Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition review: A compact 15.3in notebook with stellar battery life and a great keyboard

Thanks to its 15.3-inch display, the Yoga Slim 7i falls somewhere between a true compact with a 14.5-inch or smaller display and a full-sized notebook with a 15.6-inch or 16-inch screen. It's arguably a golden size, offering the convenience and usability of a full-sized laptop while taking up little more room than a genuine compact.

The most important feature of this model is Intel's new Core Ultra 7 Lunar Lake CPUs which means it should demonstrate a very good battery. Over the last twelve months thanks to Qualcomm's Snapdragon-X ARM platform and Intel's Lunar Lake we've seen a wholesale redefinition of what good battery life looks like on a Windows laptop.

Before we get any further into this review it is worth clarifying what an Aura Edition PC is. In basic terms, Aura is a range of settings and options that can quickly put your laptop into various Scenario and Smart modes. The former includes tasks like engaging the noise canceling system in Meeting mode or tuning the speakers' sound profile in Media mode.

The Smart modes use a vague AI-enhanced functionality to improve secure browsing by using a proximity sensor to launch security protocols such as blurring the screen if you move away from your laptop or someone looks over your shoulder, distraction-free work which limits notifications for a set duration and "wellness" which monitors your posture and eye strain.

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition: Design

The new Yoga Slim 7i weighs in at 1.53Kg which is impressively light given its all-aluminum construction – by way of comparison, the 15.3in MacBook Air weighs 1.51Kg. The device feels sturdy, solid, well-made, and easily capable of withstanding the rough and tumble of a work-life spent on the hoof. The Yoga is also credited as possessing MIL-STD-810H military-grade durability and resistance to shocks, vibration, and changes in humidity.

For what is essentially a full-sized laptop the Yoga Slim 7i is usefully thin at just 14mm while at 344mm wide by 235mm deep it is a little wider than the 15.3in MacBook Air but also not as deep. Slipping it into the thinnest of briefcases or rucksacks was never a problem even if the 11.9mm MacBook Air has it beaten in the thickness stakes.

The design is clean and business-like but also rather anonymous, a situation not helped by the rather dour Luna Grey colorway. The matte paint finish does at least have the advantage of not showing up fingerprints which in the real world is more important than design fripperies.

The Yoga Slim 7i features two Thunderbolt 4 ports, a single 5Gbit/s USB-A port, a 3.5mm audio jack, and an HDMI 2.1 video output. With no dedicated DC-in, you will lose one Type-C port to charging duties. While the presence of at least one Type-A port is always welcome we'd have liked to have seen two, and ideally rated at 10G/bits.

The location of the power and webcam electronic shutter buttons on the right side of the chassis is less than ideal: We found them rather too easy to press while putting the Yoga into a bag or getting it out. The small power button precludes its use as a fingerprint scanner which means the only biometric option on the Yoga Slim 7i is the Windows Hello-enabled IR camera.

Post-purchase upgrade options are very limited. Once you've prised the base off, which isn't the easiest task thanks to the tight plastic clips all you can do is swap out the single 2242 M.2 SSD and the battery and clean the fans. This being a Lunar Lake machine the memory is of an on-package design while the Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth Intel BE201 wireless card is also soldered in place.

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition: Keyboard, touchpad and webcam

It's a very strange day when you need to take Lenovo to task over the quality of one of its laptop keyboards, and today is not such a day. The keyboard deck is solid, the keys themselves are perfectly shaped and pleasant to touch while the typing action is light but positive. The keycap graphics are models of clarity with or without the assistance of the two-stage automatic white backlight.

The touchpad doesn't quite match the keyboard quality; it deserves a large haptic affair rather than a small – 135 x 80mm – mechanical device. It's not inherently a bad touchpad with a clean and usefully quiet click-action but it's not the tactile equal of the keyboard above it.

The 1080p webcam is also rather ordinary. The images it produces are neither especially dull nor noisy. It's a long way behind the high-quality 1440p webcams that some manufacturers are now fitting to their latest compact laptops.

A feature we noted was missing from the Yoga Slim 7i is Windows Studio Effects webcam enhancements. Usually, with a Lenovo machine, this could be corrected by downloading the Lenovo Smart Appearance app, but the driver package that you need to get this to work doesn't yet support the Yoga Slim 7i.

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition: Display

At present, the Yoga Slim 7i is only available with an IPS touchscreen though Lenovo's international specification sheet does note that an OLED version will be released in January 2025. You might think that this puts the Lenovo at a disadvantage against the likes of the Asus Zenbook S14 which has a high-quality OLED screen but you'd be quite wrong.

To start with the 15.3in 2,880 x 1,800 panel is bright, hitting 503nits, and colorful with gamut volumes of 134.4% sRGB, 95.2% DCI-P3, and 92.6% AdobeRGB. It's accurate too, registering Delta E variances of exactly 1 in Display P3 mode and 0.95 in sRGB mode. Thanks to a 120Hz refresh rate animations are butterfly smooth.

That's a combination of features that makes the display ideal for general productivity – wrangling a large spreadsheet is so much more pleasant in 16:10 120Hz than 16:9 60Hz – and creative tasks where out-of-the-box color accuracy is a must.

Granted the screen doesn't have the deep zero-light blacks and infinite contrast of an OLED display but the contrast ratio of 1154:1 is still healthy and it carries a VESA DisplayHDR 400 certificate which guarantees a competent HDR performance.

Some users may take issue with the ultra-glossy finish which is very reflective. This can sometimes prove to be an issue when working under strip lights or in sunlight but turning the brightness up towards the always proved to be a good fix.

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition: Specs and performance

The Intel Core Ultra 7 258V chip inside the Yoga Slim 7i is a slightly down-tuned version of Core Ultra 9 288V we encountered inside the Asus Zenbook S14. The basic architecture is the same with four P cores and 4 E cores but the maximum clock speed is reduced to 4.8Ghz from 5.1Ghz while the base power is set to 17W rather than 30W.

Both chipsets use the same Intel Arc 140V integrated GPU featuring Intel's high-performance XE2 architecture and an AI boost NPU offering 48TOPS of performance, the latter making the Yoga Slim 7i more than Copilot+ compliant.

In the Geekbench 6's single-core test, the Yoga Slim 7i scored 2682 compared to 2807 for the Zenbook S14 and 2427 for the fastest Snapdragon X Elite laptop we've tested – the Asus Vivobook S15. In the multi-core test, the Yoga Slim 7i scored 11182 to the Zenbook S14's 10360 and the Vivobook S15's 14337, a clear indication of Lunar Lake's emphasis on efficiency rather than the outright performance of their Meteor Lake brethren.

In the PCMark10 benchmark, the Yoga Slim 7i scored 6964, again shading the on-paper more potent Zenbook S14 which returned 6235.

It's a testament to the capability of Intel's latest iGPUs that they can run tests like the SPECviewperf 3dsmax 3D modeling benchmark at 25.5fs which is very impressive for a system without a dedicated GPU.

The 3DMark Time Spy test tells the same tale with the Yoga Slim7i scoring 3960, a very solid score and not far adrift of the Zenbook S14's 4329. Interestingly the Yoga Slim 7i beat the AMD Radeon 890M-powered Zenbook S16 which scored 3725, a clear case of Intel parking its tanks on AMD's lawn

The Yoga Slim7 doesn't suffer any untoward thermal issues. After a short period of running stress test apps on both the CPU and GPU utilization of the former settled at 75% while the GPU continued to run at 100% which is acceptable for a compact laptop. The noise made by the cooling fans never became intrusive while maintaining this level of performance.

The 1TB PCIe 4 Western Digital SSD wasn't the fastest we've seen in a compact laptop – that accolade goes to the HP OmniBook Ultra 14 – but the 4,140 MB/s read speeds and 2,350 MB/s write speeds are certainly more than sufficient for day-to-day use.

Thanks to a generous 70Wh battery the Yoga Slim 7i's unplugged runtime is extremely impressive and reason enough to pick the Lenovo over any of its natural competition if you have a work schedule that involves being away from a power socket for prolonged periods of time.

Our regular test involves looping an SD video using the VLC media player with the display brightness set to 170nits. Under those conditions, the Yoga Slim 7i ran for 21 hours and 10 minutes. That makes it the longest-running laptop we've tested, beating the Zenbook S14 (17 hours and 9 minutes) and the Snapdragon X-powered Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 (18 hours and 35 minutes).

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition: Is it worth it?

As a general-purpose business laptop, the new Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i makes a very strong case for itself: The battery life is excellent, the keyboard is hard to fault, and the display is bright, smooth, colorful, and very color-accurate. The laptop itself is solid and well-made and the sound system is thoroughly on point.

Taking a glass-half-full position we'd point out that the webcam is mediocre, the power button is in a less-than-optimal place, user upgrades are limited to the point of non-existence and you don't get Windows Studio Effects though we anticipate a driver update will eventually fix that problem. A little more in the way of ports wouldn't go amiss either though since the Yoga Slim 7i is still better than the MacBook Air in this respect we can't be too harsh on it.

On balance, we think the positives far outweigh the negatives making this a highly recommendable device for anyone wanting a good multi-purpose laptop for any business environment.

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition specifications