Provided By: Lenovo
Price: $1504.99
Closer Look:
The Lenovo Yoga 9i (14″) is an all-metal convertible laptop that has a pretty thin and lightweight body. The 9i provides a premium all-aluminum design that I find to be both modern and attractive. The lid opens easily with a single hand, which is helped by the balanced hinge and the massive protrusion on the lid. It also houses the HD camera and its “TrueBlock” privacy shutter.
The Yoga 9i’s 4K UHD IPS touchscreen display is one of its best features. First of all, it’s relatively bright, measuring more than 500 nits. I found the Dolby HDR panel offers reasonably crisp text, and at an impressive 500 nits of rated brightness, it’s viewable even in a room flooded with sunlight. Even better, the 9i’s display supports Dolby Vision, a dynamic HDR format that allows for vivid color and deep, dark black levels when you’re watching supported content.
Lenovo built a sound bar into the 360-degree hinge that houses custom tweeters with vibration buffers to reduce distortion, and a pair of downward-firing woofers underneath the chassis. By placing the sound bar in the hinge, you get the benefit of the Dolby Atmos tuned speakers in all orientations, including media mode where you’re most likely to benefit from it. And it’s some excellent audio, with tremendous volume that never distorts, clear mids and highs, and even a touch of bass. You can use the Yoga 9i for binging Netflix all by itself with no need for headphones or external speakers, even when sharing with a friend, and that’s unusual for a Windows 10 laptop.
Keyboard, Touchpad:
Next, we have the base of the device, which is also very strong. Unlike some of its competitors, things are pretty busy around here. The keyboard itself offers above average comfort, with mostly well spaced keys and virtually no flex when you press them. That said, the travel distance of each keystroke is quite short, and the directional arrow keys are very cramped. It also has speakers hidden in the hinge.
Then, there is solid state glass trackpad, which feels agile and snappy, it’s a bit on the small side and lacking dedicated left and right click buttons. Last, you can find a ultrasonic fingerprint reader just beneath the “End” key.
I like that the Yoga 9i’s includes a pen, something that often costs extra. The stylus offers a good inking experience. Based on Wacom AES technology, it offers up to 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity and a pen-on-paper-like feel against the Yoga 9i’s glass display surface. Lenovo rates its onboard battery for 130 minutes of continuous use, and says it charges quickly up to 80% in 15 seconds when inserted in its slot.
As a convertible PC, the 9i supports multiple versatile usage modes—like tent mode, stand mode, and tablet mode—in addition to the standard laptop style clamshell mode.
Ports:
There are two Thunderbolt 4 ports on the left side, and they’re paired with a USB Type-A 3.2 (Gen. 2) port. As the notebook charges by USB Type-C, naturally, both ports would work for charging. The only other port here, by the way, is the Audio jack.
The right side only houses the Power button, while the backside is home to the dedicated stylus.
Internals:
To get inside this machine, you need to undo 6 Torx-head screws, as well as three Phillips-head ones, hidden beneath the back rubber foot. After you do so, pry the bottom panel with a plastic tool, starting from the back.
As we can see, the cooling solution includes two heat pipes of different sizes, as well as two fans, and some brackets, cooling the soldered memory, as well as the VRMs. Sadly, this laptop has all its memory soldered to the motherboard, so no upgrades are possible. Thankfully, you can switch the M.2 SSD for a faster or a larger one in the future. The battery capacity is 60Wh and takes half of the space inside the machine.
Performance:
The Intel Core i7-1185G7 is a new Ultra Low Voltage (ULV) processor from Intel. In this case, ULV refers to the processor’s typical TDP of 15 watts. With a clock speed of 3.0GHz (4.8GHz turbo), the Core i7-1185G7 is Intel’s highest-frequency “Tiger Lake” CPU. It also has slightly faster integrated graphics.
Cinebench R20:
The results display that the Core i7-1185G7 processor’s single-core score is 473cb and its multi-core score is 1806cb.
Cinebench R23:
The results display that the Core i7-1185G7 processor’s single-core score is 1358cb and its multi-core score is 4462cb.
Cinebench R15:
The results display that the Core i7-1185G7 processor’s single-core score is 200cb and its multi-core score is 822cb.
Thermals are very acceptable. The laptop is never too hot to touch (unlike some of the other laptops. The fan noise is minimal even at full tilt.
SSD Speeds:
Battery:
The Yoga 9i sports a 60Wh battery, In testing I used the better performance setting with the display set to 70% brightness, backlit keyboard on, I did manage to get just under nine hours of battery life on the Yoga 9i, You can squeeze even more battery life by using the included Lenovo vantage widget.
The Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 laptops is a great option to consider for both basic business and general personal use.
The Lenovo Yoga 9i's is a very well built machine. Premium materials, the latest and greatest in terms of technology Intel Tiger Lake CPUs, Thunderbolt 4 support, Wi-Fi 6 support, and so on. It’s flexible and rugged enough to use in various modes, good computing performance, and thoughtful extras like the webcam privacy filter. It has two Thunderbolt 4 ports, as well as a USB Type-A port, so you don’t necessarily need to use a dongle for everything you do. It's still a sleek aluminum convertible that's undeniably well built. The displays 500 nits brightness with Dolby Vision HDR is no doubt also going to be attractive for a lot of people. It also produces a great Dolby Audio tuned sound with its four 2W speakers.I’d be happy to recommend the 9i to anyone unless you want to do serious gaming.
