(Credit: Michael J. Miller)
Lately, I've been using a Dynabook Tecra A60-M (series 2) laptop, a midrange 16-inch notebook that sports an Intel Arrow Lake chip, very good battery life, and an excellent selection of ports and features at a good price.
The Dynabook series isn't as well known in the US as its competitors but has a long lineage back to the Toshiba laptops introduced in the 1980s. It's now part of Sharp.
The Tecra A60-M has a solid feel, with an unassuming black cover. Measuring 14.06 by 9.8 by 0.78 inches and weighing 3.75 pounds (4.36 with the included charger), it's not the lightest laptop but is still easy to carry for a 16-inch machine. I was a bit surprised to see it came with an average-sized 65W charger with a proprietary connector as most new laptops come with more modern USB-C charging.
The keyboard has a generously sized touchpad, and like many 16-inch laptops, includes a numeric keypad on the right-hand side. Like most current Windows systems, it has a Copilot key, but I wish the keyboard had indicator lights for muting the microphone and the speaker. It has a 1,920-by-1,200 IPS display in the now-common 16:10 ratio, and it looked just fine. Dynabook lists a touch-screen option, though I didn't test this.
It has a full line-up of ports. The left-hand side has a locking slot, proprietary power connector, HDMI, USB-A, two USB-C/Thunderbolt ports, and a headset jack, while the right-hand side has a full-size Ethernet port, another USB-A port, and a microSD socket. Both Ethernet and microSD are increasingly rare on laptops but can be quite convenient.
Performance
The unit I tested came with an Intel Core Ultra 5 225U processor, a midrange mobile part in Intel's Arrow Lake family. This includes two performance cores, eight efficiency cores, and two low-power efficiency cores, with a 1.5GHz base frequency for the performance cores with turbo up to 4.8GHz and Intel Graphics, made on Intel's 3nm process. This has a neural processing unit (NPU) rated at 11 TOPS, notably less than Intel's Lunar Lake or AMD's Strix Point series. My unit came with 16GB of memory and a 512GB SSD.
All this was reflected in the benchmarking numbers I saw, where the Tecra scored notably lower than recent Lunar Lake systems or those based on the AMD Ryzen AI 9 platform, but pretty comparable to older systems based on the Intel Raptor Lake series. On my toughest tests, it took over two hours to transcode a video using Handbrake, comparable to what I saw on older Alder Lake systems; and took 47 minutes to run an Excel file with a large data table. Again, these times don't match up with the fastest current systems, but they match the top of the line from just a few years ago and should be quite sufficient for typical office work.
Even though this processor has an NPU, I wouldn't recommend it for local AI processing. It's rated with fewer TOPS than the Lunar Lake processors and was much slower on tests using Procyon's computer vision tests, and wouldn't run Procyon's image-generation tests because it didn't have enough memory. When I tried running a local version of Stable Diffusion, it took almost twice as long to generate images as most current systems and running a local copy of Meta's Llama 3.1, it only ran at 25 to 40% of the speed that I've seen on Lunar Lake and Strix Point systems. Still, I doubt most people will be running local AI applications on this, and again, it should be fine for typical office work.
One area where it did quite well was battery life, lasting almost 18 hours on PCMark 10's Modern Office test with 40 nits, and over 15 hours with 100 nits, quite good for a 16-inch laptop.
For audio/video, the Tecra A60 comes with a 5-megapixel webcam with a physical cover (which I always appreciate), and a dual-array microphone. Though the camera has a good wide-angle field of view, it wasn't as good at focusing as some of the other systems I've tested. It does support Windows Studio Effects. The sound seemed good, though not special.
As I write this, the Dynabook Tecra A60-M with similar specifications to what I tested is selling for $1,249 on the Dynabook website. While its performance isn't quite up to the top current machines, and I wish it had stronger AV capabilities, the Tecra A60 is a solid machine at a good price.