Lenovo has announced the IdeaPad 5 Pro, a powerful but slim laptop based on the IdeaPad series and featuring AMD's latest mobile processor at its heart.

The Ryzen CPU-powered model, which will be available in the U.S., ditches the standard IdeaPad laptop's 15-inch display in favor of a 16-inch screen instead. Not surprisingly, the IdeaPad Pro 5 seems to have taken its cue from the success of the MacBook Pro 16-inch.

There are many Windows 10 laptops that try to capture the essence of the design that makes the MacBook Pro so special, but few have truly mastered the blend of industrial design and ease of use. The IdeaPad 5 Pro, however, may be a candidate.

The 16-inch IdeaPad 5 Pro starts at $1,149, a price that puts it on par with other premium laptops such as the Surface Laptop 3, Dell XPS 15, and MacBook Pro with M1. Therefore, it will take a solid high-end laptop experience to divert attention away from the aforementioned PCs.

The IdeaPad 5 Pro will be released in May, but Lenovo has not narrowed down the date any further. The IdeaPad 5 Pro could face stiff competition, as Microsoft's Surface Laptop 4 is expected to arrive around the same time.

The Lenovo IdeaPad 5 Pro looks like a child between the MacBook Pro 16" and the Lenovo ThinkPad X1. It is an Apple machine with rounded corners, narrow display bezels, a clean keyboard deck and lid, and a Lenovo laptop with a reasonably generous selection of ports and keyboard design. And the bottom half of the IdeaPad 5 Pro has a more trapezoidal bottom than the MacBook Pro.

The trackpad, which seems relatively large, is located below the keyboard, slightly off-center. It also features a single seamless pad, rather than clickable buttons at the top, as on some Lenovo notebooks.

Post-selection comes in the form of two USB Type-A ports, a full-sized SD card reader, USB-C with Thunderbolt 4 support, and an HDMI connection. For those who do not have wireless headphones, a 3.5mm audio jack is also available.

Clad in an all-metal casing, the Lenovo IdeaPad 5 is available in Cloud Gray and Storm Gray. Overall, the laptop appears to be a slightly sleeker, more premium take on the standard IdeaPad 5.

As mentioned, the Lenovo IdeaPad 5 Pro has a 16-inch IPS display. This screen delivers 2.5K resolution with a 16:10 aspect ratio, a 120Hz refresh rate, and 350 nits of brightness.

This aspect ratio, 90% screen-to-body ratio, and fast refresh rate should make the display quite comfortable for watching movies and jumping between different apps. Lenovo claims that the IdeaPad 5 Pro covers 100% of the sRGB color gamut, which may be suitable for some video and photo editing, but we would need to see how well it covers the Adobe RGB color gamut to recommend it for professional-grade photography work.

There is also an IR camera on the bezel above the display to facilitate facial recognition login with Windows Hello.

Lenovo has not mentioned which AMD Ryzen processor the IdeaPad 5 Pro will be powered by. However, AMD is expected to announce a new Ryzen 5000 laptop CPU, which is expected to be included in the IdeaPad 5 Pro. Expect a chip with eight cores and blazing core speeds, crunching through demanding tasks and handling multitasking with ease.

Up to 16GB of DDR4 RAM will be available, with an optional Nvidia GeForce RTX dedicated GPU. Graphics options are worth noting as they may include laptop versions of Nvidia's new GeForce RTX 3000 series.

Thus, the IdeaPad 5 Pro should have more than enough power to handle your daily professional computing tasks and light gaming when work is winding down. Up to 1TB of PCIe M.2 SSD space should provide plenty of fast storage for accessing files and launching applications quickly.

Although we did not find any indications on battery life, the IdeaPad 5 Pro is powered by a 75 WHr battery pack that supports Lenovo's Rapid Charge Express. This means that a 15-minute charge in standby mode will provide battery capacity for up to 3 hours of continuous 1080p video playback, depending on the brightness of the display.

The Lenovo IdeaPad 5 Pro does not stand out in terms of innovation. And arguably, it could be called a basic MacBook Pro 16-inch-inspired laptop. However, if it is set to powerful specifications and the keyboard and trackpad are fine, it could compete with the MacBook Pro on Windows 10.

To make a proper judgment, the IdeaPad 5 Pro needs to be tested in person. As it stands, however, Lenovo's new machine could be a fairly strong premium laptop to compete with top-of-the-line offerings from Apple, Dell, Asus, and Microsoft.