Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8 Review

When it comes to 2-in-1 laptops, the Yoga name is iconic, and deservedly so. Lenovo's folding multi-mode design defines the convertible category, and its latest version, the Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8 (starts at $1,700), is one of the best you can get. While we suspect Lenovo may have gone overboard in its pursuit of thinness and lightness, to the slight detriment of performance, this laptop combines exquisite design with a gorgeous 14-inch OLED panel and thoughtful features—all topped off with a new Intel 13th Generation P-series processor. It's a beautiful machine that's as comfortable to use as a tablet as it is a laptop. And, like the Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 7 before it, the combination of premium build and features with still-leading power is easy to recommend, making it our new Editors' Choice 2-in-1 laptop.

Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8: Configurations and Design

Our test unit from Lenovo was model 83B1001WUS, a 14-inch laptop with a 2,880-by-1,800-pixel OLED touch screen with an included Lenovo Precision Pen 2. The Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8 starts at $1,700 on Lenovo's website, but Best Buy had it listed for $1,399.99 at this writing. This base configuration comes with an Intel Core i7-1360P processor, 16GB of RAM, Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics, and a 512GB SSD. 

You also have the option of upgrading to a higher-resolution 4K (3,840-by-2,400-pixel) panel for $100 more, or adding a larger 1TB SSD for storage ($50), bringing the top configuration to $1,850 at Lenovo.com.

The 2-in-1 space is often marked by a wide variety of materials and finishes, but the Yoga 9i Gen 8 keeps things simple with an all-metal chassis and lid. The result is a premium look—available in either gold-tinted Oatmeal or a darker Storm Gray—but the real treat is the combination of polished rounded edges and a bead-blasted finish across the lid, keyboard deck, and underside of the chassis. The rounded edges mean you'll feel no hard ledge on the palm rest, and the slim laptop is just as comfortable to hold in tablet mode.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

It's nearly identical to the model we reviewed in 2022, but the Yoga 9i Gen 8 is actually just a bit slimmer, measuring 0.6 by 12.5 by 9.1 inches and weighing just under 3.1 pounds, shaving off a couple of ounces in the process.

Premium Display and High-End Audio Work Well Together

Driving home the premium bona fides on the Yoga is that 14-inch OLED panel with 2,880 by 1,800 pixels. Given that this machine is a 2-in-1, touch capability comes standard, but Lenovo ups the ante with the Lenovo Precision Pen 2, a rechargable stylus with 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity and tilt support, as well a hexagonal shape that gives the pen a pencil-like grip. Lenovo doesn't include built-in storage for the pen; instead, you'll find a laptop sleeve with a pen holster inside the box, making it a little more convenient to bring along.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Whether you're tapping and swiping at the screen in tablet mode or handwriting notes, the 14-inch display provides a sublime mix of wide color representation, decent brightness, and OLED's signature true blacks—along with Dolby Vision HDR support. Lenovo also boosts the quality with a higher-than-average 90Hz refresh rate. It's a small boost, but it makes everything look a little smoother in motion. This won't have as much impact as the 120Hz or 240Hz displays we've seen included on some gaming laptops but, for a general-use laptop like this, it's a welcome touch.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The display is matched by a Bowers & Wilkins speaker bar built right into the laptop hinge. Inside that slim speaker bar are two speakers, with another two subwoofers built into the chassis, giving you rich audio in whatever orientation you have the Yoga in, from tent mode to tablet. The rotating speakers are a clever solution to the problems that come from making audio work well in both a laptop and a laptop, and it succeeds in delivering clear sound in any orientation. And, to match the display's HDR capability, the speakers support Dolby Atmos audio.

Luxe Looks, Polished Feel: Camera, Keyboard, and Touchpad

Above the display is a 1080p webcam with a built-in physical shutter that's moved using a small switch on the display bezel. (It's so tiny you might miss it.) Compared with the 720p cameras that are still common on less expensive models, the full HD webcam looks superior, especially on video calls. The camera also has IR capability for Windows Hello, and a time-of-flight (ToF) sensor that makes autofocus a lot better. This sensor also lets the laptop accurately detect when you walk away from your machine, locking the desktop whenever you leave.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The accompanying keyboard provides a plush typing feel, with soft but firm feedback and enough depth to provide comfortable key travel. The adjustable backlight is welcome, but it does fall prey to a common problem, where soft white backlighting doesn't contrast well against light-colored keycaps, paradoxically leaving the keys less legible in well-lit rooms. Of course, the issue is solved by simply turning the backlight off.

Along the right side of the keyboard Lenovo includes a selection of extra keys, which Lenovo calls “1-Click Function Keys.” These keys are pre-programmed with functions like swapping power profiles, blurring the background on webcam, switching audio profiles, changing the color mode of the display (like Windows dark mode), and a fingerprint reader for secure logins. While the extra functions are useful in their way, the lack of customization means that these are single-function buttons. Plus, tying performance modes to Lenovo's special keys and proprietary software may introduce confusion when the average user starts troubleshooting a battery or performance issue, since Lenovo removed the standard power profiles from the Windows 11 settings.

Finally, just below the keyboard is a large buttonless touchpad. The glass-surfaced pad is comfortably wide, measuring 3.1 by 5.3 inches. The clickable pad produces a crisp click for every button press, and it tracks multitouch gestures flawlessly.

A Port for Every Storm

I'm a little disappointed that you'll find no HDMI port on the Yoga 9i, but I won't complain much, since the designers still found the space for oft-omitted ports like USB-A and a headphone jack.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Joining those are two Thunderbolt 4 ports on the left and a single USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port on the right. It's not the most robust set of ports we've seen, but it's better than many premium models that have gone the minimalist route.

Wireless connectivity is handled by Wi-Fi 6E networking and Bluetooth 5.1 for audio and peripherals.

Testing the Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8: Measuring the Boost From ‘Rocket Lake'

With so many options to choose from in the 2-in-1 category, we stuck to the best comparison models from our favorite convertibles, pitting the Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8 against the previous Yoga 9i Gen 7 from 2022, the HP Spectre x360 13.5 (2022), and the less expensive Lenovo Yoga 7i 14 Gen 7 (2022). We also wanted to see how the Yoga stacks up against standard laptops with similar hardware, so we included the recent Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro 360, which uses the same Intel Core i7-1360P model processor.

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. (See more about how we test laptops.) 

Three more 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 Geekbench 5.4 Pro by Primate Labs 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 PugetBench for Photoshop(Opens in a new window) by workstation maker Puget Systems, 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.

With a 12-core, 16-thread processor, we expected decent performance from the Gen 8 Yoga, and the test results proved us right. Almost across the board, the Yoga 9i sat comfortably at the top, with best and second-best scores in PCMark 10, Cinebench, Geekbench, and HandBrake. It dipped to third place in Photoshop, but narrowly. For day-to-day use, the Yoga 9i has performance that will feel fast in almost any scenario.

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 GPU performance, 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.

Graphics tests showed impressive performance for a thin and light 2-in-1, making it well suited to general use, like streaming media and even light photo and video editing. Armed with Intel's Iris Xe integrated graphics, we wouldn't recommend it for gaming or complex 3D rendering, but everything else should be handled easily. As for why this Yoga 9i Gen 8 trailed its predecessor, we suspect it has something to do with being both thinner and lighter than before, which could have cut into its thermal headroom.

Battery and Display Tests 

We test laptop 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. 

To measure display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and 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).

We saw one marked stumble from the Yoga 9i, and that's battery life. While 14 hours of battery is long enough to earn the “all-day battery life” descriptor, that's par for the course in this sort of product. Its time was only a few minutes longer than last year's Lenovo Yoga 7i, and actually shorter than the 2022 Yoga 9i Gen 7, which lasted almost an hour longer. (This again is where the increased thinness and lightness likely came into play.) And, compared with the longer-lasting HP Spectre x360 or the Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro 360, it's an hour or two behind.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The highlight of the Yoga 9i Gen 8 is its OLED display, which produces broad color representation and shining brightness, in line with what we expect from such a premium panel. However, with competitors coming with similar OLED touchscreens, this isn't as big a win as it seemed before.

Verdict: Among 2-in-1 Laptops, a Pleasing Yoga Still Presides

After last year's Yoga 9i model wowed us with its superb new look, we had high hopes for the newest version of Lenovo's best 2-in-1 laptop. With its sleek, feature-filled design, the Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8 isn't quite a 100% slam dunk—longer battery life and more flexibility with the added function keys would be welcome—but you'll find precious little to complain about. The design is superb, the OLED display is impressive, and the overall performance is more than enough, though we do wish the move to 13th Gen resulted a larger boost in capability. (We suspect going even thinner and lighter than before put a little crimp in performance here.) Nevertheless, the excellent design and still-leading performance make the Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8 the best 2-in-1 we've tested so far in 2023, and our new Editors' Choice pick among premium convertible laptops.