If you think Lenovo’s business laptops are the epitome of enterprise IT, you don’t know the ThinkPad Z series. Built for nonconformists (with AMD instead of Intel silicon) and tree-huggers (with recycled and sustainable materials), the ThinkPad Z16 Gen 2 (starts at $1,225.26; $2,488.85 as tested) even features a silvery Arctic Gray aluminum shell instead of the usual matte black magnesium chassis. The Z16 is a high-performance desktop replacement that’s as sleek and well-built as you expect from a ThinkPad, but it isn’t cheap and has a couple of flaws not common to the brand.Design: A Box Made of Bamboo and Sugar Cane Crafted from recycled aluminum and delivered in plastic-free, compostable packaging, the ThinkPad Z16 Gen 2 starts at $1,225.26 with an AMD Ryzen 5 Pro 7640HS processor, 16GB of memory, a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive, a 1,920-by-1,200-pixel non-touch IPS display, and Windows 11 Home. Our $2,488.85 review unit (model 21JX0027US) is the top of the line, leapfrogging the available Ryzen 7 Pro for an eight-core, 16-thread Ryzen 9 Pro 7940HS chip, the max 64GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, Win 11 Pro, a 4GB AMD Radeon RX 6550M discrete GPU instead of the processor’s Radeon 780M integrated graphics, and a 3,840-by-2,400-pixel 4K touch screen with OLED technology. The only available upgrade is a 2TB drive.
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(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The laptop measures 0.63 by 14 by 9.4 inches and weighs 3.99 pounds (IPS versions weigh a bit more). That’s trimmer than the Gigabyte Aero 16 OLED (0.87 by 13.9 by 10.1 inches, 4.2 pounds), but hefty compared with the 2.73-pound Acer Swift Edge 16. Thin bezels surround the 16:10 aspect ratio screen, and a slight bump at the top houses the webcam, which has a privacy toggle (the F9 key) instead of Lenovo’s usual sliding shutter.
The face-recognition webcam isn’t the only way to skip passwords with Windows Hello, as you’ll find a fingerprint reader on the bottom row of the keyboard. Like most ThinkPads, the unit has passed MIL-STD 810H tests for travel hazards like shock, vibration, and extreme temperatures—you’ll feel almost no flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The Z16’s connectivity is a major disappointment, however, and we don’t mean its use of Wi-Fi 6E instead of the absolute latest Wi-Fi 7. All you get are three USB Type-C ports: two USB4 plus an SD card slot on the left, and one USB-C 3.2 plus an audio jack on the right. (The bulky AC adapter has a USB-C cable.) You can connect an external monitor via a DisplayPort dongle, but I see no excuse for a non-ultraportable laptop to lack HDMI and USB Type-A ports.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Using the Lenovo ThinkPad Z16 Gen 2: Less Wonderful Than Usual We’ve often called Lenovo ThinkPad keyboards the best in the laptop business. The Z16’s keyboard has a first-class snappy (if slightly shallow) typing feel and is brightly backlit, but I was dismayed that its cursor arrow keys are arranged in the clumsy row seen on HP laptops—half-height up and down arrows stacked between full-size left and right—instead of the usual and proper inverted T. Also, while you’ll find dedicated Home and End keys on the top row as with most ThinkPads, you must pair the Fn key with the hard-to-hit up and down arrows for Page Up and Page Down. (On a much happier note, Lenovo has finally moved the Ctrl key to the left instead of the right of Fn at bottom left.)
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Loyal fans of Lenovo’s TrackPoint keyboard mini-joystick cursor controller will look in vain for the traditional three mouse buttons below the space bar—their role is performed here by a haptic strip along the top of the buttonless touchpad. Tapping the narrow top area’s left and right sides for left- and right-clicks work fine, but the rest of the pad is frustrating, often ignoring taps at the default setting (dialing in more sensitivity helps), popping up an unwanted right-click menu, or generally not following my fingertips as well as I’m accustomed to from other laptops and certainly from ThinkPads.The keyboard has handy shortcuts besides the camera shutter and microphone mute, like F10 and F11 that place and end Microsoft Teams calls. Plus, double-tapping the TrackPoint nubbin now pops up a handy menu—though I had to install Microsoft .NET 6.0 first—with audio and mic settings and voice typing or dictation. But overall I consider the Z16 Gen 2’s inputs a step backward.Lenovo’s keyboard deck has large speaker grilles on either side of the keys instead of making room for a numeric keypad. Their sound is certainly loud—too loud at more than 75% volume—and provides both clear instrumentals and a welcome bit of bass, but is rather hollow when turned up. Dolby Audio software provides dynamic, movie, music, game, and voice presets as well as optimization for VoIP.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The 1080p webcam captures well-lit and colorful images and videos with minimal noise or static. Lenovo View software provides video enhancement (on AC power only), auto framing, background blur, and the option to superimpose you on your shared screen or PowerPoint, as well as over-the-shoulder onlooker and poor-posture warnings. The ThinkPad Z16 Gen 2’s best feature is its high-resolution OLED touch display, which is wonderfully bright with rich and vivid colors. Images, videos, webpages, and even Word documents look fabulous, with wide viewing angles and sky-high contrast. Blacks are inky and white backgrounds are clean instead of dingy, though the screen doesn’t tilt back quite as far as I’d like. You’ll find zero pixelation around fine details or the edges of letters.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Lenovo Vantage software centralizes system updates, Wi-Fi security, and battery as well as microphone settings. The standard warranty is skimpy by corporate standards—one year of carry-in or ship-to-depot service—but extensions and on-site options are plentiful.Testing the Lenovo ThinkPad Z16 Gen 2: Ryzen 9 Challenges Core i9 Most of the 16-inch desktop replacements we’ve tested have skewed more toward content creators than office workers. Two with OLED screens already mentioned are the Intel Core i9-powered Gigabyte Aero 16 OLED and the lightweight, AMD Ryzen 7-based Acer Swift Edge 16. The Asus Vivobook Pro 16 is a bargain (about $1,400 as tested), thanks to a relatively low-resolution IPS display. The Editors’ Choice award-winning Dell XPS 15 has a 15.6-inch OLED panel.
Productivity Tests We run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL’s PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.Three other benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.5 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Next, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). Finally, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s famous image editor to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
The Lenovo finished near the top of these tests (and was the only system besides the Gigabyte to complete our Adobe Photoshop benchmark, narrowly beating the latter though both had sky-high scores). Like its rivals, the Z16 obliterated the 4,000-point score that indicates excellent everyday productivity in PCMark 10 and showed more than enough muscle for light to moderate photo and video editing. Graphics Tests We test each Windows PC’s graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). Additionally, we run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests are rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions. The more frames per second (fps), the better.
The laptops with discrete GPUs easily (and predictably) outran the integrated graphics of the Acer, though in the ThinkPad’s case that was only good enough for fourth place, with its AMD Radeon RX 6550M trailing the three Nvidia GeForce systems. It’s fine for casual and moderate gaming, though it’s happier handling office work and video streaming. Battery and Display Tests We test each laptop’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. Additionally, we 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).
The Z16 and the other three notebooks with OLED screens delivered the dazzling color reproduction, brightness, and contrast you expect from that technology, though the Asus did exceedingly well for an IPS panel. The ThinkPad trailed only the Dell in battery life, showing lengthy unplugged stamina for a desktop replacement system.Verdict: An Eco-Friendly Letdown The ThinkPad Z16 Gen 2 is a handsome, relatively trim full-size laptop with a terrific OLED display, and it’s a powerful performer for anything short of workstation CGI rendering. But replacing the TrackPoint buttons with an uncharacteristically balky touchpad doesn’t work for us, and we’re put off by the missing USB-A and HDMI ports. Lenovo’s exemplary build quality is what ultimately earns this laptop a 3.5-star review, but this time an Editors’ Choice award is off the table.
Lenovo ThinkPad Z16 Gen 2
Pros
Gorgeous 4K OLED display
Speedy performance
Ample battery life
Quality build
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The Bottom Line
Lenovo’s ThinkPad Z16 Gen 2 is a nearly nifty full-size office laptop, but the company forgot that old saying: ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’
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