Pros & Cons
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- Fabulous glass-topped design
- Gorgeous borderless OLED touch screen
- High-res webcam hidden within the display
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- Expensive
- No headphone jack, USB-A ports, or HDMI
- Some poor keyboard design choices
Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10 Specs
| Boot Drive Capacity (as Tested) | 1 |
| Boot Drive Type | SSD |
| Class | Ultraportable |
| Dimensions (HWD) | 0.61 by 12.3 by 8 inches |
| Graphics Processor | Intel Arc Graphics 140V |
| Native Display Resolution | 3840 by 2400 |
| Operating System | Windows 11 Home |
| Panel Technology | OLED |
| Processor | Intel Core Ultra 7 258V |
| RAM (as Tested) | 32 |
| Screen Refresh Rate | 120 |
| Screen Size | 14 |
| Tested Battery Life (Hours:Minutes) | 15:46 |
| Touch Screen | |
| Variable Refresh Support | Dynamic |
| Weight | 2.76 |
| Wireless Networking | Bluetooth |
| Wireless Networking | Wi-Fi 7 |
You can buy a good consumer laptop for $1,000 and a great one for $1,500, so why spend $2,000? In the case of Lenovo's Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10 ($1,999.99 as tested), the lure is knockout looks, drop-dead design, sex on wheels. This thing costs a mint and is shamefully short on ports, but it's one of the most gorgeous ultraportable notebooks you can buy. (Note: This model is a clamshell design, not a 2-in-1 convertible that the Yoga brand once always connoted.) Our brains tell us the Yoga Slim 9i is too pricey to deserve an Editors' Choice award, while our hearts are going "hubba hubba awooga" like a cartoon wolf. We'd be happy to link arms with the Slim anytime, but for our money, we'd opt for a base model of Lenovo's own ThinkPad X9 14 Aura Edition for value.
Design: Pleasant Under Glass
Lenovo says the Slim 9i fits a 14-inch screen into a 13-inch chassis—0.61 by 12.3 by 8 inches. That's indeed trimmer than the Acer Swift 14 AI (0.74 by 12.3 by 8.8 inches), but a bit larger than the 13.4-inch Dell XPS 13 (0.58 by 11.6 by 7.8 inches). The Yoga qualifies as an ultraportable at 2.76 pounds; its AC adapter is a pocket-size plug.
Unlike its rivals, however, the 9i's chassis isn't just anodized aluminum. The lid is covered by a pane of glass that turns it into a blue mirror (the color is called "Tidal Teal") with the Lenovo logo seeming to float below. The hue changes depending on the light and angle. It's strikingly attractive, if prone to finger smudges (you'll want to keep a microfiber cloth handy), and makes the Yoga Slim stand out in a crowd of slimlines.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)That's not the only thing under glass: Lenovo calls the 9i the world's first camera-under-display laptop, with a high-resolution webcam actually hidden beneath the upper part of the screen. (A black dot indicates the lens when in use.) Combine that with vanishingly thin bezels, and you get an amazing 98% screen-to-body ratio. All you see is the screen.
As for what's inside, our $1,999.99 Best Buy config (model 83CX0005US, on sale for $1,699.99 at this writing) combines an eight-core Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor, 32GB of RAM, a 1TB solid-state drive, and an ultrasharp 3,840-by-2,400-pixel OLED touch screen with 120Hz refresh rate, backed by Intel's Arc 140V integrated graphics. Windows 11 Home and a two-month Adobe Creative Cloud trial membership are included.
While the Yoga Slim's Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth are first-class, its connectivity is otherwise crippled: just two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, one on each side, plus a power button and a webcam shutter switch on the right.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)That means no USB Type-A ports, no HDMI monitor port, no SD or microSD card slot, no 5G or 4G mobile broadband option, and—perhaps worst—no headphone or audio jack. You'll have only one port free when the AC adapter is connected, and you'll need a DisplayPort dongle to plug in a monitor. But hey, you can commiserate with owners of Dell's XPS 13, the only other laptop so unforgivably skimpy with ports.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Display and Keyboard: Plenty of Pixels, If Not Ports
Your friends' laptops have crummy 720p webcams? Ha! The Yoga Slim 9i has a 32-megapixel camera hidden beneath the screen that can take 7,520-by-4,232-pixel stills (though Windows Camera sticks to 1080p videos); its images are colorful and well-lit without noise or static. The webcam supports Camera's recently added auto framing and background blur, but not Windows Hello face recognition. You can, however, bypass passwords thanks to a fingerprint reader in the keyboard.
Speaking of the keyboard, I'm never happy to see the cursor arrows in a row instead of an inverted T (with half-height up and down arrows stacked between full-size right and left). I'm also unhappy to see the arrow keys paired with the Fn key instead of real-deal Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys. The 9i has four keys at the right edge of the keyboard that would be fine for those, but Lenovo apparently thinks you'll want to use other options a lot more often: performance/cooling modes, the low-blue-light screen setting, and music, movie, or game audio presets. (Hint: Lenovo is wrong.)
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)That aside, the keyboard works well, with a shallow but snappy typing feel that let me maintain a brisk pace with enough comfort for long work sessions. The smallish, buttonless touchpad glides and taps smoothly, with a springy click.
Except possibly for its lid, the Yoga Slim's star attraction is what Lenovo calls a PureSight Pro display, a 4K OLED touch screen with smooth 120Hz refresh and top-tier brightness and contrast. Photos and videos look downright lush, with rich, saturated colors. Blacks are inky, and white backgrounds are as pure as the driven snow. Viewing angles are wide, though the touch glass picks up reflections at extremes, and fine details are flawlessly sharp.
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(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Quad speakers (two tweeters and two woofers) produce not overly loud but impressively clear audio, with crisp highs and midtones, and a welcome bit of bass. The sound isn't harsh or tinny, and it's easy to make out overlapping tracks. In addition to the presets available via a dedicated key, Dolby Atmos software provides an equalizer with detailed, balanced, and warm options. Other bundled software includes Smart Connect to link your PC and phone (with emphasis on Motorola phones) and Lenovo Vantage for system settings, updates, and Wi-Fi security.
Performance Testing: This Slim's Close to the Head of the Class
For our performance comparison charts, we went straight to the previous Most Glamorous Ultraportable titleholder, the Dell XPS 13, along with two 14-inch slimlines, the Asus Zenbook S 14 and the AMD-powered Acer Swift 14 AI. The last slot went to another Lenovo, the small-business-centric ThinkPad X9 14 Aura Edition mentioned up top. All four undercut the Slim 9i's list price by amounts ranging from $300 to $700.
Productivity and AI Tests
Our primary overall benchmark, UL's Windows-only PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC's storage throughput.
Three more tests are CPU-centric or processor-intensive. Maxon's Cinebench 2024 renders a complex scene using the company's Cinema 4D engine. Primate Labs' Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. We also see how long it takes the video editing tool HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.
Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Creators rates a PC's image editing prowess by running a variety of automated everyday operations in Adobe Photoshop 25. And Geekbench AI is one of the first AI processing benchmarks.
The Yoga Slim 9i took the silver medal in our CPU and Photoshop tests, just behind the Swift and its near-workstation-class Ryzen AI 9 processor. All five systems aced our PCMark 10 office productivity benchmark.
Graphics Tests
We challenge laptops' graphics with a quartet of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K) use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. Steel Nomad's regular and Light subtests focus on APIs more commonly used for game development, like Metal and DirectX 12, to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. A fifth test, Solar Bay, emphasizes ray-tracing performance.
None of these laptops' integrated graphics can compete with a gaming rig's discrete GPU, but they're fine for casual gaming, video streaming, and even some light video editing. The Yoga was at or near the front of the pack.
Battery Life and Display Tests
We test portables' 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 Windows software to measure a 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 Slim 9i had the shortest running time in our battery rundown, but come on—we're not going to complain about nearly 16 hours or two workdays' worth of unplugged use. Our test didn't push the OLED screen close to its rated 750 nits of brightness for HDR content, but we won't complain about that, either; its color coverage and brightness are exemplary.