Lenovo Ideapad 5i Pro - Intel i5-13500H, 16GB RAM, 512 GB SSD, RTX 3050, 14" 2.8K (2880x1800) 120Hz IPS Display, Windows 11

I bought this model in April for £790 and ended up returning it. It's a very well rounded machine for the price (especially this lower price) and has a few standout features e.g. great performance including capable discrete graphics in a regular laptop form factor, solid aluminium build, a very nice keyboard, decent webcam + IR sensor for Windows Hello. There were just a few things that irritated me.

First is that the keyboard backlight LEDs are very bright even on the lowest setting and because of the gaps between the keys and the deck they are clearly individually visible. It gets really distracting typing in dim settings.

Second is that the battery life is mediocre to poor. Despite being a decent size (75Wh), it doesn't last as long as you'd think. This was even when doing regular stuff (browsing, emails, word processing, some YouTube), albeit with the display always set to 120Hz (now I've had it, can't do without it!).

Thirdly, at the time I bought it a lot of the marketing materials listed it coming with HDMI 2.1. It doesn't, it's 2.0 spec. That was disappointing to me as someone with a UWQHD 144Hz monitor that when working at home I couldn't run at native resolution + refresh rate because of the bandwidth limitation of 2.0. As a 2023 machine it should really have a 2.1 spec HDMI port. Also because TB4 docks with HDMI 2.1 ports are very expensive!

Finally the display, though generally very nice to look at, suffers quite a bit of IPS glow. Certainly not the first IPS display I'd seen with that issue, and may just have been my unit, just hard to unnotice!

Ahhh I've paid 800+ on the release. Extremely good machine!

This seems pretty good for what it is, not sure why it's not doing better - Pro spec is all-metal, good GPU for creators (not so much gaming, at least it's the 6GB) but this is a really solid general purpose machine with decent display too.

This or The AMD 7840HS version with 32Gb ram for £693?

Nice package