Restored Lenovo ThinkPad 13.3" Touchscreen Laptop, AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, Windows 11, 21D2001QUS

[This review was collected as part of a promotion.] Seriously fantastic little laptop. The build quality is fantastic, the keyboard sound and feel is great, the trackpad (after some adjustments to sensitivity) feels great, and the screen is very clear and bright (after adjusting the Radeon Dynamic Brightness to "Balanced"). I use it to run games at medium to high settings and compile code. It packs a serious punch with the Ryzen chip in it. Very happy with my purchase.

[This review was collected as part of a promotion.] My specs were 6650U, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, IPS 1920x1200. I needed a light machine with good battery life for writing on the road, so I didn't need to load it up. When I first opened the box, I thought the Z13 was ridiculously small. It made my wife's MacBook Pro 13” look big. It made my T480 look HUGE. While it weighed slightly more than the X1 Carbon, the Z13 had a condensed/tight feel to it and was not at all bulky. I could easily throw it in a bag and not really notice the weight. It was a thin slab of aluminum and glass, rather than the big T480 I'm used to. The thing is, when working on it, it didn't feel small. It's like the ThinkPad Tardis—bigger on the inside. It did feel like a ThinkPad. It's solid. No give in the keyboard. Hinges stay where you put them. It felt like a premium machine, and it acts like one, too. The screen was crisp and clear. Most of the time, I ran it at about 30% - 40% brightness for a comfortable screen without it feeling too bright. ONE NOTE: I turned OFF the VariBright setting in the AMD Radeon Software. This is supposed to vary the brightness of various windows to save battery, but I found that it messed with contrast and saturation. Sometimes, things looked oversaturated and sometimes, things were hard to read. Once I turned this off, things went back to normal, and there didn't seem to be any loss in battery life. Specs say that key travel is 1.35mm, the same as on the X1 Nano. I think I liked it a little better than the X1 Yoga Gen 7's keyboard, which was 1.5mm of travel. The keys had a sort of tactile spring/snap to them that felt really nice. Also, the keyboard remembered the backlight setting after sleep/power off. I think the “haptic forcepad” is light years beyond the old mechanical clumsy T440 clonkpad, but let's face it, no virtual button is going to be the same as a dedicated physical button. The virtual TrackPoint buttons took some adjustment. After about a week, I was almost there, but it still was an adjustment. For me, the biggest issue with the haptic buttons was not having the shape of the physical buttons there to guide my thumb. You have to retrain yourself to feel for the raised dots on the touchpad (which mark the middle button area). It was about day 4 before this stopped being weird. At that point, I was focused on some work, and muscle memory took over. Oddly enough, when I found myself not thinking about it, it all went better. Beyond that, this is probably the only touchpad on a Windows laptop that I ever found myself actually using. (I usually hate them, which is why I buy ThinkPads.) The 6650U had more than enough power for what I bought it for – some web research, light graphics work from time to time, and a main workload of productivity tasks in MS Office (sometimes I have docs up to 400 pages). Everything was snappy and quick – even when working off battery. Battery life was really good. I would estimate around 10-12 hours in best power efficiency, no battery saver. In actual use, I was burning about 9% an hour, and I got close to 9 hours before I wore down to 20% battery. I wasn't babying it, either – I wanted to see what it would get for my actual work, so I ran at settings that were comfortable to me. The Windows Hello face recognition was great. The speakers were not incredibly loud, but were fine – decent mids and a little bass. I didn't do any video conferencing, but I did check the video and sound quality with the Camera app, and it was fairly nice. I thought it was not quite sensitive enough (I had it set to 98%, but I still sounded quiet in video). In the end, it had a great screen, keyboard, and battery life, but the form factor was just not a right fit for me. I have a weird hand position on the keyboard, and the corner of the chassis hit me in the middle of the left palm. So, after seven days on it, I felt some tenderness in my hand where the corner was hitting me. At that point, it was time to pack it up, but it was an issue that is somewhat unique to me. I was somewhat sad that I had to send it back, because otherwise, it was perfect. If it were a Z14, I wouldn't have had that issue, and would probably still have the machine, but that also would have meant the unit wouldn't have been as portable.