The Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i (2025) is my new favorite laptop, hands down. I have a thing for laptops that just pull out all the stops for a gorgeous design. HP used to own that space with the Spectre x360, but in recent years, it’s toned it down. Now, the Yoga Slim 9i is the one that’ll turn some heads. No seriously, I was out in public with this machine for all of five minutes before someone asked what it was.
It comes in Lenovo’s Tidal Teal color, which isn’t new, but the metallic finish on the lid is covered in glass, giving it a truly unique look. It’s just beautiful.
And of course, as you’d expect from Lenovo’s flagship 9i tier, it’s a great laptop. Despite using materials like glass and aluminum, it only weighs in at 2.76 pounds, which is lighter than premium 14-inch laptops from HP and Dell.
Throw in Intel’s excellent Lunar Lake processors and a 120Hz OLED display, and the product is pretty sweet. The bad news is that the display doesn’t support variable refresh rate, so you have to choose between 60Hz and 120Hz, and if you pick the latter, it’ll affect battery life.
Lenovo sent XDA the Yoga Slim 9i (2025) for review. It had no input on the contents of this article.
Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i (2025) pricing and availability
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i (2025) is available from Lenovo.com, and it’s curiously absent from Best Buy and Amazon, at least for now. It comes in two configurations at the moment, both including a 1TB SSD and a 3840×2400 OLED screen.
The only difference is that one includes a Core Ultra 7 256V and one has the Core Ultra 7 258V, and since the chips come with onboard memory, that means they come with 16GB or 32GB RAM, respectively.
The unit that Lenovo sent me for review has a Core Ultra 7 258V.
Everything about this laptop stands out
It’s just so beautiful
When the Slim 9i first arrived, I went to a local Starbucks on a Saturday afternoon to get some work done. As soon as I opened the laptop, the person next to me started asking about it. This thing stands out, in a world where so many companies are toning down colors and accents on their premium products.
The metallic blue, covered in glass, glimmers in the light, and the base is surrounded by a polished soft-tough border. It’s peak laptop design.
It’s not the first time Lenovo has used glass on a laptop lid. It’s been doing so on various 9i products for years, back to when it was called the 900 series. In fact, if you want to see something really neat, go look up the Yoga 910 or Yoga 920 Star Wars editions. They’re wild. Hey Lenovo, while we’re here, let’s bring those back please.
The glass lid definitely adds some panache. With the last Yoga Slim 9i, it came in a pale gold color that some genius decided to call Oatmeal, and while I was a huge fan of that colorway, there’s something about this blue that puts it over the top.
It’s not for everyone. There’s a reason that HP’s OmniBook Ultra Flip doesn’t flash the same style that the Spectre x360 did a few years ago. Not everyone wants a flashy laptop, and I get it. For those people, I’d say that Lenovo makes a really great product called the Yoga Slim 7i.
Really, there isn’t much of a difference between a company’s flagship product and its next-highest tier, and much of the time, it’s design stuff like this.
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It’s true to the Spectre x360 brand
One thing to be aware of is that this laptop only has two Thunderbolt ports. I’m fine with no USB Type-A; we’ve been moving in that direction for a decade, so it’s time. But that also means there’s no headphone jack, something that does still matter on PCs. If a wired audio connection is critical to your work, you’ll have to pass on this one. I suspect if that’s you, you probably wouldn’t trust a Thunderbolt dock either. I wouldn’t.
It’s a laptop with an under-display camera!
The inside is just as beautiful as the outside
While the Yoga Slim 9i is easy on the eyes on the outside, the inside is just as good. Dare I say that it feels even more immersive than a Dell XPS 13. It’s nearly bezel-less on all sides, not even making room for a webcam.
That’s because the webcam is under the screen, which I believe is the first for a laptop, or at least it’s the first I’ve seen it. It’s actually a 32MP (7520×4232) 16:9 sensor, which I believe is also the highest resolution on a laptop webcam. But don’t let that fool you. It’s actually a pretty bad camera. You’ll start seeing a loss of quality at even moderate lighting.
But that’s fine. Dell has been doing this for around a decade with XPS, right? It’s prioritizing the design and the immersiveness over certain other aspects of the build. And if you don’t like it, as mentioned above, Lenovo has a wonderful product called the Yoga Slim 7i that you can check out.
Personally, I think the sacrifice is worth it, because this product just feels so good to use.
New Intel chips make this a MacBook killer
Lunar Lake can compete with the best of them
Companies have promised MacBook killers ever since the M1 was released, and they never really delivered until this year.
Intel’s Core Ultra Series 2 chips, at least the Lunar Lake variants of them (Intel doesn’t exactly differentiate in its branding), aren’t exactly new anymore. I’m at that point where I’ve reviewed enough of them that it feels like I’m writing the same thing over and over, and I know what to expect.
Here’s what I can tell you before I even go into benchmark scores. In fact, it’s the same I’d have told you before I even powered this laptop on. CPU performance is exactly what you’d expect from a current-gen Intel mobile chip, and integrated graphics performance is well beyond what anyone expected.
This is the first time you don’t have to think about getting dedicated graphics for things like photo editing and even video editing. Previously, if you wanted thin, light, and power, that was what you needed Apple Silicon for. Not anymore.
And then there’s battery life, another thing that was easily predictable. Battery life is fantastic with Lunar Lake, but Lenovo has a critical flaw, which is the same as the latest ThinkPad X1 Carbon. It doesn’t support dynamic refresh rate, meaning you have to choose between 60Hz and 120Hz. If you choose the latter, battery life will be as bad as any recent x86 laptop.
2:15
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Average battery life was eight hours and nine minutes, which is really solid, although I kept the power profile at Balanced and the refresh rate at 60Hz. If you want the same level of performance and display quality that you get when it’s plugged in, you’re looking at four or five hours, again, due to the lack of dynamic refresh rate.
It’s something that’s frustrated me over the years with x86 PCs. Intel has this habit of touting great battery life, and then you learn about all of the compromises you have to make to get it. That’s not quite the case anymore, since Lunar Lake is legitimately good, and can stand on its own against a MacBook Air in a much more beautifully designed package, but it’s on Lenovo that there’s no dynamic refresh rate here.
As for performance scores, have some benchmarks.
|
Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i Core Ultra 7 258V |
HP OmniBook Ultra Ryzen AI 9 HX 375 |
Surface Laptop 7 Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100 |
|
|---|---|---|---|
|
PCMark 10 (AC / battery (best perf) / battery (balanced) |
6903 / 6868 / 6223 |
7723 / 6697 / 5962 |
N/A |
|
Geekbench 6 (single / multi) |
2724 / 11,003 |
2842 / 15,030 |
2803 / 14,497 |
|
Cinebench 2024 (single / multi) |
118 / 567 |
114 / 965 |
124 / 972 |
|
3DMark (Time Spy / Wild Life Extreme / Night Raid) |
4455 / 7510 / 35,673 |
3863 / 6618 / 32,476 |
1892 / 6540 / 25,257 |
|
CrossMark (Overall) |
1777 |
1825 |
1558 |
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You’ve never had more choices in silicon before, and they all have their pros and cons. AMD is winning in CPU performance, although there are massive power dropoffs when disconnected from power, and even more as you change the power profile. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X platform doesn’t have the power dropoff problem, and it still wins in multi-core.
But Lunar Lake still wins for graphics, which is what allows it to take on Apple Silicon with the unique features that a variety of OEMs can provide.
Should you buy the Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i (2025)?
You should buy the Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i (2025) if:
- You want the most beautiful laptop
- You care about your user experience
- You’re not that concerned about webcam quality
You should NOT buy the Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i (2025) if:
- You use the laptop webcam a lot
- Looks and user experience simply don’t matter to you
People ask me which laptop they should buy all the time, and while I used to ask what they’d use it for, I don’t anymore. Unless you need a gaming laptop, in which case you’re probably already asking about that, the truth is that it doesn’t really matter. Sure, I can help you decide between a Core Ultra 5 and a Core Ultra 7, or between the rest of the silicon available these days, but ultimately, a $700 computer does the same thing as a $1500 computer.
People say things like, “Oh, I don’t need to do all of the fancy things you do.” What do I do? I write articles on the internet. What I ask instead of what you’ll use it for is, how good of an experience do you want? Do you want a vibrant OLED display that shows you your pictures the way you want to see them, or are you willing to save some money and get a washed out FHD screen that looks distorted from an angle?
If you care about your experience, get a Yoga Slim 9i. It’s the type of machine that hits the senses in just the right way, whether you’re looking at the screen, typing on the keyboard, or just admiring it from the outside. And if you don’t want that, like I’ve said several times, Lenovo makes a fantastic product called the Yoga Slim 7i that doesn’t have the bells and whistles.
Lenovo Slim 9i (2025)
