What makes a good business laptop? It must have excellent security features to keep Prying Pams and Nosey Nancies at bay. Secondly, it must offer zippy, fast performance to keep up with your daily demands. And thirdly, it must have good battery life. Boss men and women have far too much going on to be tethered to an outlet.
As a laptop reviewer, it's been a while since I stumbled upon a business laptop that meets — and exceeds — all three of those requirements. However, Lenovo changed all of that when it launched the spectacular Lenovo ThinkPad Z16. Truth be told, this company has been hit or miss lately, but the ThinkPad Z16 knocks it out of the park.
Let me give you three reasons why the ThinkPad Z16 is the best business laptop you can get.
Which laptop configuration am I praising?
The impressive Lenovo ThinkPad Z16 I tested and reviewed comes with an AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850H CPU, AMD Radeon graphics, 16GB of RAM, 512GB of SSD storage, and a 16-inch, 1920 x 1200-pixel display.
The AMD chip stuffed inside the ThinkPad Z16 is the truth — this processor makes this machine reign supreme as one of the best business laptops I've ever tested. It's power efficient, delivers rival-beating power, and is a terrifying reminder to Intel that AMD is nipping at its heels.
As of this writing, this Lenovo ThinkPad Z16 configuration is only $1,359 at Lenovo.
The Lenovo ThinkPad Z16 has excellent battery life
To give you some perspective, the average laptop that comes through the Laptop Mag conveyer belt typically lasts between 9 and 10 hours. Many companies claim that their laptops can survive for nearly 20 hours, but they're typically using battery tests that don't reflect real-world usage.
Our in-house battery test is more intensive. We set our laptops at 150 nits of brightness and allow them to browse the internet non-stop over Wi-Fi until they run out of juice. In the ThinkPad Z16's case, we ran three battery tests on it. The first time, it lasted 13 hours and 17 minutes. The second time, it survived for 15 hours and 26 minutes. The final time, it tapped out after 14 hours and 41 minutes.
In my review, I compared the ThinkPad Z16 to the LG Gram 16, which already has an incredible 13-hour runtime, but somehow, someway, the Lenovo business laptop outpaced its LG rival. Again, I suspect that the power-efficient AMD is partly responsible for the ThinkPad Z16's glorious, long-lasting runtime.
Say goodbye to seeing "battery low" pop-ups. Plus, you don't have to chain yourself to an outlet. With the ThinkPad Z16, you're free to bounce from A to B without worrying about your power draining quickly.
The Lenovo ThinkPad Z16 has rival-beating performance
On Geekbench 5.4, a benchmark that tests overall performance, the ThinkPad Z16 mops the floor with its opponents with a rival-beating multi-core score of 9,018. Keep in mind that the ThinkPad Z16 launched during the latter half of 2022 while one of its rivals — the Acer Swift Edge 16 — launched in 2023. And still, it zipped that au courant laptop with ease.
The LG Gram 16 is packed with an Intel Core i7-1260P GPU while the Acer Swift Edge 16 is outfitted with an AMD Ryzen 7 6800U CPU. Despite both laptops falling within the same price range as the ThinkPad Z16, you'll get way more power out of the Lenovo laptop.
It also kicked butt at video editing, too. On the Handbrake benchmark, which tests how well a laptop can transcode a video from 4K to 1080p, the ThinkPad Z16 only took 6 minutes and 37 minutes to complete the task. The LG Gram 16, on the other hand, moved at a snail pace; it took a whopping 17 minutes to transcode the video. The Swift Edge 16 wasn't as bad, but it still couldn't keep up with the Lenovo laptop. It took 7 minutes and 20 seconds to complete the task.
The Lenovo ThinkPad Z16 has a wealth of security features
The Lenovo ThinkPad Z16 has a wealth of security features, including a dedicated fingerprint reader near the arrow keys. If you prefer biometric authentication using your visage, you can use the IR-infused 1080p webcam to login seamlessly with your face.
Other security features include a webcam kill switch via the F9 key, a Kensington lock slot, a discrete Trusted Platform Module (dTPM), and Microsoft's Pluton chip-to-cloud technology. (You can read more about the latter in our ThinkPad Z16 review).
Adding a cherry on top, you don't have to worry about the ThinkPad Z16 being a fragile machine that breaks at the slightest bump or drop. This bad boy passed laptop passed the 12 MIL-STD-810H certification tests, ensuring that the laptop can sustain extreme conditions, including shocks, drops, vibrations, and inclement weather. For example, if you end up in a nasty sandstorm while doing business in Dubai, your ThinkPad Z16 will be just fine.
