Lenovo ThinkBook 14 review: Stuck in the past and paying for it

Best Prices Today: Lenovo ThinkBook 14

How much are you willing to sacrifice for a laptop with tons of ports?

The ThinkBook 14 is likely to test the commitment of even the most committed port-fiends. It has Thunderbolt 4, USB-C, USB-A, Ethernet, a full-sized HDMI 2.1, a 3.5mm audio jack, and a 4-in-1 SD card reader, all in a laptop under $1,000. Unfortunately, it also falls way behind the competition in performance and battery life.

Lenovo ThinkBook 14: Specifications

The Lenovo ThinkBook 14’s specifications are rather basic. It has an Intel Core 5 210H which, though it does provide eight cores (four performance, four efficient), relies on cut-back Intel Graphics and lacks an NPU. The model I reviewed also stuck to Wi-Fi 6, instead of the newer Wi-Fi 7 standard, and had a small 256GB solid state drive.

• Model number: 21SG000FUS
• CPU: Intel Core 5 210H, 8 cores with 12 threads
• Memory: 16GB LPDDR5x
• Graphics/GPU: Intel Graphics
• NPU: None
• Display: 14-inch 1920×1200 60Hz 300-nits
• Storage: 256GB M.2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe solid state drive
• Webcam: 1080p 30fps camera with privacy shutter
• Connectivity: 1x Thunderbolt 4 40Gbps / USB-C with Power Delivery 3.0 and DisplayPort 2.1, 1x USB-C 10Gbps, 2x USB-A 5Gbps, 1x HDMI 2.1, 1x 3.5mm combo audio, 1x Gigabit Ethernet (RJ45), 1x 4-in-1 SD card reader
• Networking: Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2
• Biometrics: Fingerprint reader
• Battery capacity: 45 watt-hours
• Dimensions: 12.34 x 8.82 in x 0.69
• Weight: 3.0 pounds
• Operating System: Windows 11 Home
• Price: $949.99 MSRP / $828.99 typical retail (CDW)

Lenovo’s pricing doesn’t reflect the laptop’s basic hardware. The configuration I tested carries an MSRP of $949.99 on enterprise-focused retailer CDW, though it’s more frequently sold for $828.99. Even then, the ThinkBook’s specifications are lackluster compared to alternatives like the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED or Dell 14 Plus.

The Lenovo ThinkBook 14 is a laptop stuck in the past.

Lenovo ThinkBook 14: Design and build quality

The ThinkBook line is Lenovo’s entry-level business and enterprise sub-brand. It’s designed to provide some benefits of ThinkPad laptops at a lower price point. The ThinkBook 14 fulfills that mission in some areas, but design isn’t one of them.

I’ll give the Thinkbook credit for one thing: it’s distinctive. The two-tone silver display lid and prominent ThinkBook branding is less subdued than competitors like Dell’s Pro and Acer’s Travelmate line-up.

Open the laptop, however, and it’s clearly built to a budget. Plastic is the material of choice. The chassis mostly resists flex but can feel squishy across the middle of the keyboard.

It’s also rather light at three pounds. That’s good for portability but underscores the laptop’s budget feel. I thought it felt a bit hollow, as if most of the interior was empty (which, to be clear, isn’t the case).

None of this is shocking for a Windows laptop priced under $1,000, but buyers can do better. Asus Zenbook, Dell Plus, and Lenovo IdeaPad laptops tend to offer a more attractive and premium design for the money.

Lenovo ThinkBook 14: Keyboard, trackpad

While it might not look premium, the Lenovo ThinkBook 14 has a great keyboard that’s generally better than most Windows laptops and certainly solid for a laptop under $1,000. The keyboard is spacious, provides good key travel, and benefits from a crisp, snappy key feel. A few keys, like Backspace, are a bit smaller than on a full-sized keyboard, but it’s a spacious and enjoyable experience overall.

The ThinkBook 14 I tested had a keyboard backlight, but it’s not standard, so keep that in mind when shopping for the laptop. The backlight was unimpressive, but it did the job.

The touchpad measures just a hair under five inches wide and three inches deep, which is typical for a 14-inch Windows laptop. It was responsive in my testing and, importantly, never picked up on unwanted inputs while typing. A few competitors, like the Microsoft Surface Laptop 13.8 and Asus Zenbook 14 OLED, offer a larger touchpad (though, to be fair, Microsoft’s Surface is much more expensive).

Lenovo ThinkBook 14: Display, audio

Most Lenovo ThinkBook 14 configurations, including the one I tested, ship with a 14-inch 1080p IPS display. An optional touchscreen is available, too, and it’s also a 14-inch 1080p IPS panel.

The display is a bit disappointing overall. It’s advertised with a maximum brightness of 300 nits and, in my testing, barely exceeded that. That’s not bright for a laptop and it can make the screen difficult to view in brighter rooms. Outdoor use will prove nearly impossible on a sunny day.

It’s not a great display for color and contrast, either. Movies and games look muted and washed-out and viewing the display in a dark room will reveal noticeable “IPS glow,” which casts a silver-gray sheen over the display.

The recent proliferation of affordable OLED panels has reduced the appeal of basic IPS displays like that found in the ThinkBook 14. The Asus Zenbook 14 OLED, Lenovo Yoga 7 2-in-1, and Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro all provide more colorful and rich OLED displays and, at current pricing, they’re competitive with the ThinkBook 14.

Audio performance is a downside for the ThinkBook 14. The laptop has simple downward-firing speakers that struggle to provide adequate volume and quickly become muddy in music, movies, and games. The speakers are fine for podcasts and video calls, but that’s about it.

Lenovo ThinkBook 14: Webcam, microphone, biometrics

Most Lenovo ThinkBook 14 configurations ship with a 1080p webcam capable of recording up to 30 frames per second and a dual-array microphone. This is a typical configuration for a laptop sold in 2025, and it provides good video quality and audio quality for video calls. A physical privacy shutter is included.

An IR camera with support for Windows Hello is also available but wasn’t on the laptop I reviewed. It did have a fingerprint reader, however, which was bundled into the power button. It worked about as well as usual. The fingerprint reader is often responsive but may struggle if touched slightly off-center or with greasy, damp, or dirty hands.

Lenovo ThinkBook 14: Connectivity

I’ve mostly ragged on the Lenovo ThinkBook 14 so far, and for good reason. It’s behind the competition in several areas.

But if you want ports? Oh, boy, does the ThinkBook 14 have ports. 

The laptop has one Thunderbolt 4 / USB-C port with USB Power Delivery and DisplayPort, plus a second USB-C port that also supports power. It also has two USB-A ports, full-sized HDMI, a Gigabit Ethernet jack, a 3.5mm combo audio jack, and even a 4-in-1 SD card reader.

I like Lenovo’s no-compromise approach. The ThinkBook 14 supports Thunderbolt 4 for fast connections to modern displays, storage, and docks, but it also supports USB-A and Ethernet. 

Wireless connectivity, on the other hand, is a miss. The ThinkBook 14 only supports Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2, but most modern laptops have upgraded to Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.

This won’t be a huge issue for most shoppers, because you need a Wi-Fi 7 router or Bluetooth 5.4 device to see any difference. However, sticking to older standards will make the ThinkBook 14’s wireless connectivity feel dated quickly.

Lenovo ThinkBook 14: Bloatware woes

We’ll dig into performance in a moment, but, before we do, I need to explain a major problem I experienced while testing the laptop.

The Lenovo ThinkBook 14, like most Lenovo laptops, ships with a smattering of Lenovo software. It’s meant to provide all sorts of functionality, from customization of power profiles to improvements to video quality in video calls. Most of this is lumped under Lenovo Vantage, but other services include Lenovo Smart Meeting and Lenovo Now.

I quickly noticed that the ThinkBook 14 wasn’t performing as well as expected. On closer inspection, I noticed a program called Lenovo Live Face Filter was constantly battering the CPU, which seemed to also reduce performance in benchmark scores.

The solution? I uninstalled software called Lenovo Smart Meeting Components, which apparently included the Live Face Filter.

The performance and results below were reached with Live Face Filter turned off. However, users who fail to uninstall it can expect to see a 10 to 20 percent reduction in performance. That’s a terrible penalty for pre-installed bloatware and immediately sinks the ThinkBook 14’s hopes of competing against other laptops.

Lenovo needs to pay much closer attention to the behavior of software it ships on its laptops.

Lenovo ThinkBook 14: Performance

The Lenovo ThinkBook 14 I reviewed was a barebones configuration with an Intel Core 5 210H processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 256GB PCIe 4.0 solid state drive. It’s close to the most basic version of the ThinkBook 14 available and its only upgrades—a fingerprint reader and the keyboard backlight—of course have no impact on performance.

So, how does the Intel Core 5 210H hold up? Well, not great, even with Lenovo’s Live Face Filter disabled.  

The ThinkBook 14 was off to a bad start in PCMark 10, where it hit a combined score of just 5,060. That’s a rather low result which puts the ThinkBook behind competitors like the Dell 14 Plus 2-in-1, Framework Laptop 12, and Acer Aspire 14 AI. Asus’ older Zenbook 14 OLED, meanwhile, runs away from the pack—which is a big problem for all competitive laptops, as that model is available online for about $850.

Handbrake results were similarly unimpressive. Though the CPU has eight cores overall, only four are performance cores, and the ThinkBook 14 seems to have trouble sustaining performance over long durations. That puts it at the rear of the pack.

Cinebench 2024 is no more favorable, once again placing the ThinkBook 14 behind the pack. The laptop fails to sustain a high level of performance over the test’s duration, which tanks the score. It makes the benchmark painful to run, as it takes a long time to complete.

Graphics performance isn’t a strength for the Lenovo ThinkBook 14, either. The Intel Core 5 210H sticks with Intel Graphics, which has just 48 execution units and a top clock speed of 1.4GHz, and the execution units (EUs) are of an older generation. By comparison, the Intel Arc 140V graphics in the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition provide 64 of Intel’s latest EUs with a max clock of 1.95GHz.

Put simply, the ThinkBook 14 ain’t it when it comes to graphics, falling a tad behind the Framework Laptop 12’s Intel UHD graphics and the Dell 14 Plus 2-in-1’s AMD Radeon 840M. Even games from the PS4/Xbox One console generation won’t run smoothly without significant cuts to graphics detail and resolution.

In summary, the ThinkBook 14 is not a performer. So much so that you might be wondering what, exactly, is up with the Intel Core 210H that powers it.

That’s a good question, and it’s worth mentioning that the ThinkBook 14 appears to be significantly behind other laptops with the Intel Core 210H. Those laptops, which include the Asus Vivobook V16 and Dell Inspiron 16 Plus, are larger. They also ship with larger power adapters (150 and 100 watts, respectively). That leads me to speculate the ThinkBook 14’s smaller configuration, powered by a 65-watt adapter, is a bit starved for power.

Whatever the case, the results were clear—and not to the ThinkBook’s benefit.

Lenovo ThinkBook 14: Battery life and portability

The Lenovo ThinkBook 14’s specifications don’t look promising when it comes to battery life, as the laptop has a relatively small 45 watt-hour battery–while that is similar to a MacBook Air 13, it’s smaller than many 13-inch and 14-inch Windows laptops, which tend to land in the 50 to 70 watt-hour range.

As a result, the ThinkBook’s portability was disappointing. The laptop endured eight hours and 43 minutes, which is barely enough to handle a full workday.

And, if anything, I think the battery life test—which uses a 4K file of the short film Tears of Steel—was more charitable than my real-world experience. A two-hour visit to a local coffee shop often left me with less than 50 percent of a charge remaining.

Keep in mind, too, that this result was achieved with Lenovo’s persistent Live Face Filter software uninstalled. With it installed, the ThinkBook 14’s battery life was just six hours and 28 minutes.

I do have one nice thing to say about the ThinkBook 14’s portability. I like the USB-C power adapter. It’s a compact 65-watt charger that’s light and easy to tote in any bag that will fit the laptop. Some competitors at this price point still use brick-style adapters, so it’s good to see a compact charger included.

Lenovo ThinkBook 14: Conclusion

The Lenovo ThinkBook 14 is a laptop stuck in the past. From its display to its design, to its battery life and performance, nothing about it feels modern. Even its perks are countered by trade-offs that don’t work to its benefit.

It has the physical connectivity that a prosumer or frequent flier might want to connect to anything they encounter on the road, but it lacks the performance and battery life to be a great travel companion. It has a keyboard that is great for long typing sessions, but the display is often too dim to easily see what’s on screen.

The real problem, however, is that it faces competitors that do better in nearly every metric, aside from connectivity. That’s what ultimately sinks the laptop’s fortunes: if you’ve got about $800 to spend, you’ve no shortage of much better options, from the Asus’ Zenbook 14 to Lenovo’s own Ideapad models. And that’s to say nothing of Apple’s MacBook Air 13, which, if you’re ok with MacOS, is quicker, lighter, delivers far better battery life.