New Yoga 2 13 and the current Yoga 2 Pro confusion

At Lenovo website is the new Yoga 2 13inch, what is the point of this and what is the difference between the new Yoga 2 13 and the current Yoga 2 Pro since looking at the specs they look identical.

 

They are not identical. The Yoga 2 13 has a 1920x1080 screen vs the 3200x1800 on the Yoga 2 Pro. The Yoga 2 13 can come with mechanical hard drives on the lower configurations. The Yoga 2 13 is heavier and likely uses somewhat different materials than the Yoga 2 Pro.

Think of it as the budget version of the Yoga 2 Pro, like the Yoga 2 11 vs the Yoga 11S (Haswell). I do agree that the price points do not make sense.

 

The Yoga 2 13 is a lot less expensive than the Y2P at BestBuy this week. The I5 4GB 500GB SSHD version is $799 at BestBuy.

In a review,
Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 2 (13.3"): Review
the reviewer said that the Y2 13 was somehow better than the Y2P. The main reason was the display screen scores.

The Y2 13 screen has almost twice the contrast of the Y2P screen and the color rendering was significantly better. There are no yellow issues. Quote: "We weren't expecting to see such good results from this screen; very few laptops have displays this good."

This is a newer build design than the Y2P. I like the all black color inside and out scheme. It does have the backlit keyboard. I have not run into any issues with this model thus far.

I needed FULL HD and the 500GB drive at a minimum. The 2 mm thicker and extra weight are well worth the hundreds that I saved.

 

In my opinion the Yoga 2 13 is better than the Yoga 2 pro.. just because you can upgrade the hard drive yourself and FHD is somewhat better than QHD due to the latter being scaled anyways.

Let alone the 300$ you save can buy yourself a big SSD or a nice little vacation.

 

The Y2P SSD is user upgradeable and is nearly a 1/2 pound lighter than the Y213.

There are font scaling issues with Quad HD screens right now with some apps (like Adobe Photoshop and Elements) although many apps work fine (e.g., MS Office 2013, Google Chrome, Quicken, Adobe Lightroom). Full HD screens have similar font scaling issues, but they just aren't very noticeable due to the lower resolution of Full HD (i.e., the fonts are small, but still usable while Quad HD fonts can be too small).

The future will be Quad HD since the screens can and do look so much sharper (that's why the Apple retina displays are so popular). Unfortunately the hardware development has outstripped windows software support at the moment.

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The review posted above says that the HDD cannot be swapped in the Yoga 2 13 due to a proprietary connector. That seems odd...

 

The HDD connector is part of the new slim WD drive offering. There are very few 5 mm HDDs available. In any case, the very useful upgrade is to put an M2 SSD in the empty M2 slot. You can have a 128 GB SSD or larger and a 500 GB HDD in the same PC. That is cool. Some owners have done that upgrade. See Lenovo forums.

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I noticed that a Y2P user posted a Windows Experience Index of 4.6.

My Y 2 13 gets a score of 5.2. Surprising. The desktop graphics score is the weakness of the Y2P.

 

The Yoga 2 13 and Yoga 2 Pro have the same specs except the Y2P has a higher pixel count to drive, so it's not too surprising.

 

I couldn't find any discussion about Yoga 2 13 on the Lenovo Forum. Please provide a link.

Thanks, Jim

 

Yoga 2 13 Internals - Lenovo Community

This is a brief discussion about upgrading.

 

Didn't someone claim that there was an M.2 slot?

 

Thanks for the link! Good discussion.

Jim

 

I can't wait to see notebookcheck's review on the Yoga 2 13's screen. Hoping for a screen that shows yellow well and is closer to 100% sRGB coverage. I'm not holding my breath though...

 

I just opened my Yoga 2 13 (non-pro) and found the empty M.2 slot (2280 style). Crucial sells a new M550 CT128M550SSD4 (128GB) that is 2280 (22 mm by 80 mm). Some places have it for as low as $99. I bought my Y2 13 from BB on sale for $799 ($100 discount). I wanted the savings, the better screen (color, contrast, and RGB fidelity), and the cheaper 500GB hybrid storage. This model is also newer in build design than the Y2Pro.

The difference is price, 1/2 pound in weight, thinness, storage type, and screen.

 

So the yoga 2 13 from bb comes with an empty slot? How hard was it to open up? I have this model.but still unsure if I want to keep it. It takes a while sometimes coming on from hibernation, and coming on from sleep sometimes the log on screen freezes. Any suggestions?

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I had the same resume problem with my Yoga 2 13 a few days ago. I reverted the system partition to a snapshot I took days ago. The problem disappeared. I would see a very slow spinning circle of dots and it would get slower and hang. I had updated an Intel software program.

The Y2 13 from BB was easy to open. I used a Torx T5 screwdriver to remove the screws. Then I removed the cover by lifting a corner and using my thumbnail to pop several catches along the edges. These are more like bumps to hold the cover in place without the screws. They are not delicate like some cover catches.

My Y2 13 does have an empty M.2 22mm x 80mm slot just like in the photos in this forum of the Y2 13 internals.

I have ordered a Crucial M550 128GB M.2 card. This card has a surprisingly high Passmark benchmark rating of 3886. I will post a report of the SSD installation.

 

Does notebook check have a yoga 2 non pro owners thread anywhere?

 

I haven't seen one. The Y213 has only been out a few months.

A lot of what is in the Y2P threads applies except for the yellow issues and maybe the WIFI issues but a lot of WIFI is Windows 8.1 fussiness.

The M.2 SSD installations are Y213 specific. I do not believe that Y2Ps have two drive connections. I believe that only Y213 owners can have a 500GB SSHD and a SSD at the same time. For only $899, I expect to have 628GB of storage including a 128GB SSD.

 

Tonight, I installed a Crucial M550 128GB M.2 card in my Yoga 2 13 (non-Pro). The card only goes in one way, chip side up. I had to scavenge a mounting screw. It is needed because the card tends to lift up like memory cards in terms of the slot design.

I rebooted twice before the system saw the SSD drive. The second reboot I went into the BIOS first to see if it detected the second drive. It did.

I ran some initial Passmark disk benchmarks on the SSD drive and got a Passmark disk rating of 3880. This is higher than every Yoga 2 Pro disk rating with the Samsung SSD.

I then cloned my HD to the SSD. The free partition programs did not like to deal with GPT partitions. They want you to upgrade. So I used Macrium Reflect to restore my drive image to the SSD drive. Reflect would restore all of the partitions except for the Recovery partition due to space issues even though there was enough space. I had to use the drag and drop feature to restore the Recovery partition. I also selected None for the drive letter for the Recovery partition. Then I shut down the Yoga and booted into the BIOS. In the Boot screen, I made the Crucial SSD the first drive to boot by moving it up one slot.

The boot from shutdown to the first appearance of the Windows desktop is less than 13 seconds now.

I then ran a full Passmark Performance Test 8.

The full Passmark benchmark rating is 2071. The disk rating is 4079.

The CrystalDiskMark numbers:
1000MB Read Write
Seq 479.5 369.9
512K 439.7 369.4
4K 27.17 68.44
4KQD32 339.3 265.6

500MB Read Write
Seq 501.5 370.6
512K 436.9 369.0
4K 29.26 76.77
4KQD32 340.3 268.8

Only the two top write numbers of the 1000MB are 20 percent lower than the Yoga 2 Pro numbers I found in one review. All of the other Crucial numbers are higher.

PCMark 7 of 4912.

The result is that for $899 including the SSD, I get a Yoga 2 that is faster than any Yoga 2 Pro with I5 CPU. And it has over 600GB of storage internally. That is a deal!!!

 

Here is an excerpt of a review of the Yoga 2 13 screen from the DigitalVersus website:

For one thing, the Yoga 2 has almost twice the contrast of the Yoga 2 Pro: 1,350:1, compared to 730:1. That's important. It has slightly lower brightness (322 cd/m² instead of 400 cd/m²), but it's still satisfactory. Moreover, the screen has an average Delta E of 3.2, which gives it (for all intents and purposes) perfectly natural colours, with no yellow overtones this time, whereas the Yoga 2 Pro's was an exaggerated 7.6. The colour temperature is just as good: 6,779 K, not far off from the ideal 6,500 K. We weren't expecting to see such good results from this screen; very few laptops have displays this good.

Here is the link to the full review: Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 2 (13.3"): Review

This review points out that the Yoga 2 13 screen is better than the Y2P screen in everything but pixels and brightness.

 

I'm 95% decided on the Y2 and would add an mSata as you outlined in your post. Question: Am I able to also upgrade the spinning disk? I'd like to put a 2TB drive in to store my eleventy billion photos.

Thanks,
J

 

I'm 95% decided on the Y2 and would add an mSata as you outlined in your post. Question: Am I able to also upgrade the spinning disk? I'd like to put a 2TB drive in to store my eleventy billion photos.

Thanks,
J

 

Hi,
I am deciding between the Y2P and Yoga2 13". They are very similarly prices on lenovo website these days. So I can even afford to get the 256GB SSD model.

I saw both plus Surface Pro 3 at bestbuy and somehow how HD playback on all 3 looked ordinary compared to my high end HP Envy 15" 1080p laptop.

Than I went to microcenter and played the same movie on Surface Pro 3 and it was much better. I guess the lightening or lack of updated software might have something to do with it at Bestbuy. Sadly microcenter didn't have any Yoga's on display. So i couldn't check the screen quality there.

Can you guys please comment on 1080p Movie or video playback on Y2P or Yoga2 13.
Is the screen so different that the difference is obvious?

Also are the keyboards on both Y2P and Yoga2 13 backlit??
Please let me know.

Thanks.

 

Having two drives is very intriguing; I did the same in my old Thinkpad T520. Is it possible to have 2 SSDs? Or only HDD plus SSD?

I guess I'd be ok with HDD+SSD but Lenovo only allows you to order the HDD model with 4Gb RAM and not the 8 that I'd like. So if I want 8 Gb, I'd have to have the SSD in the boot drive, which is fine, but do I lose the option to get the second drive?

Alternatively, if I order the 8Gb model with the 256Gb SSD, can I later install a 5mm HDD in the HDD slot? I can't seem to find one on Amazon, BTW, only 7.5mm.