Lenovo Yoga 6 review

The Lenovo Yoga 6 is a great laptop to match with your cool denim outfit, but it also offers long battery life, solid performance and a clicky keyboard. All of that is wrapped up in a sweet $749 deal.

However, its 13.3-inch display is a little dim, and the Yoga 6 gets surprisingly warm for something that’s not a gaming laptop. But overall, we really like the Yoga 6’s design, performance and battery life, making it worthy to be one of the best laptops you can buy. 

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Lenovo Yoga 6 price and configuration  

The Lenovo Yoga 6 comes with two configurations to choose from, but don’t worry, both options are relatively affordable.

The base model starts at $749 (currently $599 on sale), and offers a 13.3-inch, 1080p touchscreen display with an AMD Ryzen 5 5500U processor, 8GB of RAM, 256GB of SSD, and an AMD Radeon GPU. Those specs are pretty great for the price.

Bumping it up a level, you can opt for a slightly pricer version, which just so happens to be the model we reviewed. For $949 (currently $749 on sale), you can upgrade to an AMD Ryzen 7 5700U processor, 16GB of RAM, 512GB of SSD, and AMD Radeon GPU. Similar to the first configuration, this one also includes the 13.3-inch, 1080p touchscreen display.

Lenovo Yoga 6 design

Lenovo has a bold new approach to the laptop chassis, outfitting the Yoga 6 with an abyss blue fabric cover that looks and feels like a pair of denim jeans. Embedded in the top corner of the fabric is the “YOGA” logo, while the opposite bottom corner has the “Lenovo” emblem in a glossy chrome.

The abyss blue continues into the interior portion of the laptop, with a smooth, blue deck and a decent sized keyboard that has top-firing speakers on either side. The side bezels surrounding the screen are small, while the top is just large enough to support the webcam, but that bottom bezel is a chunker.

Since it’s a 2-in-1 laptop, you can fold the lid 90, 180 and 360 degrees, allowing you to put it in a tent or tablet mode, which is nice for folks that either just want to look at the display or want to do a bit of sketching.

At 12.1 x 8.1 x 0.7 inches and 3 pounds, the Yoga 6 is incredibly thin and light. However, the HP Pavilion Aero 13 (11.7 x 8.2 x 0.67 inches, 2.2 pounds), Asus Zenbook 13 (UX325) OLED (12 x 8 x 0.55, 2.5 pounds), and Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 (12.1 x 8.8 x 0.6 inches, 2.8 pounds) were all thinner and lighter than the Yoga.

Lenovo Yoga 6 ports 

The number of ports on the Lenovo Yoga 6 isn’t the greatest. In total there are five ports, two of which are the same type. 

Located on the left side is one USB Type-C port, which also is the charging port, a USB Type-A 3.2 port, and a headphone jack. 

The right side features another USB Type-A 3.2 port and USB Type-C port, along with the power button.

Lenovo Yoga 6 display 

The Yoga 6’s 13.3-inch, 1080p touchscreen display is a little dim, so I can’t really say I enjoyed watching dark scenes with the laptop, but overall the color quality is great. 

Watching the trailer for The Matrix Resurrections, I noticed that the scenes taking place at night or in the dark were hard to see in a brightly lit room. Despite that, the color contrast on the Yoga 6 is absolutely beautiful. In the scene where Neo is in a city full of a green numeric code, the contrast of the colors popped against the nightly city scene. 

The Yoga 6 covered 77.2% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, which just surpassed the premium laptop average (72%) and matched the Surface Laptop 4 (77%). However, it couldn’t get past the Aero 13 (85%) and ZenBook 13 (98.2%).

At 276 nits of brightness, it's the lowest compared to the competitors, which doesn’t come as a shock to me. Both the Surface Laptop 4 (349 nits) and Asus Zenbook 13 (368 nits) slid past the 310-nit premium laptop average, while Aero 13 peaked at 451 nits, kicking everyone's butt.

Lenovo Yoga 6 keyboard, touchpad, and touchscreen 

What the Yoga 6 loses in portability, it makes up for with its decently spaced keyboard. Each press of the keys felt pleasantly clicky and offered enough feedback to satisfy me.

I hit 51 words per minute on the 10fastfingers.com typing test, which is just a couple below my 53-wpm average. The keys offer a nice bump every time I type on them, but I’m still getting used to the smaller deck since I usually use a 14-inch laptop.

I drew a little portrait of my kitty cat Moonlight with the Yoga 6’s touchscreen display, and it felt really smooth and responsive.

The 2.5 x 4.1-inch touchpad is soft to the touch, but the clicks are a bit shallow. It was responsive with Windows 10 gestures like two-finger scrolling and three-finger tab switching.

Lenovo Yoga 6 audio 

The Lenovo Yoga 6’s top-firing speakers aren’t very loud or well-balanced.

The opening guitar in Hazen’s “This House” was bright and full, but the following vocals weren’t as crisp as they could’ve been. Also, the drums were a little muddy when combined with the guitar, and since there’s not a lot of bass, the percussion sounds more treble-heavy. The speakers just sound too shallow.

There’s Dolby Atmos included with the Yoga 6, but no matter how much tweaking I did in the Music settings (which let you choose between detailed, balanced or warm), something always sounded a little off. There’s also Movie, Game and Voice settings, too.

Lenovo Yoga 6 performance

With the Lenovo Yoga 6, you get an AMD Ryzen 7 5700U processor with 16GB of RAM, which didn’t even flinch when I opened 38 Google Chrome tabs, three YouTube videos and Discord to all run at once.

On the Geekbench 5.4 benchmark, the Yoga 6 scored 5,514, which beat the premium laptop average (4,467). It also surpassed the ZenBook 13’s Intel Core i7-1165G7 (5,428) and the Surface Laptop 4’s Intel Core i7-1185G7 (4,829), but it couldn’t get past the Aero 13’s AMD Ryzen 7 5800U processor (5,876).

The Lenovo Yoga 6 transcoded a 4K video to 1080p in 12 minutes and 34 seconds on our HandBrake benchmark, which wins over the premium laptop average (16:06). It even beat the ZenBook 13 (16:50) and Surface Laptop 4 (17:01), but lost again to the Aero 13 (9:05).

Lenovo provides a 512GB SSD with a transfer rate of 406 megabytes per second, which isn’t very fast, losing to the average premium laptop (796.5 MBps). The ZenBook 13’s 512GB SSD (513 MBps), the Surface Laptop 4’s 512GB SSD (563 MBps), and the Aero 13’s 512GB SSD (503 MBps) all beat the Lenovo.

Lenovo Yoga 6 graphics 

The Lenovo Yoga 6 is packing a simple, integrated AMD Radeon chip, but it still holds its own in certain games.

On Sid Meier's Civilization VI: Gathering Storm (Medium, 1080p) benchmark, the Yoga 6 averaged 46 frames per second, soaring above the 30-fps threshold. Rocking integrated Intel GPUs, the Aero 13 (26 fps), Surface Laptop 4 (30 fps), and ZenBook 13 (20 fps) couldn’t make it past the 30-fps mark.

However, the Yoga 6 scored 3,002 on the 3DMark FireStrike synthetic benchmark test, which falls short of the  Zenbook 13 (4,407), Aero 13 (3,182), and the Surface Laptop 4 netted a (5,089).

Lenovo Yoga 6 battery Life 

There aren't any customizable battery options with the Lenovo Yoga 6, so what you buy is what you get, but you won’t be disappointed.

The Yoga 6 comes with the 4-cell, 45 WH Lithium-ion polymer battery, and when surfing the web at 150 nits of brightness, our Laptop Mag Battery Test determined that the Yoga 6 could last for 12 hours and 34 minutes. It crushed the Surface Laptop 4 (10:46), ZenBook 13 (13:06) and Aero 13 (10:32). 

Lenovo Yoga 6 webcam 

The 720p webcam on the Lenovo Yoga 6 does not do a great job.

The 720p webcam is located in the top-center portion of the upper bezel. Immediately when opening up the camera, I was hit with haziness and blotchiness. The camera has no ability to focus whatsoever. With that being said, the haziness also affects the color in the picture, with most of my rosy skin fading out. Things like my lips, eyes, and hair color were barely distinguishable. However, it does feature a very small switch above the webcam that enables webcam privacy through a shutter. 

Lenovo Yoga 6 heat 

You know how you get really hot in jeans on a sunny day? I guess the same happened with the Yoga 6. The laptop got pretty hot, hitting 115 degrees Fahrenheit on the underside, which is far above our 95-degree comfort  threshold. But it  stayed on the cooler side with the touchpad, which got to 74 degrees, while the center of the keyboard got up to 94 degrees, both of which stayed below our comfort threshold. The laptop’s hottest point was on the far rear underside, about 1.5 inches left of center, which reached a whopping 124 degrees. Ouch. 

Lenovo Yoga 6 software and warranty  

Most of what you’ll need is packed all into the Lenovo Vantage app, which is where you can find the latest BIOS and driver updates, information about the Yoga 9i, and the system settings and warranty information. There is also another app called Active Pen, which allows you to customize the button controls.

Otherwise, you’ll find some Windows 10 apps preinstalled, but nothing that's too out of the ordinary or annoying, since you can easily uninstall it. 

The Yoga 6 also comes with the average 1-year limited warranty. 

Bottom line 

The Lenovo Yoga 6 is a wonderful laptop that not only looks good, but works well thanks to its AMD Ryzen 7 CPU, clicky keyboard and long battery life. However, if you don’t like dim displays, and can’t stand when laptops get hot, you might want something else.

Try looking at the HP Pavilion Aero 13, which is one of the lightest laptops around that offers a super bright display.

But overall, you won’t find a laptop that looks as cool as the Yoga 6, and this one even flips.