That’s much longer than we saw from last year’s Envy x360 13, and even a bit better than the Spectre x360 14. I averaged 10 hours and 49 minutes of continuous work with the screen around medium brightness. But the battery life - AMD’s true strength - is the real standout here. It blew through my typical workload of around a dozen Chrome tabs with Slacking, Spotify streaming, and Zoom calls over top with no issues. Having raved about the 1165G7-powered Spectre x360 14 not too long ago, I think the Aero was about on par with that machine in everyday use. The Aero is also available with a six-core Ryzen 5 5600U, which we wouldn’t expect to be a big step down in performance. (My review unit also has 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage.) The 5800U is positioned to compete with Intel’s flagship Core i7-1165G7 (which is available in the much more expensive Spectre x360 14), but it’s proven itself significantly faster in multicore performance. It makes the Aero one of the lightest laptops you can buy with eight cores.
Models with this processor start at $869.99. My model has AMD’s eight-core Ryzen 7 5800U, which is one of the fastest U-series processors (the ones in thin and light laptops) you can buy.
Perhaps the biggest contributor to the Aero’s excellence is its processor.
