Lenovo Ideapad S540, best 13-inch MacBook alternative

5 min readAug 13, 2020

There must be times when you just want a laptop that delivers what it claims. The first reliable option is always the MacBooks. but what if you want to stick to the Windows side? Well, in this article we are going to discuss one such laptop. That is the Lenovo Ideapad S540. It’s slim and compact and also has great performance power. Let’s DIGIN2 the specs.

Build Quality:

The Lenovo Ideapad S540 is available in three colors. Frost White, Ice Blue, or Platinum Grey. The all-aluminum build is pretty solid. The texture is fingerprint and smudge resistant. The bezels around the display are pretty narrow. And the laptop is extremely thin. Despite the thinness of the laptop Lenovo has managed to put a dual exhaust pipe and dual fan to cool down the internals.

Furthermore, the dimensions of the laptop are such 308.3mm x 211mm x 14.8mm / 12.1″ x 8.3″ x 0.58.” The Lenovo Ideapad S540 weighs only around 1.3kg, which is quite light for a laptop.

The Display of Lenovo Ideapad S540:

This is the first thing that will grab your attention for sure. The narrow bezels give the display of Lenovo Ideapad S540 a 90% screen to body ratio. Even more, the display is a 13.3-inch 2560 x 1600p QHD IPS LCD display. The sRGB color gamut is 72%. Furthermore, the color accuracy is super accurate and the nits count is 300. For any kind of photo editing or work that requires color accuracy, you can rely on this machine blindly.

Internals of Lenovo Ideapad S540:

The Lenovo Ideapad S540 comes in an AMD variant and as well as an Intel variant. The Intel one packs a 10th gen i7 10710U CPU. Also, there is the NVIDIA GeForce MX250 graphics card that comes along with the laptop. In the case of the Ryzen variant, it comes with the Ryzen 4600U(better than 10th gen i7) processor. Likewise, there’s an APU built in the chip. Here it’s a Radeon Vega 6 (500mb video RAM.)

4k video editing is possible. There’s no thermal throttling at all. The device gets a little hot sometimes but that’s it. Playing Fortnite is possible and playing even demanding games is not possible due to the lack of video ram.

There’s a 720p webcam built in the laptop that also doubles as a security feature. Since there is no fingerprint sensor in the laptop the WebCam supports windows hello support. So for a fast log in you can rely on this laptop. The webcam’s video quality is fairly decent although I would recommend buying a separate USB webcam.

Storage and RAM of Lenovo Ideapad S540:

There’s a 512GB PCIe M.2 SSD built into the laptop for faster storage access. All your programs will load super fast and snappy due to that. The 8GB of soldered 2666MHz ram makes multi-tasking pretty smooth. You can change the SSD and replace it with a 1TB one if you like. There’s also a 16GB RAM variant that you can choose, since upgrading Ram is not possible in the Lenovo Ideapad S540.

Finally, Battery and Charging of Lenovo Ideapad S540:

There’s a 56Wh battery built in the laptop. Just like a MacBook, this laptop can also last for fairly long sessions. The laptop can easily give you 9hrs of screen-on-time in moderate use. Even more, the laptop comes with my favorite 65W USB-C charger. Furthermore, the charger can boost up the battery to 80% in merely an hour.

Port Selection:

The port selection is pretty great in my opinion. There are two USB C ports on the left side and only one USB A port and a 3.5mm headphone jack on the right side. Both the USB-C ports support charging. And that’s it. If you’re a port-lover you might get pretty pissed, I can totally understand. But for me, I love minimalism hence only the bare minimum feels pretty good. The dongle life is already here. Above all, I use very few accessories. The external keyboard-touchpad combo and the mouse I use are Bluetooth ones. Hence they don’t require a USB port to function.

Some extra stuff:

The Lenovo Ideapad S540 comes with Windows 10 Home built-in.
There are 2x 2W bottom-firing speakers in front of the bottom part of the laptop. They are okay but I would recommend external speakers, Bluetooth speakers, or headphones if you’re an audio-lover. The speakers are nowhere comparable to a MacBook. Period.
Likewise WiFi, Bluetooth 5.0 is there. SO it’s okay to use it without an ethernet cable always plugged in like a caveman.
The keyboard has a nice travel distance and it is also backlit.
The trackpad is pretty big. And being a glass trackpad the inputs are pretty precise and the device becomes smooth to use.

Conclusion:

The Lenovo Ideapad S540 is robust in design and the display is superb. The performance is top-notch and the battery life is huge too. But the downsides are the port selection and the RAM upgradability. If you’re looking for a slim laptop that just does all the basic and needy works you can totally rely on this Windows laptop. Go for it. Likewise, homepage links and buying links will be below. Have fun.

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