JB Hi-Fi Australia’s #1 seller of notebooks is heading to a bumper run as a new generation of AI notebooks hit the market with the new Lenovo Yoga Slim 7X set to be one of the top sellers. The device could also spell the end of the Intel notebook era with the Qualcomm powered Lenovo offering tipped to deliver growth for the retailer whose shares have soared 12.49% in the last month and are now trading at $64.50.
Recently some JB Hi-Fi stores have sold more notebooks than they have TV’s despite the downturn with IDC tipping that the consumer market, will grow 1.6% year over year. Elevated interest rates along with demand for other devices, such as smartphones, are expected to subdue growth within the segment if Australia cops another rate rise.
Earlier this week I got my hands on the new Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x which is powered by the new Snapdragon Elite process and to be honest, Intel should be worried because Qualcomm is delivering on just about everything that Intel should have delivered on years ago, including better battery life, CPU performance and GPU performance and despite all this added performance this device is incredibly light and very stylish. 
Qualcomm is the Company that have been powering top end smartphones for decades, they are also the same Company that kept Intel out of the smartphones because their processors outperformed the best Intel tried to throw at smartphone manufacturers.
According to JB Hi-Fi management inquiries for new AI notebooks is very strong with new devices from the likes of Lenovo, HP and Acer snow hitting stores.
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x is packed with AI capability due to the inclusion Microsoft’s first next generation Copilot+ PC, unfortunately the Microsoft executive skipped the event this week before facing up to any Q&A so we were not able to question t about Copilot’s penchant to steal data from anywhere to compile a request as we found out when we produced an entire edition of SmartHouse back in December.
He did however make a case as to why Microsoft had at the last minute pulled their questionable Recall AI software
Since announcing Recall Microsoft’s Windows engineers have been scrambling to secure its controversial AI-powered Recall, this week during an event at Lenovo offices we found out that nearly everything you do involving Recall on the new Qualcomm-powered laptops is being recalled.
As for the new Lenovo Yoga Slim 7X Copilot Plus PCs shipped to JB Hi-Fi this week as well as those AI notebooks from Dell, HP, and Acer that were shipped to Harvey Norman earlier this week all have seen Recall, dropped because Microsoft has modified the setup process to remove it from Windows 11 — it’s now a feature that’s “coming soon” to these devices.
After developing Recall largely in secret away from the usual Windows Insider public testing, Microsoft is now relying upon that community of thousands to help test the new AI feature on new Copilot Plus devices
It’s quite clear that this is an early gen notebook with Qualcomm executives talking up software emulators for third party apps, limited Adobe capability and Microsoft apps that primarily run in the cloud.
The good news is this is a Lenovo product that looks impressive despite ChannelNews not yet being able to run a full test across multiple apps with the device.
Basically this is one of the first ARM based PC’s with a lot of power and battery capability and it also outperforms the 13-inch MacBook Air and their M3 processor.
It’s also one of the thinnest notebooks in the market today and I suspect retailers are going to be rubbing their hands with glee after a rough 18 months when notebook sales were wallowing.
Its has 14.5-inch OLED display device with touch capability
The notebook is as thin and light as the 13-inch MacBook Air and I was impressed as to how light it felt.
While the screen went way back I would have liked to have seen it go fully back like the older Yoga Book 9.
This down to the aluminum chassis and the wafer thin board and the significantly reduced in size Qualcomm processor.
I was impressed by the keyboard and being a person who spends all day writing, the thick large keys appeared to deliver excellent resistance when pounded.
As a heavey keyboard user this is key for me along with having a smooth and responsive touchpad.
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7X only has 2X USB-C ports on its left-hand side and another USB-C port on the right.
The 14.5-inch 3K (2,944 x 1,840) 90 Hz 16:10 OLED touch display appears to be up there and we wi;ll only know how good it is wnen we do a full review.
The big difference is that it packs a Snapdragon X Elite processor.
The chip’s NPU (Neural Processing Unite) is capable of 45 TOPS (trillion operations per second) for running LLMs (large language models) and generative AI locally on the laptop instead of via the cloud.
This is important especially as you are going to be running some apps in emulation mode and as AI-driven apps become more ubiquitous.
According to several sources the device is 28% faster than the Apple M3 processor and this is impressive for such a compact device.
With luck we will get our hands on the device for review next week.
The retail price is $2,799.
