Should You ACTUALLY Upgrade Your Laptop?

Laptops have gotten boring, and I mean that as a compliment. Recently, I spent a lot of time daily driving laptops that are nearly a decade old for various videos, and I've come to a realization. They're totally fine. Like, legitimately fine. This is great, though. You don't need a new laptop. You upgrade when you're ready, and you want the better battery life and creature comforts of a new device. So, when Lenovo and AMD reached out about sponsoring this video around their new Yoga 7A, it felt like a good opportunity to ask a very simple question. Is it finally time to upgrade? So, take a step back to 2016. You're buying a laptop and a good one. You're spending real money, maybe a thousand bucks or even more. And I did a lot of videos on these kind of laptops. They were pretty good for the time. You probably had a dual core processor that could handle email, your spreadsheets, and a handful of browser tabs easily. It could just about handle a video call without the fan sounding like it was preparing for takeoff. And gaming was technically possible, but outside of Minecraft, not really a thing. The screen was fine. 1080p, which is still a standard for a lot of devices today, but it was dim, especially if you were in a brightly lit space or near a window. Battery life, though, that was the big lie back then. Everyone promised 8, 10, or 12 hours if you were in airplane mode, looping a video, minimum brightness. Instead, you were lucky to get four or five hours of legitimate real use. That proprietary charger it came with, it lived in your bag, not at home. Because were you really sure you can make it through the day? No, you weren't. Then there were the little things. The 720p webcam was bad, although I guess some things never change. Wi-Fi was fine for streaming video, but not much more than that. The trackpads were all kind of uh, shall we say, usable, but yeah, definitely kept the mouse in your bag anyway. And the fan kept cranking whether you are maxing out the system or you just happen to have one too many tabs open. But here's the thing, it worked. And with a few software related exceptions, it still does today, which is why so many people are still using machines from that era just fine. But fine and genuinely great are two very different things. Laptops might look similar to a decade ago, but a lot has changed under the hood. So, if you bring in a modern 2026 laptop, like our Yoga 7A, a few things will immediately jump out to you. Screens have gotten massively better to start. We've gone from dim 1080p panels to an OLED display that hits over a,000 nits of brightness. You're getting excellent color accuracy and 120 Hz refresh rate that would have made your 2017 gaming monitor jealous. The Purite Pro OLED 2.8K display is something that quite literally wasn't possible at almost any price point back then. Then there's battery. I'd say we've roughly doubled real world battery life over the last decade. Now, I'm not talking about the marketing number. I'm talking about the actual number. Getting 8 9 or even 10 hours of real use is actually possible now. Now, part of that is due to the fact that we have bigger batteries, but a lot of it is on the silicon side. The AMD Ryzen AI 400 series chips inside the Yoga 7A are just in a different league when it comes to efficiency, which brings us to performance. Your old laptop is still probably fine for basic stuff like web browsing, documents, watching videos. But the benchmarks don't lie. Single core performance really shows you how much it's changed. I mean, the Yoga 7A just feels snappy. I mean, we're talking over two times as fast as your old laptop here. And it really shows when you throw anything more complicated at it or start multitasking where the gap is massive. We're talking somewhere in the range of four to seven times the multi-core performance. And graphics are similarly way better, especially on the Yoga with its AMD RDNA 3.5 GPU that opens up light gaming and real creative work tasks that I'll say you uh don't want to do on a 2016 laptop. So, when you do step up to the modern era with the Yoga 7A, a few things immediately stand out. The keyboard is easy to overlook, but I really want to take a second here because it is something you're going to be using for years, and it is legitimately excellent. Now, this shouldn't be a huge surprise. Low key, keyboards are some of my favorite features on yoga laptops, and the 7A continues that. The 1.5 mm of key travel, the shape of the keys, the soft touch finish, it's the kind of keyboard you actually enjoy typing on. And as a guy who writes a lot on my laptop, do not sleep on a good keyboard. Now, as a yoga, the 7A is positioned really around creativity and the stylus experience. The Yoga Pen Gen 2 uses Wacom technology. It has 8,192 levels of pressure sensitivity. Don't worry, I count them all. And the new canvas mode props the screen up at a slight angle for a more natural drawing position. For anyone who actually draws or takes handwritten notes, this is a real step up over Windows laptops from even a few years ago. Now, I will say the Windows part still isn't perfect here. You'll still see phantom inputs or moments where pen and touch are kind of fighting each other, which does tend to push me back to the good old laptop mode, but the hardware is definitely here. And while we're talking things to keep in mind, I do have some honest caveats. Fan noise is fairly quiet, but it's usually not silent unless you specifically switch to a lower power mode. And this is a full co-pilot Plus PC, which means you have the hardware capability to run the features on the device. Now, this is improving, but I'll be honest, it's not massively useful yet. And the real elephant in the room for 2026 is of course the RAM crisis. Pricing is a challenge for pretty much everyone at this point. So I will have a link in the description for the most up-to-date numbers here. But while the entry-le models are pretty reasonably priced, it does step up very quickly when you start adding upgrades. There's also a 14-inch version of the laptop, which is normally what I would gravitate toward. You get the same size 70Wh battery with a smaller screen to power it, but of course 16 in is the most popular choice for most people. So who is this actually for? And I asked that genuinely because it is so easy just to tell you what I, a weirdo tech reviewer on the internet, actually cares about. If you're a student, think about what you actually do all day. Maybe writing papers and video calls. Promptly jumping between a browser with 17 tabs. Or if you aspire to be like Alex, 700 tabs in whatever your school actually forces you to use. You need something that lasts all day without hunting for an outlet. And if you're the kind of person who thinks better with a pen, annotating notes, and sketching ideas, then that stylus is genuinely useful. Although, not with the 700 tabs, no amount of hardware can help you with that. That's just a personal failing. What? What are you talking about? You need a search function for your tabs. You got to chill. If you're doing normal 9 to5 kind of work on your laptop, this handles it easy. The Ryzen AI 400 series processors don't break a sweat with normal work, including the spreadsheets that you pretend to understand. Tons of multitasking, super easy. Now, the keyboard matters a lot here, and that chassis is light enough to easily live in your bag. And of course, you can use USBC to charge up whenever without even having to think about it. And if you're creative, even just casually, like occasional photo or video edits, the 2.8K OLED display alone makes a huge difference. You can take advantage of all the different modes for this twoin-one laptop, even though they're technically like five modes. Five in one doesn't sound good, though. I want to learn how to be a tablet mode. And there's gaming. Now, look, I want to be clear that this is not a gaming laptop, but it is a light portable laptop that can game. A sentence you pretty much couldn't say at all back in the day. Fire something up, dial it into a reasonable setting, and it largely does just work. So, back to the question I started this video with. Should you upgrade? Now, I want to be super clear. You do not need to upgrade, even if your laptop is old enough to make itself a YouTube account. I mean, you probably should, but how much better are things really now? Honestly, a lot. More than I think most people would notice if you're just poking around new laptops in a store for a few minutes. I mean, the screen alone is a huge leap. The battery life is actually real this time. The performance head remains you're not fighting with your own laptop. And the little things like the keyboard, the build, the weight. I mean, this is the kind of stuff you'll notice every day for years to come. The Yoga 7A is not the most exciting laptop I've ever used, but it's not trying to be. What it is is a genuinely well-rounded machine that covers a lot of ground for a lot of people. Now, if you want to check out the Lenovo Yoga 78 2in1, the link is in the description. And especially these days, pricing moves around, so check there for the latest. And if you've been on the fence about upgrading for a while, maybe this is your push. Thank you again to Lenovo and AMD for sponsoring this video.