You could be surprised to find out that the first laptop with built -in solar panels is almost 15 years old. For me, however, the bigger shock is that with all the latest progress in photovoltaic cells, the manufacturers have not visited this idea again more often. But at MWC 2025, Lenovo changes this with his Yoga Solar PC concept.
The yoga solar PC concept weighs £ 2.6 and measures less than 0.6 inches thick and is essentially the same size as a standard 14-inch clamshell. And because the underlying design is not so different from Lenovo's standard yoga family, it does not play specifications either. It has an OLED display, up to 32 GB RAM, a 50.2-wheel battery and even a 2MP IR webcam for use with Windows Hello.
However, all of these components are by no means as important as the solar cells embedded in their lid. According to Lenovo, the panels use the contact cell technology so that the assembly brain and grid lines can be placed on the back of the cells. This enables the panels to offer up to 24 percent solar energy conversions, which is pretty good, since this corresponds to efficiency that they receive from many high-end home solar systems. In addition, the PC also supports the dynamic solar tracking in order to automatically adjust the cells of the cells to maximize the amount of energy that you can collect.
Lenovo says this means that the Yoga -Solar -PC can create enough juice to play an hour of videos in the sun after only 20 minutes. But it could be more impressive that even if the laptop is indoors, the performance can still absorb only 0.3 watts to tear down the battery. To understand you how much strength it collects, Lenovo has created a tailor -made app to follow how much light the panels absorb.
Unfortunately, Lenovo has no plans to transform this concept into a complete commercial device. But after playing around with it, I was pleasantly surprised to see how solid and robust the chassis felt. In contrast to many prototype devices, the Yoga Solar PC concept does not feel technologically so far compared to other notebooks. His PV cells sit safely behind a glass (or possibly plastic, Lenovo would not confirm which one) and at the same time add a little characteristic visual flair.
The biggest hurdle (and possibly a big reason why we have not seen more laptops like this) is that it is probably easier and more versatile for people who want to use their devices to load their devices, instead of having integrated something into the device itself. Regardless of this, Lenovo's Yoga Solar PC is a surprisingly polished concept that I would like to attract more attention in the future.