Teclast F7 Air: Beauty is only skin-deep

The Teclast F7 Air is a great looking laptop, especially considering the US$400 price tag. However, there’s not much substance behind that pretty face.

First, the highlights: The F7 Air is well-designed. It’s a very thin laptop (~17 mm at its thickest point). Despite its tiny profile, the chassis is rigid and feels well-built. There are some gaps along the trackpad and the front edge of the bottom panel, but overall, the fit and finish belie its low price tag. The system is also fanless and has no coil whine, so it’s completely silent.

Once you get over its looks, there’s not a lot to like. The F7 Air runs on an Intel Celeron N4120, a slow Gemini Lake CPU from 2019. It’s capable of handling light office work (word processing, emails, etc.) and some browsing, although it struggles a bit with heavier social media pages like Facebook. RAM is limited to the 8 GB of DDR4 soldered to the motherboard. On the plus side, there are two M.2 storage bays, but they only operate at SATA speeds.

Surprisingly, the F7 Air can stream 4K video from YouTube without much issue. If you give the Intel UHD Graphics 600 iGPU a few seconds to buffer the video, playback is relatively smooth with the occasional jitter every minute or so. Considering this is a weak point for most Celeron and Pentium machines, the fact that 4K playback is smooth at all is a high point.

Lastly, battery life is very disappointing. Even with a small battery (32.7 Wh), runtimes should be longer than the 4.5 hours we examined in our Wifi v1.3 test.

Overall, the Teclast F7 Air is one of the best-looking laptops under the $500 mark. If you value anything in addition to aesthetics, though, you should pass this one up.

Read the full review here.