Lenovo Yoga C930 review: As good as it gets

prob­a­bly the best laptop

Win­dows sucks

is it keep run­ning for 12 hours bat­tery back up?

Damn, the old hinge was 10/10, i under­stand they need to put audio some­where but why hinge?

A lap­top review that did­n’t talk about proces­sor, RAM or con­nec­tiv­i­ty options. Nice..

looks sexy

This spe­cial lap­top should be com­pared to oth­ers to see how fast and good it is to others

Fun fact, not real­ly fun lol, but the sil­ver mod­el is actu­al­ly SHARP. Lit­er­al­ly cut my fin­ger on it at my job. Go for the black if your interested

Leno­vo sim­ply aced this one! They are pro­gres­sive­ly upgrad­ing their line­ups and it is very promising.

If u are look­ing for a $200 lap­top then it’s not for you..

what an ultra­book lap­top ! But this is just about shape

Sir are you a robot?

The speak­er is amaz­ing!!!! Dol­by Atmos is real­ly worth pay­ing for!

Almost no bezel? Someone’s not look­ing at that mas­sive chin

I picked up a C930 a few days ago and so far I’m pret­ty pleased. I have the 1080p mod­el with 12gb of RAM and 256 SSD. It’s very fast and respon­sive. It has not slowed down or chugged on any­thing yet. I have Steam, Ever­note, and Chrome run­ning all the time with­out issue. It boots and wakes very quick­ly and the login with the fin­ger­print sen­sor is almost instant.
That sen­sor is on the right just below the key­board and has worked fine every time. 

The bat­tery life is good not great. I think I’m see­ing about 9ish hours. I don’t have a lot of expe­ri­ence with lap­tops, but i will say that it has got­ten pret­ty darn warm when I was play­ing End­less Leg­end (which I prob­a­bly should­n’t be try­ing to play on this.) The fan noise real­ly nev­er gets offen­sive, and I may have been drown­ing it out with the great sound (more on that lat­er). The Wi-Fi and Blue­tooth have had no issues. 

The sty­lus is hand­i­er than I expect­ed it to be. I real­ly like being able to doo­dle on Word docs while dis­cussing them at work. That said, I find it a bit fid­dly to get out of its lit­tle garage. It’s hard to grip. But I’ve found it’s more fun to just push in its spring and then let it launch out of the lap­top like a mis­sile from an old G.I. Joe toy. I’ve heard a lot of folks say that it’s too small to use com­fort­ably for long peri­ods of time but I disagree. 

The screen is clear and respon­sive, but I wish it would go a lit­tle brighter. I’ve also heard that the col­or accu­ra­cy isn’t very good, but in this case, being col­or defi­cient has its advan­tages. I will say I don’t like the chin at all. They def­i­nite­ly could have used that space for addi­tion­al screen real estate and I’m not sure why they did­n’t. I did­n’t think I’d see the day when I pre­ferred a 4:3 ratio, but work­ing on a 16:9 Yoga after hav­ing used a Pix­el­book for a cou­ple of weeks made the 16:9 feel a bit claus­tro­pho­bic. After a cou­ple of days, I got used to it and now I don’t notice it, but I find that I’m more like­ly to us the C930 in stand more (key­board upside down on table) than tent mode because I pre­fer to keep that chin on the bot­tom. Well, except the sound is bet­ter in tent mode (more on that later).

The web­cam is 720p and it’s ade­quate. Noth­ing spe­cial, noth­ing awful. The lit­tle hard­ware shut­ter they’ve added to block off the cam­era has been called chintzy by some, but I think it’s an inge­nious solu­tion to the problem. 

The key­board is good not great. It’s cer­tain­ly bet­ter than any key­board that exists on a “folio” but it’s not as nice as the one you’ll find on the Pix­el­book (I only know this because I had one for 13 days before return­ing it. Key­board was good — tablet was meh). Keys are respon­sive, but shal­low. Touch pad is nice; no issues there.

Port selec­tion is ade­quate. I’m glad there’s still a USB‑A on this thing, as it’s still pret­ty handy to have. It’s also pow­ered, so you can charge or pow­er stuff with it if you want­ed to. The two USB‑C ports are both Thun­der­bolt and both can be used to charge the C930. It still has a head­phone jack (because remov­ing them is absurd), and the only oth­er thing on the sides are the pow­er but­ton on the right. I real­ly wish they includ­ed hard­ware but­tons to con­trol vol­ume. It is a drag to have to use the taskbar to con­trol sound in tablet mode, espe­cial­ly since some pro­grams won’t let me call it up (and I“m not going to keep the taskbar up — the screen is too squished as it is). My oth­er (small) gripe is that all the ports are on the left (port, ha!) side of the machine. Though I did­n’t know this before now, appar­ent­ly all my use sce­nar­ios are bet­ter served with right-sided ports. Regard­less, this thing charges very quick­ly and I’ve had no issues with bat­tery life.

There’s been a lot of chat­ter about the death of the watch­band hinge. I fear I nev­er got to try one myself, but the new hinge seems fine. The C930 almost pass­es the open-with-one-hand test, but juu­u­ust a snad too light on the bot­tom to open ful­ly. There’s def­i­nite­ly some wob­ble when using the touch­screen in lap­top mode, but hon­est­ly I can’t imag­ine how to avoid that sort of thing with such thin devices.

I would be remiss not to men­tion the sound com­ing out of this thing. It is, by far, the best sound I’ve ever heard from any lap­top ever. The Dol­by Atmos is a real thing. It has made me almost turn my head because it made me think sound was com­ing from an angle off to my side. Not like, waaaay off left or any­thing, but you get it. It’s loud and very full-sound­ing for a lap­top. Hell, they’re just good for com­put­er speak­ers peri­od if we’re com­par­ing them to the usu­al junk we all put on our desks. If you try one of these out at Best Buy, you’ll see what I mean. I lit­er­al­ly tried ten+ oth­er lap­tops and ultra­books in their store and none of them were near­ly as good at pro­duc­ing sound like the C930. I think what sold me was when I heard the open­ing music to Civ­i­liza­tion IV com­ing out of it. That song is good to begin with. On the C930 it was down­right impres­sive. Hon­est­ly, the sound more than makes up for my gripes about the screen chin or the port-side ports. Now, you’re sup­posed to be able to get that same Dol­by Atmos expe­ri­ence using any old head­phones in the jack on the C930, but I have not been super-impressed in that regard. It might be bet­ter than stan­dard stereo, but it’s not the same as that nice sound bar. They designed that bar so that it’s nev­er being muf­fled by the table. Even in stand mode, when the key­board is face-down on the table, the sound bar is bounc­ing off the table and hit­ting you. How­ev­er, in that mode the oth­er speak­ers (yes, there are four) are way behind the screen and fir­ing into the air at noth­ing, so I think it sounds bet­ter in tent mode, when the sound bar is point­ed upwards and the “woofers” (total­ly not woofers but they han­dle most­ly mid-range) are fir­ing into a sort-of enclosed space under the tent. There’s no ques­tion that the sound is best in lap­top mode, but it’s good even in tablet mode. The Pix­el­book was far too qui­et, and I found myself keep­ing it in lap­top mode just so I could hear YouTube talk­ing heads dur­ing break­fast. That is very much not a con­cern with the C930. The speak­ers are LOUD. You will nev­er have a hard time hear­ing it.

Last­ly, this is a very nice look­ing machine. It’s thin and I find it easy to car­ry around with me. I’ve already got­ten a cou­ple com­ments about how nice it looks. 

Whelp, that end­ed up a lot longer than I expect­ed, but I felt like this video “review” was not very good and I want­ed to pro­vide some actu­al infor­ma­tion about the machine. I’d be hap­py to answer any questions.

Bought this lap­top few months ago and now I’m get­ting fan noise issues, feels like the fan is touch­ing on a surface.

Any­one knows about the qual­i­ty of the camera? 🙂

If I ever again want to buy a lap­top whose bat­tery goes from 80% to 0% in 1 minute, I’ll def­i­nite­ly buy a lenovo