SUMMARY This is a solid, mid-performance laptop most ideally suited for business tasks and college students. It provides plenty of performance for those applications and for the price, with fast data transfers via the Thunderbolt port. While the touchscreen display isn’t fast or dazzling, it’s quite sufficient for typical tasks or watching videos. It feels solid and easy to carry around. Don’t expect great performance for gaming or intensive graphics applications, however. See the attached image for the Passmark ratings on performance, which ranks this laptop against all other computers currently in active use. In summary, this is a competitive laptop for the performance it delivers vs. price. FIT AND FEEL The case feels solid despite being all plastic. Fairly light and easy to carry around. The touchpad is large, with average responsiveness but clicking takes a little pressure. The keyboard isn’t very snappy but it’s comfortable to type on and it’s extremely quiet. It’s nice to have a numpad as well. The keyboard is backlit which is great for use in darkened rooms. The lid hinge is a bit stiff, and it takes two hands to open. The laptop is less than 1” thick. DISPLAY & GRAPHICS This has an IPS display known for slower response and lower contrast compared to other technologies like OLED, but they are bright and there is no risk of burn-in. The display is bright, but the colors aren’t exactly eye-popping. There is some washout evident (always an issue with backlit LED screens) and with fast movement you can sometimes see ghosting. This is not a computer you’d use for gaming. For watching movies, you also might notice the low contrast ratio in dark scenes. The display is best suited for web, office and productivity type work. This laptop does not have a dedicated GPU. Instead, it has integrated graphics (Intel Iris Xe with 1 GB RAM and a fixed refresh rate of 60 Hz) which does the job for most things but not great for games and fast video. CPU & STORAGE This laptop has the Intel Core i7-1355U (Raptor series), which has 10 cores. You can get this laptop with the H type CPU instead which has 14 cores and almost twice the performance, but you pay for that in battery life. This is a mid-performance CPU which is fine for most tasks, but for number-crunching tasks and scientific computing you might want to get the H processor. This comes with 16 GB RAM (Micron Technology) which is the max you can put in it. The SSD is a Kingston which delivered a speedy performance on the Passmark test , and I didn’t feel like it was a bottleneck when doing typical tasks. CONNECTIVITY There is a HDMI for an external monitor, but it only has 2 USB-A ports. However, it does have a USB-C Thunderbolt so you can take advantage of very quick data transfers with other devices. There is a headphone jack. No ethernet port. No memory card slots, but these days portable SSDs are becoming much more common anwyay. OTHER NOTES • There was a minimum of bloatware installed and it took just a few minutes to get rid of it. • The charging connector has a very narrow diameter barrel. It seems delicate. (see photo) • The speakers are just okay sounding • Battery life is pretty decent, around 6-8 hours depending on what you’re doing