The Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11S is a Windows notebook with an 11.6 inch touchscreen display which you can push back 360 degrees until it’s back to back with the keyboard, letting you hold the device like a tablet.

Lenovo started selling the Yoga 11S in June, offering models with Intel’s 3rd generation Core, or “Ivy Bridge” processors. Now the company is offering a model with an Intel Core i5-4210Y “Haswell” processor which is part of the 4th-generation Core family.

The new Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11S is available from Best Buy for $800.

Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11S

While the new chip should provide a modest performance bump, the biggest difference is that it’s a low power chip that helps boost the computer’s battery life by up to 2 hours.

A $730 model with a 3rd generation Core i3 processor, for instance, gets up to 5 hours and 25 minutes of battery life, while the new model should run for up to 7 hours and 24 minutes.

Interestingly, there’s no mention of the new Haswell-powered Yoga 11S on the Lenovo website yet, but it appears Best Buy may have had the new tablets in stock since early October.

I only noticed the new model because it showed up in an Intel holiday buyer’s guide.

Aside from the new processor, the new Yoga 11S looks a lot like the original. The Windows 8 convertible measures about 0.7 inches thick, weighs 3 pounds, features WiFi, Bluetooth, HDMI, USB 3.0, and USB 2.0 ports, 4GB of RAM, and a 128GB solid state drive.

At 3 pounds it’s kind of heavy for a tablet, but pretty light for a notebook — and considering it has a keyboard which is not detachable, it’s probably best to think of the Yoga 11S as a laptop that you can use as a tablet (or prop up in “tent mode” for watching videos or presentations) rather than as a tablet with keyboard.

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,547 other subscribers

9 replies on “Lenovo updates $800 IdeaPad Yoga 11S convertible with Haswell”

  1. It is a good machine, but make sure your copy of Windows is activated before leaving the store. I had a horrible experience with Best Buy, having to return the 11s multiple times because the copy of Windows 8 wasn’t genuine/activated. I think it has to do with them swapping in the new processor, which makes the product/activation key invalid (these keys are computed directly from the hardware config). They didn’t do their due diligence to make sure Lenovo had refreshed the product key after the hardware change. Neither Microsoft, Lenovo, or Best Buy knew what to do, so I eventually had to return it.

  2. Is there any way I can manually upgrade the 3rd Gen Core i5 in my 11S to a Haswell processor for the battery life improvements?

    1. no this is not a desktop where you can pop out the cpu and replace it. It’s soldered on

      1. Is the motherboard replaceable? I think it’s high time PC manufacturers started making laptops and tablets as modular as desktops. It can be done…there was a group of students at Stanford who made a fully modular laptop for easy disposal and upgrades.

        1. Thin and light tablet-convertibles are pretty much the last place to look for modular and upgradeable systems. The only way you can get the thinnest possible system is to surface mount things. The unusually positive thing about this system is that you can upgrade the RAM to 8gb and swap out the SSD, unlike a lot of thin systems, where they use custom drives with non-standard sizes and where the RAM is on the motherboard. (The downside: you have to open the case to perform either upgrade.)

  3. We picked up a couple of these beauties in October, from Best Buy, and I had to double and triple check that they were, in fact, Haswell processors, since every info site I visited said Haswell wasn’t available for the 11s. The new Haswell-equipped models are fantastic though, and I can’t recommend them highly enough.

  4. just picked one up tonight.. I just happened to be at Best Buy looking at vid capture cards. I assumed they screwed up when labeling it.. but when I check sys info on the display and it showed the haswell i5 I was super surprised. Ive been waiting specifically for this laptop and no mention anywhere of it. So far it’s flying fast.. I’m slighlty dissapointed by the 1366×768 screen and some light leakage and I may swap it for a different one. When sitting side by side with the super hd yoga pro 2 the difference was NOT striking.. you would think it would be but the yoga pro 2 only looked slightly better. Identical hardware design .. the pro was a hair thinner though. This is probably a mid year refresh.

  5. Meh, I hope that since weve reached somewhat acceptable level of thinness in laptops/tablets manufacturers will start to think about how to increase battery life, 7-11h in best case scenario is, IMHO, weak!

  6. Its available on bestbuy with Haswell for more than a month.

    May be bestbuy exclusive.

Comments are closed.