Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i Laptop Specifications
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i looks great, has a lot of power, shares an amazing OLED display with decent battery life and good ergonomics – but it's not always the cheapest option, lacks connectivity
Key features
A gorgeous OLED display defines a 14-inch Lenovo OLED panel that defines almost every square. It makes apps, browser windows and media files look amazing, has breadth and quality for multimedia work, and high resolution, touch support and high brightness levels make it a winner in almost every situation.
Extremely Solid Intel Core i7 CPU Intel's Core i7-1280P has the ability to handle multitasking, creative workloads despite Lenovo's slim size. And while they don't always work at full scale, when they stretch their legs, there is little in this class of machines that can compete.
Great-looking design Lenovo combines aluminum and glass for a big impact – this is one of the best ultra-portable laptops you'll find anywhere. It's a powerful notebook too, and it doesn't weigh much — even if it's a little heavier than its competitors.
Introduction
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i is one of the best ultra-portable laptops on the market, which will surprise anyone who associates this manufacturer with precision desktop laptops instead of attractive designs.
Beneath the curved edges and glass you'll find Intel's interior specs and high-quality displays. It's a good start, and on paper, Lenovo looks like a strong contender to the Apple MacBook Air M2 and Dell XPS 13 Plus and potentially a potential participant in the best 2023 laptop for the countdown.
If you want to get this device, you will have to pay £1499 in United Kingdom and 1699 euros, but keep in mind that the US price is slightly higher at $2070.
However, these prices still compare well with some competitors. But is this laptop worth the expenses - or does it lack substance under the design?
Design and keyboard
The combination of glass and aluminum makes this one of the best looking slim laptops
Brilliant keyboard and glass trackpad provide a first-class comfortable experience
One of the three Thunderbolt ports should charge this rig, and the connection is minimal elsewhere
Get hands-on training with yoga and you will find plenty of fun aspects regarding design. There are no sharp edges - instead, the base and aluminum cover are shaved with gently curved edges with a chrome effect. The cover is illuminated with glass, and on the sides of the gently sunken keyboard are sharp speaker grilles.
The edges are small in size, and this version of the excavator uses a yellowish-white shade called Oatmeal instead of the alternate stormy gray Lenovo.
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i is impressive in practical areas as well. This is an impressively powerful laptop, with no significant movement on the panel – it's the kind of laptop you can easily do on your commutes. The movement of the hinge is smooth, and a small lip on the screen easily opens the lid. And although its weight of 1.38 kg is slightly higher than competitors, it is not a big enough jump to make a big difference.
Open the screen easily and you will find a high-quality keyboard. This is typical of Lenovo, and this unit is comfortable, quiet and reliable; it strikes a great balance between light movement, responsiveness and strong feedback. Fortunately, the power button is not installed on the keyboard, and you will get a double-height return switch.
Since this is very easy to carry, there is a travel distance of only 1 mm and no number pad. This is normal for this class of devices, and there is little difference between this unit and the MacBook Air.
The keyboard isn't perfect – the backlight should be stronger – but it's pretty good. It's also more traditional than the experimental unit on the XPS 13 Plus.
The trackpad is also excellent. It is spacious, with a perfectly smooth glass coating, and its buttons are very satisfying.
The Lenovo laptop deploys three Thunderbolt 4 ports — one more than a competitor — along with a headphone jack and webcam privacy switch. The camera pairs with sharp 1080p quality with Windows Hello facial recognition system. Internally, the connection comes from a dual-band Wi-Fi 6E network and Bluetooth 5.2.
As always, Lenovo size means some missing features. You don't get a card reader or fingerprint scanner - both competitors include the latter. The Yoga device does not have an HDMI output or any full-size USB ports, and there are no adapters in the box.
screen
The high-resolution OLED touchscreen has a great color gamut and contrast performance
You'll want to look elsewhere for flawless color accuracy
Bold and loud speakers are a good screen companion
There is a lot to like about the yoga show. This 14-inch touchscreen uses OLED technology and deploys a resolution of 2800 × 1800, so you get stunning colors and crystal-clear detail via a 16:10 aspect ratio.
Yoga board backs this spec with some great standards. This panel has produced 100%, 99.2% and 96.8% sRGB, DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB bands in huge size, so this monitor can handle creative workloads and media playback in every space. Combine these shapes with the perfect black levels of the OLED display and contrast and you will get amazing vibrancy and great depth.
The Delta E of 3.21 is reasonable and not great and means that this monitor is not accurate enough for the most demanding design tasks, but this is a minor problem. Elsewhere, the SDR brightness of 396 cd/m² is high enough for indoor and outdoor use, and the HDR peak of 600 cd/m² provides a small boost to HDR films. The screen comes with a stylus.
This is one of the best screens you will find on any laptop. It surpasses the MacBook Air panel in terms of resolution and color processing and matches the OLED option of the XPS 13 Plus.
The stunning screen is backed by gorgeous speakers that produce plenty of volume and punches along with great details and crisp, high-end notes.
performance
Intel i7-1280P is a great mid-weight CPU
You can't always get the full power of this chip unless you manipulate the power modes
Convert the CPU to full speed which is a better option than anything Dell can muster
Intel Core i7-1280P is a mid-power Alder Lake processor with great credentials. It has six ultra-filament cores peaking at 4.8 GHz and eight low-power electronic cores. It's also ahead of the i7-1260P you'll find elsewhere – this CPU may come from the same range, but it has fewer P cores and isn't in the same league as the i7-1280P.
Elsewhere, the Lenovo laptop has 16GB of dual-channel DDR5 memory and a 1TB Samsung PM9B1 SSD with moderate read and write speeds of 3558MB/s and 2764MB/s. In terms of graphics, you will have to rely on the core of the built-in Intel.
By default, Lenovo operates in adaptive performance mode, and with this option, Geekbench single- and multi-core results of 1, 694 and 7175 are selected with this option. These modest figures hardly differ from the i7-1260P inside the Dell XPS 13 Plus and lag behind Apple's M2 chip. The same pattern was repeated in PCMark 10, with Lenovo and Dell scoring around 5,200 points.
Switch to Extreme Performance mode and i7-1280P stretches his legs. In this standard, its PCMark 10 score improved to 5852 and in Geekbench tests it scored 1738 and 10806, with the latter result surpassing Apple's latest chip and extending far ahead of the i7-1260P.
When it comes to performance, then, you have options. This adaptive performance mode is ideal for everyday office tasks and web browsing, while the Extreme Performance option is better suited for photo editing, modest content creation workloads, and tougher work tools. In these daily workloads, Lenovo, Dell, and Apple can be replaced, but in creative tasks and multi-threaded situations, the i7-1280P is better than the Dell i7-1260P and Air's M2 silicon.
The Lenovo laptop does a good job of thermal tests as well. It's almost silent in adaptive mode and only causes a little more fan noise in extreme runs – it will be hard to hear unless you're in a very quiet environment. The outer panels also do not heat up.
In some markets, you can buy Yoga using different processors. Avoid the i7-1260P, which is slower than the i7-1280P but mostly sold for the same price. Sometimes, you'll discover the i5-1240P, a daily chip capable of browsing the web and office tasks. This is a smart key to save money.
Stick to i7-1280P and you'll find that yoga isn't always the cheapest option. In the US, the $2,070 Lenovo can compare to the XPS 13 Plus with OLED, but the Dell is cheaper if you want to drop that screen — and the MacBook costs less, even with 16GB of memory and 1TB SSD upgrades.
Dell and Apple laptops offer more variety in specifications. In many markets there are no options for customizing Yoga, while XPS and MacBook have a lot of tweaks. This is not always the case with Lenovo, and I hope this is just a pause for customization.
Also keep in mind that Yoga will get 13th generation Intel processors from April 2023 onwards. The i7-1280P doesn't slack off, but it's worth the wait if you want more speed.
battery
All-day battery life in some situations is a better result than most OLED laptops
However, Apple's non-OLED Air notebook is still much better in this regard
You will get a full day of use from this laptop in some situations. With the adaptive performance mode on, the screen brightness was halved and the daily work standard running yoga lasted for 10 hours and 25 minutes, and in the battery saving mode that extends for an hour.
Increase the brightness to display OLED content or run stricter content creation tools and you'll get about seven hours off this laptop, but if you're careful, Yoga will handle a workday.
This is reasonable for an OLED laptop and longer than Dell, but non-OLED competitors are noticeably better here. Apple's MacBook Air M2 lasted fourteen hours.