Lenovo ThinkPad L580 - Review 2022

Desire a ThinkPad? Good luck choosing. Lenovo offers ThinkPad A, E, L, P, T, Ten, and Yoga models micro-targeted at different audiences. Some are familiar, but others are less clear. Ane page on Lenovo'southward site describes the ThinkPad L machines every bit affordable notebooks for the enterprise, another equally "our virtually dark-green business organization laptops." The xv.half dozen-inch ThinkPad L580 (starts at $770; $989 as tested) will certainly salvage yous some green; information technology's a desktop-replacement that limbos under the k-dollar line, withal is packed with ThinkPad goodness, from fine fit and finish to a fabled keyboard. All those niceties earn it our midrange desktop-replacement Editors' Option accolade.

Hot-Rodders Need Not Apply

The $770 base model combines an eighth-generation Cadre i3 processor with 4GB of memory, a 500GB hard drive, and a 1,366-by-768 display, which is a poor resolution for whatever laptop nowadays and downright ridiculous at the 15.vi-inch size. Fortunately, the $989 L580 offers a handsome 1,920-past-i,080 IPS screen, forth with a Cadre i5-8250U CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB NVMe SSD. You can configure a model upwards to the Cadre i5-8350U chip with vPro plus 32GB of memory, merely no Core i7 pick is bachelor.

The L580 is every inch a ThinkPad, a matte black slab with diagonal logos in the corners of the lid and palm rest and substantial rather than fashionably slim bezels around the screen. The webcam to a higher place the console doesn't offer face recognition, though Windows Hello is supported by a fingerprint reader beneath the keyboard cursor arrows. The photographic camera captures slightly dim simply adequately detailed and grain-free images.

At 4.46 pounds, the L580 is reasonably light for a desktop-replacement—non the world's lightest, with the Dell XPS 15 and 15-inch Apple MacBook Pro at 4 pounds apiece and the LG gram 15 at 2.41 pounds, merely it's easier to tote than the 5.27-pound Acer Aspire E 15. It's fractionally larger than its peers at 0.9 by 14.8 past 10 inches (HWD). Compare the Dell at 0.66 by 14.one by ix.iii inches or the Apple at 0.61 past thirteen.8 by ix.5 inches.

Port selection is good, though there's no VGA port for the oldest projectors or Thunderbolt 3 port for the newest docks and storage arrays. On the system's left side are 2 USB-C ports (the rearmost 1 for utilise with the supplied charger), a USB three.0 port, an HDMI video output, a micro SD card slot, and an Ethernet port. An audio jack, a 2nd USB 3.0 port, and a security lock slot are on the right. Bluetooth and 2x2 802.11ac Wi-Fi handle wireless communications.

That Excellent ThinkPad Keyboard

The backlit keyboard, with a numeric keypad on the right, follows the standard ThinkPad layout, with Domicile and End keys on the top row and PgUp and PgDn keys at the lower right past the cursor arrows. An Fn Lock lets you choose whether the top-row keys perform F1, F2, and and then on or organization functions such as adjusting book and brightness, while the provided Lenovo Vantage utility lets yous swap the Fn and Ctrl keys in the lower left corner.

The keyboard not only looks but also feels similar a ThinkPad T series, which is to say it's excellent, with deep travel and a quiet but lively response. I thoroughly enjoyed using it except for ane quirk—its infrequent habit of beeping during fast typing or when my fingers pressed ii keys at once. It happened rarely, only a dozen or so times during my testing, but isn't something I've noticed when reviewing other laptops, and proved annoying plenty that I dialed the audio volume downward so it was less obtrusive.

Cursor-command devotees tin can choose betwixt the smooth but slightly undersized touchpad and the TrackPoint nubbin at the intersection of the G, H, and B keys. Both work flawlessly, with the touchpad's lower corners requiring just the right amount of pressure to perform mouse clicks.

The L580 tin easily fill a medium-sized room when the book is cranked up, but its bottom-mounted speakers are disappointing—all instruments and vocals are nowadays and accounted for, just the overall sound is hollow and subdued. Overriding the automatic Dolby settings to manually select music, movie, gaming, or other modes makes a trivial difference.

The ThinkPad's full HD screen is clear and crisp, with bright colors and proficient contrast. Viewing angles are sufficiently broad for a pocket-sized audience to gather around, but brightness is just average—a couple of clicks beyond the top backlight setting would take been welcome.

Price/Performance Prowess

Considering it was the least expensive laptop (and the only Core i5) in the test fix, the ThinkPad L580 did just fine in our performance benchmarks—non winning any events, but posting competitive results. In the PCMark viii function productivity test, for example, the system scored more than 300 points above the 3,000 that we consider excellent, and it finished in the middle of the pack in the Cinebench CPU criterion and Handbrake video-editing exercise.

Neither the L580 nor any of the other notebooks with integrated graphics did very well in our graphics and gaming simulations, which were dominated by the HP Spectre x360 15 with its Nvidia GeForce MX150 and the Apple tree MacBook with its AMD Radeon Pro 560. Yous can charm yourself playing casual or solitaire games on the ThinkPad, only non the latest A-list titles.

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Battery life was more than acceptable at x hours and 48 minutes in our video rundown test, even if it trailed the MacBook Pro's 15 hours and the gram xv's xvi hours. The L580 will get you lot through a workday with time to spare for a Netflix movie.

A Reliable Desktop Replacement

All told, the ThinkPad L580 slides into a nice niche below the ThinkPad T series equally a wallet-friendly model that doesn't entail making a lot of sacrifices. You're the best judge of how important things like Thunderbolt three or an available Core i7 CPU are to your business organization—though I'm guessing it'south not a lot—and how tempting the prospect of an unglamorous merely genuine ThinkPad is. Despite that darn keyboard beep, information technology earns an Editors' Choice award as our top midrange desktop-replacement.