Yandex has released its own laptops. Inexpensive, but, judging by the characteristics, decent. Are they worth the money? We study gadgets with you. Yandex Fabrik decided to capture the wallets of Russian buyers: more and more new products are entering the market, and those that are already available are receiving serious updates. So the Lunnen Ground 16, which we talked about, has recently changed. Is it for the better? We tested the laptop of the 2025 model year to find out.
Yandex Corporation has long crossed the border of the electronic world and already sells physical devices. At first, these were smart speakers, smartphones and TVs, now they have been joined by Tuvio household appliances, no cord power tools and Lunnen laptops. In all segments, the IT giant is trying to be a kind of Xiaomi – it aims at the very “top for its money”, trying to offer the best price-performance ratio.
Assembled to the best of mind
The first acquaintance with the 16-inch laptop Lunnen Ground 16 B2 creates a pleasant impression. The box is elegant and made of pleasant cardboard, the device is weighty, pleasantly cools your palms with aluminum, confidently opens with one hand and meets with a neat keyboard with a bright power button. The body is strong, it does not lend itself to twisting either closed or open. The hinge connecting the screen to the top case looks reliable.
On the left side is HDMI, a universal Type-C capable of powering the battery via the Power Delivery protocol and displaying a picture on an external display via DisplayPort, another Type-C (only charging and flash drives) and a full-size USB 3.2 Type-A. On the right is a headset minijack, another pair of classic USB ports for flash drives and peripherals, and a microSD card slot.
The matte screen is slightly recessed into the matte plastic frame, with a webcam lens and an indicator LED placed above it. There is no privacy curtain, but a bright, one might even say annoying, white beacon will notify you if some software connects to the camera.
By the way, the webcam is not simple. It shoots in Full HD and is perfectly tuned: if you are not sitting in complete darkness or under strong backlighting, the picture is balanced in brightness; The skin tones of the face are also conveyed correctly. In such a situation, competitors have red-faced balls against the background of overexposure or dark silhouettes of heads on an exposed background. And here everything is clear: normal faces that are pleasant to look at.
Lunnen Ground 16 Royal keyboard, normal touchpad
The keyboard looks cool: neat plastic molding, strict key borders, tastefully selected font… It is really pleasing to the eye and distinguishes Yandex laptops from their Chinese counterparts assembled from the same components. The mechanism itself is light and elastic, you need to get used to it in order to type blindly at a decent speed.
There are normal full-size arrows, a dedicated numeric block and no truncations in the text part. The keyboard is equally suitable for programmers and accountants – everything you need is in its place, soft white backlighting with three brightness levels is provided. After the hands get used to it, there will be no mistakes during long-term printing.
The touch panel is quite large, installed in the center of the device and does not interfere with typing. Only the surface of the touchpad is confusing. According to Chinese tradition, a fingerprint sensor is embedded in it.
It looks untidy (it belongs in the power key), and the surface of the touchpad itself does not harmonize well with the materials of the case and keyboard – cheap plastic with a ringing click of the left and right mouse button registration mechanism hidden under it. On the other hand, the cursor moves seamlessly, accurately, and moderately accurately. Gestures are also good: scrolling with two fingers, zooming pinch, and swiping work on the first try.
Lunnen Ground 16 Pandora’s Box
The gadget is equipped with a 16-inch IPS matrix with an aspect ratio of 16:9 and Full HD resolution.
The maximum brightness is 310 nits (suitable for office conditions, but not suitable for outdoor printing), the black point is 0.22 nits. The contrast ratio is decent – 1500:1. But there are questions about the backlight spectrum and color gamut. The latter is about 70% of the sRGB clipped across the red-blue and blue-green spectrum.
To the credit of the engineers, let’s clarify: even such a mediocre matrix was set up with dignity. The white point at the level of 6400-6500 K and a sensible gamma curve make all grayscale gradations neutral and distinguishable. You can edit documents, surf the Internet, communicate in instant messengers and watch YouTube without any problems. But for professional tasks, including color correction, digital retouching, and drawing, the display is not suitable.
There is sound in the laptop, but the quality of the speakers is sad. They play quietly, there are no low frequencies, no high frequencies either, loud music sounds flat. However, this is a normal situation for an office model. Use headphones and headsets and watch what you need without disturbing others.
Another disappointment is the unsuccessful Wi-Fi module. In addition to the fact that it is already obsolete (Wi-Fi 5 AC will not please anyone in 2024), it is also assembled on the not very successful Realtek 8822C chip, famous for its crooked drivers. In our tests, Wi-Fi was unstable, providing speeds of up to 40-50 Mbps with periodic drops of up to a couple of megabits — and this is on the Ubiquity corporate access point with the most optimized settings and support for all the necessary protocols and channels.
Lunnen Ground 16 Solid configuration with room for upgrade
What is really pleasing is the filling of the gadget. The Lunnen Ground 16 B2 is built on a quite cheerful and up-to-date Ryzen 7 5800U processor. In our test laptop, 16 GB of RAM is installed at once, however, with one module. This somewhat limits the performance of the processor from the “reds”, which like fast dual-channel memory. Fortunately, there is a second SO-DIMM connector – you can expand to 32 GB or replace the native module and get 64 GB of RAM at once.
The cooling system is simple: there are no large radiators, no solid fans, no tricky vapor chambers. There is only a thin heat pipe connecting the APU to a single radiator, and a simple turbine fan that drives air through it. However, this is expected for a device of this class.
Lunnen Ground 16 B2 benchmark results
- PCMark 10
- Lunnen Ground 16 From the network:
5054 points 9012
Essentials
8750 Productivity
4445 Content Creationfrom battery:
3858 points
7030 Essentials
5830 Productivity
3804 Content Creation - 3DMark Time Spy
- 957 points 835
graphics
5623 processor
The results of the benchmarks are not surprising: the Ryzen 7 5800U loses a lot in performance if the RAM has low bandwidth. Built-in graphics especially suffer from this. Are you planning to load iron seriously? Install the second RAM module. It costs a penny, but it significantly improves the situation. And plug your laptop into a power outlet: the battery results are about 30% lower than when running on a power supply. But there are no difficulties with autonomy – when running PCMark 10 under full load, the battery is discharged by about 17% per hour (that is, benchmarks can be driven for more than 5 hours). In normal use, the laptop will last even longer – 6.5-7 hours.
Lunnen Ground 16 Final impressions
After talking to colleagues from other publications and discussing the new products with them, we came to the conclusion that Yandex’s 15-inch model was unsuccessful. But the Lunnen Ground B2 with a 16-inch screen will surely find its audience. This is an inexpensive, well-assembled office device that looks decent, does not irritate in everyday tasks and gives pleasant emotions during operation.
All its negative qualities are either not important to the target audience, or are balanced by competent settings, or are solved in no time and at minimal cost. But an attractive price and active representatives of technical support who are really eager to help are rare, especially if you compare the model with direct competitors among Chinese brands, both large and not so large.
The main advantage of the Lunnen Ground B2 is that the laptop is made wisely. In the first place, they put those characteristics that are important for the majority of the target audience. Therefore, there is decent iron inside, the case is not made of foil, and a neat keyboard looks at the user, which is pleasant to touch. And on office calls, you will not look like a red-faced demon from corporate hell, but quite a normal person.
A simple touchpad is not annoying, a display with not the best parameters is compensated by their competent settings, Wi-Fi in case of compatibility problems with your equipment can be changed in 5 minutes by installing a classic Intel or extravagant MTK with support for modern protocols and stable drivers.
The Lunnen Ground 16 B2 is a good choice for the office or home when a laptop doesn’t need to handle complex tasks, especially when you consider its price. Competitors for the same money are unlikely to offer you a Ryzen 7 (it’s more likely to be an i3 or some antiquity like Intel’s 10th generation) with similar build quality and customization. For hardware of a similar level, they will ask for 10-15 thousand rubles more, and a noticeably better screen will raise the price of another 5-7 thousand. It turns out that Yandex really got the “top for its money”?
