Skip to main content

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

Lenovo Yoga S940 hands-on review

The Lenovo Yoga S940’s inverted notch and curved glass make its bezels vanish

Lenovo Yoga S940 review
Luke Larsen/Digital Trends
Lenovo Yoga S940 hands-on
“The Yoga S940 is a subtle laptop with a few tricks up its sleeve.”
Pros
  • Extremely thin bezels
  • Thin and lightweight design
  • Upward notch includes infrared camera
  • Curved display edges look great
  • Front-facing speakers
Cons
  • Way too expensive
  • Low travel keyboard isn’t our favorite

Lenovo makes great laptops, whether they’re ThinkPad or Yoga machines, but they’re not always trend-setters. The company’s latest at CES 2019, the Yoga S940, seeks to change that.

Recommended Videos

With ultra-slim bezels and unique curved glass along the edges of the display, the Yoga S940 has a couple of tricks up its sleeve. But for a starting price of $1,500, are they enough to make this one a hit?

One inverted notch, two purposes

When closed, the Yoga S940 looks just like every other Yoga laptop. It’s grey, thin, conservative. Still, there’s a something new is in the works. Look closely, and you’ll see lip along the top edge of the lid with the laptop’s name etched in it. Not only is it a nice bit of branding for an otherwise nondescript laptop, it has a couple of interesting practical uses.

Obviously, it provides an easy grip for opening the laptop, which swings smoothly even with one finger. Once open, though, you’ll see the real purpose as an inverted notch. The bump gives just enough room to squeeze in a webcam and infrared Windows Hello camera.

The result is a frame with a 90 percent screen-to-body ratio, second only to the new Acer Swift 7. While this solution won’t win any engineering awards, the inverted notch isn’t as distracting as you might assume. In this case, it works.

Lenovo’s Yoga S940 also brings other, more subtle innovation. Examine the display, and you’ll find curved glass that hugs the edge of the frame on each side. It’s similar to a Samsung Galaxy smartphone, and a clever way to make the bezels feel smaller. We think other laptops will move to copy the design. It looks great.

The inverted notch isn’t as distracting as you might assume.

Speaking of the display, the Yoga S940 comes with a 13.9-inch IPS screen. You’ll have two options: The entry-level, which is a 400-nit 1080p with Dolby Vision support — or the 500-nit HDR400 4K model. The screen resolution and aspect ratio are what make this screen unique. It’s 16:10, which is the standard MacBook size. That also makes it the first 4K display we’ve seen in that aspect ratio. It’s a happy middle-ground that we quite like.

That also provides a bit more room in the palmrests to comfortably place your hands while typing. The keyboard itself isn’t anything spectacular — in fact, it has low travel, similar to previous Yoga notebooks like the Yoga S730. It’s not our favorite, though the layout is familiar enough to keep the learning curve down. The touchpad, on the other hand, is spacious and felt responsive in our short time with the device.

Quad-core power at your disposal

Though it might sound like a lighter, mobile-friendly laptop in the vein of Apple’s MacBook, the Yoga S940 has all the power of a modern ultrabook. Using Intel’s latest Whiskey Lake U-series processors and 8GB of RAM, the machine is snappy and responsive. The system can be configured with either a Core i5 or Core i7 (and up to 16GB of RAM), though both are quad-core processors with plenty of gusto. The same goes for storage, which starts at a 256GB NVMe PCIe SSD but can be configured up to 2TB.

Lenovo Yoga S940 review
Luke Larsen/Digital Trends

Audio quality is a surprising high point. Like the new ThinkPads, the Yoga S940 fires audio up at your face instead of down at your desk. That’s a big upgrade over the S730 and joins an elite group of laptops including the Razer Blade Stealth and MacBook Air. On top of that, they are Dolby Atmos, so you know the quality is there.

The Yoga S940 fires audio up at your face instead of down at your desk.

Sounds good so far, right? Well, it is. Until you hear the price. Configurations start at a whopping $1,500. That’s a commanding entry-level price that’s far higher than some competitors. In fact, other laptops even within Lenovo’s own lineup make more sense from a value perspective. Take the IdeaPad 730S or the Yoga S730, for example. Both have the exact same specs as the S940 — as well as a lot of the same features. What you’re really paying for with the Yoga S940 is he cutting-edge design.

Is design worth the steep increase in price? We won’t know for sure until we get the system in for full review leading up to its launch date in May of 2019.

Luke Larsen
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Luke Larsen is the Senior Editor of Computing, managing all content covering laptops, monitors, PC hardware, Macs, and more.
This new Lenovo laptop opens and contorts itself with a voice command
The Lenovo Twisting Auto PC with the display halfway twisted.

You've never seen a laptop like this -- I guarantee it.

At IFA 2024, Lenovo showed off what might be the most fascinating laptop of the year so far -- the Lenovo Auto Twist PC. It's just a proof of concept, but it introduces some really fun ideas into the world of laptops.

Read more
The 6 best 14-inch laptops to buy in 2024, tested and approved by our reviewers
The MacBook Pro open on a table in front of a couch.

Laptops come in all shapes and sizes, but over the past few years, the 14-inch screen size has become the Goldilocks standard. The best 14-inch laptops allow for enough size to pack in lots of performance without sacrificing too much portability. You'll need to choose wisely, however, as your options at this size range from ultra-portable laptops to those with some legitimate power inside, including models with discrete GPUs. That's something you'll rarely see in smaller laptops, including even the best 13-inch laptops.

We've tested the majority of the best 14-inch laptops throughout 2024, which involves putting these systems through rigorous performance, display, chassis, and battery testing. The result is the following recommendations, which represent some of the best laptops you can buy right now.

Read more
Lenovo just made my favorite gaming laptop even better
The lid of the Lenovo Legion 9i.

I've only given one gaming laptop a perfect score -- the Lenovo Legion 9i. And at CES 2024, Lenovo is making that laptop even better.

There are a few big upgrades here. First, Lenovo is switching the processor to Intel's new Core i9-14900HX and, in the process, introducing the Raptor Lake refresh chip to mobile. I suspect it won't offer a huge performance improvement over the previous version -- read our review of the desktop Core i9-14900K to learn why -- but it's still the latest and greatest.

Read more