AMD chip that is in the ThinkPad Z16 is the Truth – This processor makes this machine one of the best business laptops I have ever tested. It’s energy efficient, delivers rival-beating performance, and is a chilling reminder to Intel that AMD is hot on its heels.
As of this writing, this Lenovo ThinkPad Z16 configuration is only $1,359 at Lenovo. (opens in new tab)
The Lenovo ThinkPad Z16 has excellent battery life
To give you some perspective, the average laptop that comes through Laptop Mag’s conveyor belt typically lasts between 9 and 10 hours. Many companies claim their laptops can survive close to 20 hours, but they typically use battery tests that don’t reflect real-world usage.
Our in-house battery test is more intensive. We set our laptops to a brightness of 150 nits and allow them to surf the web non-stop over Wi-Fi until they run out of juice. In the case of the ThinkPad Z16, we ran three battery tests. It took a while the first time 13 hours and 17 minutes. The second time it survived for 15 hours and 26 minutes. The last time there was a knock afterwards 14 hours and 41 minutes.
In my review, I compared the ThinkPad Z16 to the LG Gram 16, which already has an incredible 13 hours of runtime, but somehow, somehow, the Lenovo business laptop has overtaken its LG rival. Here, too, I suspect that the energy-saving AMD is partly responsible for the glorious, long runtime of the ThinkPad Z16.
Say goodbye to “low battery” pop-ups. Plus, you don’t have to chain yourself to an outlet. The ThinkPad Z16 lets you jump freely from A to B without worrying about running out of power.
The Lenovo ThinkPad Z16 has competition-beating performance
On Geekbench 5.4, a benchmark that tests overall performance, the ThinkPad Z16 wipes the floor with its rivals with a rival-beating multi-core score of 9,018. Keep in mind that the ThinkPad Z16 was launched in the second half of 2022, while one of its competitors – the Acer Swift Edge 16 – was launched in 2023. And yet it made it au courant laptop with no problems.
The LG Gram 16 comes with an Intel Core i7-1260P GPU, while the Acer Swift Edge 16 comes with an AMD Ryzen 7 6800U CPU. Although both laptops fall in the same price range as the ThinkPad Z16, you get Away more power from the Lenovo laptop.
It also kicked butt in video editing. On the Handbrake benchmark, which tests how well a laptop can transcode a video from 4K to 1080p, the ThinkPad Z16 took just 6 minutes and 37 minutes to complete the task. The LG Gram 16, on the other hand, moved at a snail’s pace; It took a whopping 17 minutes to transcode the video. The Swift Edge 16 wasn’t that bad, but it still couldn’t compete with the Lenovo laptop. It took 7 minutes and 20 seconds to complete the task.
The Lenovo ThinkPad Z16 has a wealth of security features
The Lenovo ThinkPad Z16 comes with a wealth of security features, including a dedicated fingerprint reader near the arrow keys. If you prefer biometric authentication with your face, you can use the IR-infused 1080p webcam to seamlessly log in with your face.
Other security features include a webcam kill switch via the F9 key, a Kensington lock slot, a discrete Trusted Platform Module (dTPM), and Microsoft’s Pluton chip-to-cloud technology. (You can find out more about the latter in our ThinkPad Z16 review).
As icing on the cake, you don’t have to worry that the ThinkPad Z16 is a fragile machine that will break at the slightest bump or drop. This bad boy passed 12 MIL-STD-810H certification tests to ensure the laptop can withstand extreme conditions including bumps, drops, vibration and inclement weather. For example, if you get caught in a nasty sandstorm on business in Dubai, your ThinkPad Z16 will be fine.
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