Lenovo ThinkBook 16 Gen 7

While most ThinkPads occupy the enterprise executive suite, Lenovo's ThinkBook laptops target small-office entrepreneurs. The ThinkBook 16 Gen 7 ($819.99 as tested) is, you guessed it, a 16-inch desktop replacement built for mainstream work with everyday office apps rather than multimedia creativity. It's not a barn-burner—and its dim screen is a disappointment—but it provides capable productivity for comfortably less than $1,000. Plug it into an external monitor, and your small business will be sitting pretty. If you want to save even more dosh for your business, we recommend Lenovo's own Editors' Choice award-winning ThinkPad E14 Gen 5.

Configurations and Design: A Gray Business Suit 

Lenovo sells the ThinkBook 16 in both AMD and Intel flavors. Our review unit, model 21MS0067US, is $819.99 at Best Buy. It combines Intel's Core Ultra 5 125U processor with integrated graphics, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive, Windows 11 Pro, and a 1,920-by-1,200-pixel IPS touch screen. Prices at Lenovo.com start at $824.25 with half as much memory and storage or $945.88 for a Core Ultra 7 155U model, with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD optional but no higher-resolution or OLED display available.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Clad in two-tone Arctic Gray aluminum, the ThinkBook measures 0.69 by 14.1 by 10 inches. Lenovo lists it at a relatively trim 3.74 pounds, though my bathroom scale says 4.2 pounds. Like its well-to-do ThinkPad cousins, the ThinkBook has passed MIL-STD 810H tests for travel hazards such as shock, vibration, and temperature extremes. You'll feel some flex if you grasp the screen corners but none if you press the keyboard deck.

Medium-thin bezels surround the full HD display, and a webcam with a sliding privacy shutter is centered above the screen. The camera lacks Windows Hello face recognition, but a fingerprint reader is built into the power button, so you don't need to type passwords if you don't want to. The backlit keyboard has a numeric keypad for spreadsheet jockeys and the Microsoft-mandated Copilot key for AI assistance.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Owners of shiny new routers will be bummed that this ThinkBook settles for Wi-Fi 6 instead of 6E or Wi-Fi 7, but the ThinkBook is otherwise well-connected. You'll find two USB-C ports, either suitable for the AC adapter, on the left flank—one being Thunderbolt 4 and one 10Gbps USB 3.2—along with a 5Gbps USB Type-A port, an HDMI monitor port, and an audio jack. Another USB-A port joins an Ethernet jack and an SD card slot on the right of the laptop's base.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Using the Lenovo ThinkBook 16 Gen 7: Just a Few Frills 

Lenovo's 1080p webcam supports Windows Studio Effects, such as auto framing and background blur, and the Lenovo Smart Meeting software provides additional video enhancements and custom backgrounds. The camera captures relatively well-lit and colorful images with no noise or static.

Thanks in part to its size, Lenovo's keyboard avoids many laptops' cut corners or layout shortcomings. It has dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys and cursor arrow keys arranged in the correct inverted T instead of an awkward HP-style row. The numeric keypad keys are a tad smaller than the main ones but still easily usable.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Lenovo's typing feel is shallow and soft but with decent feedback; the keys are noticeably quieter than most. A midsized, buttonless touchpad glides and taps smoothly with a slightly stiff click. Pressing the Fn key and space bar cycles through the keyboard backlight's high, low, and auto settings. 

Bottom-mounted speakers produce fairly decent, generic sound—not loud enough to fill a conference room, but fine for casual listening. You won't hear much bass, and some overlapping tracks get lost, but the audio isn't harsh, hollow, or tinny. Dolby Atmos software offers music, movie, game, and voice presets—along with an equalizer.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The ThinkBook's display will have you tapping the F6 key in hopes of getting a little more brightness when it's already maxed out. It's not that dim, but the barely adequate brightness keeps colors from popping and white backgrounds from looking as clean as they might. Photos and videos look decent, with more than enough color for everyday apps if not for workstation-class design or cinematography, and you'll find no pixelation around the edges of letters. But the contrast is only fair (dark areas blur together), and the screen has a definite budget vibe. 

Lenovo Vantage software centralizes system updates, Wi-Fi and other security settings, performance/cooling fan modes, and sound and screen options. You'll also see ads for tuneup, smart lock, and accidental damage protection subscriptions.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Testing the Lenovo ThinkBook 16 Gen 7: The Run of the Mill 

For our benchmark charts, we pitted the ThinkBook's performance against that of two other value-priced 16-inch clamshells: its Lenovo consumer stablemate, the IdeaPad Slim 5i 16 Gen 9, and the eco-friendly Acer Aspire Vero 16. We rounded out the roster with two under-$1,000 convertibles: the same-size Lenovo Yoga 7i 16 Gen 9 and the smaller Dell Inspiron 14 2-in-1.

Productivity, Content Creation, and AI Tests 

Our primary overall benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC's storage throughput. Three more tests are CPU-centric or processor-intensive: Maxon's Cinebench 2024 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Geekbench 6.3 Pro by Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the video editing tool HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution. 

Finally, PugetBench for Creators by workstation maker Puget Systems rates a PC's image editing prowess with various automated operations in Adobe Photoshop 25. Geekbench AI and UL's Procyon Computer Vision test are two of the first AI processing benchmarks.

All five laptops cleared the 5,000 points in PCMark 10, which indicates excellent everyday productivity for apps like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. The ThinkBook landed in the middle of the pack in most of our other benchmarks, with the Dell convertible's AMD Ryzen 7 processor generally the most potent performer. So, expect reliable, if not blazing, everyday work performance from this laptop.

Graphics Tests 

We challenge laptops' graphics with a quartet of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K) use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. Steel Nomad's regular and Light subtests focus on APIs more commonly used for game development, like Metal and DirectX 12, to assess gaming geometry and particle effects.

These notebooks' integrated graphics are many miles behind the discrete GPUs of gaming laptops and workstations. Like its peers, the ThinkBook 16 can't play the latest, fast-paced games, though it's fine for solitaire sports, video streaming, and light photo editing. 

Battery and Display Tests 

We test each laptop and tablet's battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

Desktop replacements spend most of their time on desks and plugged in, but the large Lenovo showed impressive battery life in our video rundown—it can get you through an entire workday in the field. Most of its rivals' screens are less impressive, with barely adequate brightness and color coverage, though the Vero 16 stands out from the low-cost crowd.

Verdict: Making Smart Trade-Offs for Savings 

A brighter, more vivid panel would help considerably, but it would probably lift the ThinkBook 16 Gen 7 out of the economy class and into more direct competition with higher-end Lenovo ThinkPad, Dell Latitude, and HP EliteBook business laptops. But a display that's lacking but not terrible is the worst complaint we can muster against this system, which provides reasonable connectivity and an excellent keyboard in a relatively trim package for a big-screen machine. Keep its price in mind, and you'll be well satisfied, but just know you can save even more cash with the award-winning Lenovo ThinkPad E14 Gen 5.