I’ve heard for a long time that Lenovo laptops specially the yoga and the IdeaPad models come with batteries that degrade fast, battery drains a lot even while plugged in. Personally I had an old ThinkPad from 9 years ago and till now i haven’t faced any battery issues, although the laptop doesn’t support windows 11, windows 10 works fine and it’s not a let down at all. My cousin on the other hand owned a IdeaPad pro but frequently faced battery issues, degradation, draining issues and hindge problem. Maybe she got a bad product or she is careless using her laptop, I do not know. In reddit, there are posts that the degradation and drain issues in these lenovos really exist.
My sincere question would be, are these rumours true? And I would really want to know EVERYTHING about the battery issues of Lenovo yoga or IdeaPad models if it exists and how bad it is.
I do not want to suggest a laptop that is known to have these issues so help me clear my doubts.
I have a ideapad L340, almost 6 years old and 1500+ cycles. Battery still lasts around 3 hours of normal work (with dedicated gpu not turning on otherwise around 1h). And I have quite a lot of experience with lenovo havent had a problem with battery.
No drain issues, hinge is good holds well, only a bit of squeky noises probably should tighten it a bit because hard on it. Battery is on 82% capacity so pretty normal after this many cycles. Hope that helps!
That’s kind of weird. I haven’t had that experience with battery degredation on my Legion, though I did also have a ThinkPad that had a prematurely failing SSD under warranty and was given a replacement SSD for no additional charge.
I would say just replace it the battery, but those days of ThinkPad hot-swappable batteries seem to not really coming back anytime soon…
Lenovo’s hinges are good too, apart from the 2020 Legion 7i having a notable QC issue with that.
I do have a 9 year old ThinkPad, till now i have faced no problems whatsoever. My suspicion is with IdeaPad and yoga models. As I mentioned earlier, one of my cousins had an IdeaPad from 2019-2020 (I do not know exact model) it had a very bad hindge issue and battery drain issue. I’m just confused and suspicious.
Yeah, some of these around $299 “ultra budget” laptops barely make it a year or two, eespecially Chromebooks with soldered eMMC storage. I’d avoid any laptop with soldered storage that isn’t a MacBook. (I know MacBooks have soldered storage too, but unlike Windows laptops and Chromebooks, you currently don’t have any other option for a MacBook.)
The problem with Apple Silicon Maca is that once Apple eventually drops support for them in macOS, they may as well be relics; not quie e-waste, but not really usable with newer software and with no other option…
My wife’s laptop is an IdeaPad 5 Pro from late 2021 that hasn’t had any issues with battery degradation or excessive drain. She’s not a heavy user as Windows reports just 133 cycles with its health at 92 percent.
The IdeaPad came in with 45 Wh battery?? It sure is old. Although for a 6 year old laptop this is quite impressive. 2 hrs battery is good enough for its age.
For what it’s worth. This is my ideapad pro 5 14” that I bought a year ago. I never charge it over 80% so while that is likely conserving the battery, it may also skew full charge estimates (not sure)?
I have a IdeaPad Pro 16 from 2022. Aside from a few scuffs scratching against things in my backpack, it has basically perfect build quality. No hinge issues at all after 3 years of daily use. For reference, I drive to and from work, so not a hard commute but the laptop does move around. Battery life is also doing great. I leave it plugged in most of the time with the 80% charge limit feature that Lenovo offers in their Vantage app. After 3 years, its at 87% battery health. I rarely use the original charger, unless I am gaming or video editing. Most days in the office, I use a small 45W USB-C charger and it works fine. Occasionally, I need to edit some photos or make a quick screen recording clip, and only then will the laptop battery drain while on the charger. But that’s because of the 45W charger, it never drains when I use the full 135W charger the laptop came with.
Before my IdeaPad, I had a ThinkPad E570 with an i7-7500U and GTX 950M. I had that laptop for 5 years and by the end it only lasted ~3 hours on battery. But if I remember right, the battery life on that thing when it was new wasn’t great either, only like ~6 hours. However, its so easy to replace a ThinkPad battery that its basically a non issue. The build quality on that laptop was also great. The only issue I had was after I dropped it ~4ft onto hardwood floors. The laptop took a hit in the back corner and that hinge came loose. I took the back panel off and used some super glue to try to reassemble all the bits of plastic, and after that the hinge still worked, but it creaked and I needed to hold the chassis carefully when opening and closing. However, even with an awful drop like that, the laptop still worked totally fine, no display issues or electronic issues, and I used it for another year with the busted hinge and it never got any worse.
