First Look: Lenovo Tips ThinkCentre Neo 50q, a Snapdragon Copilot+ Desktop

(Credit: Mark Stetson)

So far, the Copilot+ PC party has had an unstated admission policy at the door: Laptops only!

Not anymore. At CES 2025, Lenovo tipped a compact desktop, the ThinkCentre Neo 50q, that, from the outside, doesn't look a million miles from the small-business-minded mini PCs that the company has served up for years. But the distinction? Qualcomm inside.

The video above briefly introduces the Windows 11-based 50q. For a further rundown, read on.

Snapdragon Hits the Desktop

The Neo 50q opens up a new front, of sorts, for desktop PCs, the same that laptops faced last summer. With the Neo and a few other early models, Qualcomm's efficient Snapdragon X processor line is making its first inroads into the desktop market.

The Neo 50q is a bit more than 7 inches square (it's 1.4 inches thick) but packs a whole lot of connectivity for its size. The front comprises two USB ports, one Type-A and one Type-C, along with a headset combo jack.

The back is stacked with a whole host of connectivity, including both DisplayPort 1.4a and HDMI 2.1 outputs, a quartet of USB ports in a mix of 2.0 and 3.2 Gen 2 (two of each), and a dedicated Ethernet jack, along with a power connector. Wireless connectivity comprises Wi-Fi 6E.

The chassis itself is 1 liter and weighs just shy of 2.5 pounds, with 60% of what Lenovo terms the "thermal shell" made of recycled materials.

About That Qualcomm Inside...

Lenovo will offer the 50q in Snapdragon X and Snapdragon X Plus chip choices, both being the eight-core varieties. Both are powered by the same Qualcomm Adreno integrated graphics silicon that extends across the Snapdragon X family.

These processors make the 50q a Copilot+ PC and bring all the features found in Copilot+ laptops, including advanced productivity tools, to bear. These eight-core chips employ a 45 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) NPU for background and foreground AI work. Like with the GPU, this is the same NPU and TOPS count that runs all the way up to the Snapdragon X Elite.

The system takes LPDDR5x in the SO-DIMM format at up to 16GB, and you can install two M.2 PCIe SSDs. Expect the 50q to hit the street in February, starting at $849.

About Our Expert

John Burek

Executive Editor and PC Labs Director

My Experience

I have been a technology journalist for almost 30 years and have covered just about every kind of computer gear—from the 386SX to 64-core processors—in my long tenure as an editor, a writer, and an advice columnist. For almost a quarter-century, I worked on the seminal, gigantic Computer Shopper magazine (and later, its digital counterpart), aka the phone book for PC buyers, and the nemesis of every postal delivery person. I was Computer Shopper's editor in chief for its final nine years, after which much of its digital content was folded into PCMag.com. I also served, briefly, as the editor in chief of the well-known hard-core tech site Tom's Hardware.

During that time, I've built and torn down enough desktop PCs to equip a city block's worth of internet cafes. Under race conditions, I've built PCs from bare-board to bootup in under 5 minutes. I never met a screwdriver I didn't like.

I was also a copy chief and a fact checker early in my career. (Editing and polishing technical content to make it palatable for consumer audiences is my forte.) I also worked as an editor of scholarly science books, and as an editor of "Dummies"-style computer guidebooks for Brady Books (now, BradyGames). I'm a lifetime New Yorker, a graduate of New York University's journalism program, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

The Technology I Use

I use a lot of computers on rotation in my daily work, but I rely on just a few to get things done. I split my work life mostly between a Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 (a 15-inch Ryzen model), paired with a Lenovo ThinkVision portable monitor, and a custom-built big-chassis Windows 10 desktop PC that has served me well for years now. (Specs: Liquid-cooled Intel Core i7-6950X Extreme Edition, 32GB of RAM, and a GeForce GTX 1080 card.) That's all in a giant chassis with six hard drives and SSDs packing its bays. (As I upgrade systems, I just keep moving the old warhorse drives over.) This behemoth is hooked up to a 32-inch LG monitor.

I also have a bunch of PCs around the house, all custom builds: another one attached to my main TV (for gaming and occasional forays into VR), a mini-PC on the bedroom TV (acting as a media server), and a Mini-ITX desktop in a corner of the living room...just because. I carry around an oversize OnePlus phone, but when I do long-haul travel, a vintage iPod Touch comes along, too, for old times' sake.

I wasn't always a PC guy. I cut my teeth on a cassette-drive-equipped Commodore VIC-20 in the 1980s. But I got serious with Apple desktops in the early 1990s, starting with a Macintosh SE, then a Macintosh LC, and finally one of the short-lived Umax "clone" Macs, before building my first PC and never looking back.

With all my typing and editing work over the years, I've become a huge proponent of thumb trackballs, which minimize wrist action (and my wrist pain). I have a secret cache of the long-discontinued Microsoft Trackball Optical Mouse (my personal favorite), held in an undisclosed location.

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