Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 7 Review

They don't undergo the MIL-STD 810G durability tests of ThinkPads, and they're not matte black (this one is, of all things, a hue dubbed “Oatmeal”), but Lenovo's high-end consumer laptops are some of the nicest around. The 14-inch Yoga 9i Gen 7 (starts at $1,229.99; $1,729.99 as tested) is a 2-in-1 convertible with a gorgeous OLED touch screen, a 12th Generation Intel Core i7 CPU, and luxury touches everywhere you look. Its fresher technology boosts it past the HP Spectre x360 14 as our new Editors' Choice winner among premium convertibles.

All Modern Conveniences

The Yoga 9i we reviewed in December 2020 had a full HD display with 16:9 aspect ratio. The new version—our test unit was model 82LU0001US, a Best Buy config priced at $1,729.99—not only graduates from Intel's 11th to 12th Gen silicon, but also offers a choice of three slightly taller 16:10 touch screens.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

The entry-level screen option, found on the $1,229.99 base model, is an IPS display with 1,920-by-1,200-pixel resolution. The highest is a 3,840-by-2,400 OLED panel. Ours is the middle choice, with the brilliant colors, coal-mine blacks, and sky-high contrast of OLED technology, but a lower 2,880-by-1,800-pixel resolution. It also has 16GB of memory and a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive, doubling the RAM and storage of the starter. The processor is a 2.1GHz Core i7-1260P with 12 cores—four performance and eight efficient—and 16 threads, plus Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics. 

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At 0.65 by 12.5 by 9.1 inches (HWD), the Yoga 9i is fairly big for a 14-inch convertible. (The Dell Inspiron 14 7415 2-in-1 is 0.71 by 12.7 by 8.3 inches, and the HP Spectre x360 14, with an even taller 3:2 aspect ratio display, is 0.67 by 11.8 by 8.7 inches.) Its 3.26-pound weight is a bit much to hold in tablet mode—more than the HP's 2.95 pounds, though less than the Dell's 3.4.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

The Oatmeal color label might sound unappetizing, but the machined aluminum Yoga is more of a silver hue in real life, with shiny rounded corners that are an appealing contrast to the Spectre's gem-cut edges. The screen bezels are thin, with a smartphone-style bump on the top edge to help you open the lid. There's almost no flex if you grasp the display corners or press the keyboard deck.

The full-width hinge serves as a soundbar that faces you as you swivel the screen through its operating modes. A fingerprint reader and IR face-recognition webcam give you two ways to skip passwords with Windows Hello; the webcam can lock the PC as you walk away and wake it when you return. 

Whether it's a low-cost Chromebook or a deluxe Dell XPS, we're never happy when a laptop lacks an HDMI port, obliging you to use a USB-C adapter to connect an external monitor. The Lenovo commits this sin—a USB 3.2 Type-C port joins the power button and audio jack on the right edge, with a USB 3.2 Type-A port and two Thunderbolt 4 ports on the left. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi 6E handle wireless communications.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Ample Audio, Oddly Chosen Keys 

The Lenovo's Bowers & Wilkins speaker system features two subwoofers on the sides and two speakers in the screen hinge. They produce superb sound, though you won't want to crank it past 70% or 80% volume—full volume is so loud that things start to sound harsh and boomy beyond that point. There's more bass than most laptops muster, and it's easy to distinguish overlapping tracks. Dolby Atmos software offers dynamic, movie, music, and voice presets, plus an equalizer. 

The webcam boasts 1080p instead of the usual skimpy 720p resolution; it captures well-lit and colorful images with almost no noise or static. You can disable it with either a tiny sliding shutter on the top bezel or an option in the Lenovo Vantage control software. A Smart Appearance utility can optimize lighting, frame your face and apply cosmetic filters, and enhance your eye contact by making it appear you're looking at the camera instead of the screen.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Lenovo's consumer laptops don't quite match the stellar keyboards of its ThinkPads; the Yoga 9i's backlit keyboard is responsive but has a soft, shallow typing feel. The cursor arrow keys are in an awkward, HP-style row instead of the correct inverted T, with half-size up and down arrows sandwiched between full-size left and right. A large, silky-smooth touchpad has a comfortable, silent click. 

The column of four keys at the far right would be perfect for Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down, but you must pair the Fn key and cursor arrows for those maneuvers. Lenovo instead dedicates the four keys to more specific functions, including cycling through performance/cooling fan modes; audio; Windows' light and dark modes; and toggling a background blur for the webcam.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

The high-res OLED touch screen meets the VESA DisplayHDR 500 True Black standard. It looks terrific, with plenty of brightness and killer contrast. White backgrounds are as pure as the driven snow, and colors are as rich and vivid as poster paints; fine details are crystal clear. We would have liked to see a utility to switch among sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 palettes as some high-end laptops offer, but you can adjust the panel's color temperature in Lenovo Vantage.

The bundled Lenovo Precision Pen 2 has 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity and a USB-C recharging port under its cap; there's no garage or niche to store it inside the laptop, but it showed good speed and palm rejection in our amateur sketches. 

Lenovo doesn't load its systems with as much bloatware as, say, Acer, but the Yoga 9i comes close. Besides the Vantage app, which offers everything from system updates and Wi-Fi security to a $29.99 annual Smart Performance and $39.99 annual Smart Privacy subscription, you'll find Lenovo Voice, which can take dictation, translate spoken text, and add subtitles to audio with a Lenovo ID sign-in. Bundled trials include McAfee Antivirus, SurfEasy VPN, and Dashlane Premium.

Performance Testing: A Five-Way 14-Inch Showdown 

For our benchmark charts, we compared the Yoga 9i Gen 7 to four other 14-inch laptops, whose basic specs appear in the table below. The HP Spectre x360 14 and more costly Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio are convertibles, while the ultralight XPG Xenia 14 and VAIO SX14 are clamshell designs.

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 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 Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). 

Our final productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

All five laptops easily cleared the 4,000 points in PCMark 10 that indicate excellent everyday productivity for Microsoft Office or Google Workspace, but the Yoga led the way in most of our tests, with strong processing performance from its 12th Generation Core i7. Between its CPU and its stunning screen, it's a great choice for video or photo editing, though the latter would be helped by an SD or microSD card slot for transferring images. 

Graphics Tests 

We test Windows PCs' 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). 

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, 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 Surface Studio is the only machine here with a discrete Nvidia GPU instead of integrated graphics, so it won the 3DMark benchmarks without breaking a sweat. (A software glitch kept it from running GFXBench.) The other four are fine for casual gaming and video streaming, but neither intended nor suited for fast-paced shoot-'em-ups. 

Battery and Display Tests 

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) 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. 

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).

The Lenovo had the longest battery life and was rivaled only by its OLED counterpart (the HP Spectre) when it came to stunning screen color. Brightness is ample, though the Microsoft's IPS panel was brighter still. You can't beat the Spectre's 3:2 aspect ratio display for viewing the most of a webpage or word processing document without scrolling, but the 16:10 Yoga is next best.

Intel's 12th Generation as Tiebreaker

We're big fans of the HP Spectre x360 14, but the Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 7 delivers better performance and a couple of hours' more battery life, thanks partly to the latest-generation Intel silicon. The Yoga's performance and efficiency boost is paired with an equally eye-popping OLED screen. We're bummed that neither 2-in-1 laptop offers an HDMI port, but otherwise each is a brilliant premium convertible and splendid status symbol, with the Yoga narrowly taking the Editors' Choice crown.