A High Performance, Ultra Thin, & Light Laptop for Web & Graphic Design
LENOVO YOGA 920
(UPDATE: 5/3/2022: This is still my main laptop after a little more than 4.5 years and it’s still going strong. At this point the battery doesn’t hold a charge very long and needs to be replaced. I will replace that soon and will update this after that process.
I’ve gone through several chargers both Lenovo and aftermarket. The aftermarket ones, iPower or something like that, died quickly. The original Lenovo charger failed, but I bought of few of Lenovo USB-C chargers for about $30/each on Amazon and they are good and are real OEM chargers. (Link is below.) One of the USB-C ports doesn’t work well as a charge port anymore due to several tripping on the cord incidents, but the other works fine for charging. I really like that they both ports can be used for this, as almost every laptop I’ve had in the past died as a result of broken charging ports.
UPDATE 4/30/2018: It’s been about 5 or 6 months and I still love everything about this laptop. Worth every dollar. If you’ve got the budget for it, buy it. )
Our choice for the best portable laptop for Web Development & Graphic Design or everyday computing. (or at least it was at the time of this original review) (Word of Caution with the 4k display though, read on for more info)
After researching and testing out several of the top performing ultrabooks, the Yoga 920 really grabbed my attention, and while a bit pricey, I feel ok with the price considering the beauty and performance of this laptop. The Microsoft Surface book was another I was considering for about a year, but had a hard time the justifying their high prices. (about $1k more for similar configuration).
Model: Lenovo Yoga 920
1TB SSD, 16GB RAM, 4k uhd display, Bronze color
Price Paid: $1799 ($1999 sticker), direct from Lenovo in October 2017
Get a Discount on your Yoga: Lenovo floats different deals around, but I ordered via their Chat and they offered me a 10% discount. If you are patient, sign up for their mailing list and watch the promos. Also Best Buy offers a configuration that Lenovo doesn’t, so check them out too.
View the Yoga 920 on the Lenovo Site
I won’t bother with any benchmark tests or geeky numbers here. No video showing someone opening a box. Just a real world analysis on what is awesome about this laptop, and what could use some work.
The short answer is, if the price doesn’t scare you, just about anyone will love this laptop. Get the 16GB of RAM, unless this is just for Office, email, and web browsing. I wish I had a FHD (non-4k) display to compare. While the UHD 4k screen is very nice, I am finding some applications are barely usable due to tiny GUI elements. Unfortunately ADOBE CC apps are included here.
The Lenovo Yoga 920 is amazing and exactly what I was looking for in a lightweight, super portable, and high performance laptop. This is not my primary workstation. No designer would be using a laptop as their primary workstation, but a laptop that can smoothly handle all the applications is still a necessity. I’m finding myself comfortably doing a significant amount of work on the Yoga 920, where my laptop use was previously just for meetings, travel and emergency work only.
What I Wanted In a Laptop
- Lightweight & Portability
- Performance – Ability to smoothly run Adobe Creative Cloud applications. Mostly Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Lightroom, InDesign. Also handle a large amount of browser tabs and multi browsers.
- 14″ Screen size. This is the Goldilocks size for me….Just Right!
- Quiet & Cool – low fan noise
- Stylish & High Build Quality
- Backlit keyboard and Quality touchpad
- Long term support – drivers, bios, system updates.
- 2-in-1, was originally not a high priority, but it would be now that I’ve used one.
The Best Features of the Lenovo Yoga 920
Where it Falls Short
I really haven’t found any serious flaws and none of these are enough to not love this laptop. Things may change as time goes on, but for now if I had to find some issues with the Yoga 920 here are a few.