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The best laptops for college students should be lightweight and portable, have long-lasting batteries, a display that can handle both work and entertainment, and a ton of ports.
And that’s why last year’s Lenovo Yoga 7 14 is still a fantastic pick for students of all ages, or really anyone who wants a nice, well-priced 2-in-1.
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Students will appreciate this 14-inch convertible’s lightweight design, all-day battery life, and affordable price.
Its build quality impressed Mashable contributor Sarah Chaney, our reviewer. It has a premium all-aluminum chassis that’s “solidly constructed despite weighing practically nothing,” she wrote. It comes in at about three pounds and measures 0.6 inches thin, so your average textbook dwarfs it. It’s packed with ports, including an HDMI port, a microSD card slot, and double-sided USB-C ports for convenient charging. Chaney also gushed about this hybrid’s clacky, almost mechanical-feeling keyboard with adjustable backlighting, which gives it an expensive feel. Its OLED touchscreen is a little more muted compared to those on other models, but it’s still a step up from an IPS display in terms of vibrancy. Plus, you can flip it all the way over on its hinge to use it like a tablet.
On the performance front, the Yoga 7 14 is solid for the money. We didn’t record a single-core score when we ran it through our usual Geekbench 6 performance benchmark. However, another Windows laptop we tried with the same upper mid-range Ryzen 7 AI 350 CPU scored pretty dang well; in basic workloads, it rivaled pricier x86-based Windows machines meant for creative work and gaming. (It probably trails the ARM-based Asus Zenbook A14, a single-core overachiever, by about 20 percent.)
In more intensive multi-core workloads, the Yoga 7 14 falls about right in the middle of our database’s pack. It’s not a performance beast in this regard, but it’s more than fine for everyday productivity and light multimedia work. If you need a super-powerful x86-based laptop with a dedicated GPU to run AutoCAD and other demanding specialty software, go with the Acer Swift X 14, below.
The Yoga 7 14 offers an above-average battery life of nearly 18 hours on a single charge, so you won’t be panicking if you forget to bring your charger to a study session.