Lenovo Yoga 7i 16 Gen 8 (2023) Review

Let's just face it: Under most circumstances, 16 inches is simply too big for a 2-in-1 laptop. Just like the Lenovo Yoga 7i 16 Gen 7 of 2022, the Lenovo Yoga 7i 16 Gen 8 (starts at $799.99; $999.99 as tested) is bulky and heavy—4.5 pounds—so it's no fun for holding or sketching in your lap as a tablet. But if you'd like a desktop replacement that can flip and fold for a presentation or for marking up a document, the largest Yoga is an affordable and capable, if unexciting, choice.

Have It Your Way 

As with other Lenovo laptops, the letter “i” in Yoga 7i 16 indicates an Intel processor; the Yoga 7 16 with an AMD Ryzen CPU starts at $800. The Lenovo website sells three 7i models for order online, which come with stylus pens, and two sold at Best Buy, which sadly don't.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The latter models are a $799.99 Core i5 unit with 8GB of memory and our $999.99 test unit, featuring an Intel Core i7-1355U (two Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 12 threads), 16GB of memory, a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive, and a 1,920-by-1,200-pixel IPS touch screen. Online models can be bought with a sharper 2,560-by-1,600 display not available on Lenovo's AMD Yoga 16 machines.

Clad in Storm Gray aluminum, the Yoga measures 0.75 by 14.3 by 9.9 inches, almost identical to the only other value-priced 16-inch convertible we've seen, the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 (0.7 by 14.1 by 9.9 inches), though the Dell is half a pound heavier. The more costly, AMOLED-screened Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro 360 is the same size but lighter at 3.6 pounds.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The Yoga 7i 16 has what its maker calls Comfort Edge design, meaning rounded edges rather than hard corners to grip, and a protruding lip housing the webcam that makes it easy to open the lid with one hand. You'll feel almost no flex if you grasp the screen corners, and just a bit if you press the keyboard deck. Lenovo says the convertible has passed MIL-STD 810H tests against road hazards like shock, vibration, and temperature extremes. A fingerprint reader and face-recognition webcam with a sliding shutter give you two ways to skip passwords with Windows Hello. 

On the laptop's left side are two USB4 Thunderbolt 4 ports (either suitable for the small AC adapter), plus an HDMI port and an audio jack. Two USB 3.2 Type-A (5Gbps) ports, the rear always on for device charging, join a microSD card slot and the power button at right. Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.1 come standard here.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Room to Maneuver 

Lenovo's webcam records in 1080p instead of lowball 720p resolution and captures sharp, well-lit images with just a hint of noise or static as well as colors and fine details that are above average. It's fun to play with Lenovo's Smart Appearance software to blur or replace your background, optimize lighting, and apply filters to make your face rounder or more oval, or shrink or enlarge your nose. 

A speaker grille above the keyboard releases a soft but reasonably clear sound, only a bit hollow at the top volume. Bass is minimal, as you'd expect, but highs and mid-tones are lively, drum beats are not static-sounding, and overlapping tracks are easy to discern. Dolby Access software provides adjustable dynamic, music, movie, game, and voice presets, as well as an equalizer.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The backlit keyboard has a pleasantly snappy typing feel. Unfortunately, it commits both of the sins I've made a career out of slamming laptop keyboards for: First, the Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys aren't real or dedicated, but simulated by pairing the cursor arrow keys with the Fn key. Second, the arrow keys are arranged in an awkward row, with half-size up and down arrows stacked between full-size left and right, instead of the more comfortable inverted T. 

On the positive side, the Yoga partly atones for those transgressions with a numeric keypad, so you can use the 7, 1, 9, and 3 keys for Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down, respectively, though you'll need to remember to turn Num Lock off and use it only when working on a spreadsheet. The buttonless touchpad is generally positive, as well, being roomy and smooth in operation, with a solid if slightly hollow click.

The screen has today's on-trend 16:10 aspect ratio, which is slightly taller than old-school 16:9 widescreen, with decent contrast and wide viewing angles as well as thin bezels on all four sides. Otherwise, it's acceptable but not outstanding, with neither particularly high brightness—white backgrounds are just a touch gray or dingy—nor punchy colors, though primary hues aren't too pale. Details are satisfactorily sharp, with no pixelation around the edges of letters.

However, given that it's such a divisive part of the overall experience, you would expect this gigantic tablet-like display to be especially sharp or vibrant. And that just isn't the case here.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

In addition to the house-brand utilities already mentioned and a 30-day McAfee LiveSafe trial, the Yoga 7i 16 comes with Lenovo Vantage, which combines system monitoring and updates, Wi-Fi security, noise cancellation, game optimization, and a choice of performance/cooling modes. (We used the max-speed mode for our benchmark testing.) It also provides Smart Lock anti-theft and Smart Performance maintenance subscriptions for $49.99 and $29.99 per year, respectively.

Testing the Lenovo Yoga 7i 16 Gen 8: Ready for the Long Run 

We've already mentioned two of the three other 16-inch 2-in-1 laptops we've tested, the $1,050 Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 and the $1,900 Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro 360. The third, the HP Spectre x360 16, had an older 11th Generation Intel CPU when tested but joins the Galaxy Book in the premium price club. That leaves one slot in our benchmark comparison charts that we filled with a lightweight 16-inch clamshell, the Acer Swift Edge 16.

Productivity Tests 

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage. 

Three other benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while HandBrake 1.4 is an open-source video transcoder we use to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). Geekbench by Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. 

Finally, we test each system's content-creation chops with PugetBench for Photoshop from workstation maker Puget Systems, an automated extension to Adobe's Creative Cloud image editor that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated tasks ranging from opening, rotating, and resizing an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The Yoga performed well, posting a more-than-suitable score in Photoshop and placing directly in the middle of a competitive pack. Like the others, it sailed past the 4,000 points in PCMark 10 that indicate excellent everyday productivity for apps like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, and it showed ample if not record-setting CPU power. Expect this 2-in-1 laptop to chew through any basic productivity task you try on it.

Graphics Tests 

We test Windows PC graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). 

To further measure graphics power, we also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, which are rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

The HP Spectre's Nvidia GeForce GPU blew away the integrated graphics inside the other 16-inchers, which was no surprise. The Lenovo is fine for casual or solitaire-style gaming as well as video streaming, though it makes no pretense of being able to play the latest AAA games at high image quality and resolution. You'll need a gaming laptop for that.

Battery and Display Tests 

We test each laptop's battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window)) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

Finally, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

All five laptops delivered impressive battery life, with runtimes comparable with frequent-flier ultraportables, let alone desktop replacements. Regardless, the Yoga 7i took the gold medal with a remarkable 20 hours and 30 minutes of unplugged stamina. Unfortunately, the other four beat the stuffing out of it when it came to screen quality. While the Lenovo's peak brightness is bearable, its color fidelity proved poor at best and more in line with laptops half its cost.

Verdict: Bulky But Effective 

We're fans of 14-inch and smaller convertibles, but 16-inch models are bound to be unwieldy, and not even Lenovo's unbeatable 2-in-1 expertise can change that. The Yoga 7i 16 Gen 8 fulfills its purpose with impressive material design, decent performance, and astounding battery life, However, we're not thrilled with its display or keyboard, and we're disappointed that Best Buy versions like ours don't come with a pen for sketching and scribbling on the big screen. It's certainly worth a look if you can't afford an HP Spectre x360 16, but the Yoga 7i 16 Gen 8 falls short of Editors' Choice consideration.