Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10 Review: A Beautiful Laptop Held Back By A Few Flaws

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Lenovo is known for making a variety of amazing laptops and has something for everyone. They have an excellent selection of Chromebooks and Windows laptops that cover a wide variety of price points. With gaming options like the Legion series or business-oriented laptops like the IdeaPad Pro, Lenovo knows how to cater to its fans.

With so many options, it would be easy for Lenovo to rest on its laurels and take an iterative approach to its laptop lineup, but Lenovo knows how to push the envelope and isn't afraid to bring something new to the market. The ThinkPad X1 Fold 16 and Yoga Book 9I Gen 9 are extreme examples of Lenovo's dedication to trying new ideas.

While not as daring as some of its previous attempts, the Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10 has a unique look. It's an excellent laptop, but it's not perfect and could be better if not for a couple of potential dealbreakers.  Lenovo sent over the Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10 for the purposes of this review.

This laptop is simply beautiful. The top of the Yoga Slim comes in a singular "Tidal Teal" colorway and features a glass lid. The combination of the teal colorway and glass top allows light to bounce and reflect off the top, giving it a nice reflective look. From a distance, this laptop demands to be looked at, it really is that attention-grabbing.

With the top being glass, it does tend to pick up fingerprints, but it's easily cleaned. My main concern is its durability. After seeing how easily phone screens get scratched, I can't imagine the lid faring too well over the long term. It didn't pick up any scratches during my testing, but I babied it far more than I do my own laptop. It does carry a MIL-STD-810H certification, so my fears may be unwarranted, but it's worth pointing out. The bottom is made from 50% recycled aluminum.

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Despite its 14-inch display, Lenovo did a remarkable job of keeping this laptop on the smaller side. At just 12.32 x 8.01 x 0.57 inches and weighing only 2.76 pounds, this laptop is portable and can easily be tossed in a bag and carried around. Despite its name, this is not a 2-in-1 laptop, and the hinge lacks the ability to even open it 180 degrees.

With a starting price of $1,760, I'm pretty salty about the available port selection. You get a total of two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports (one on each side), a power button, and a camera shutter switch. You don't get a headphone jack, a USB-A, or an HDMI port. Heck, this laptop is even missing a Kensington lock slot. All in all, the connectivity options are very disappointing.

A high-end laptop deserves a fantastic display and the Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i has a ridiculously good one. It comes with a 14-inch, OLED, 4K display. With a 3840 x 2400 resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate, this 16:10 display delivers all content both smooth and sharp. I did have to set the scaling to 200% to make it big enough for daily use, but it's about the most crisp display I have had the pleasure of using. For some odd reason, Windows defaulted the display to only 60Hz. I had to manually change it to 120Hz to get the extra smoothness.

To take things even further, the display has an extremely thin bezel, and thanks to an under-display camera, nothing to detract from the visual experience. The OLED display offers punchy colors and with a 100% sRGB color rating, it's very color-accurate. It's also HDR-certified, and with a peak brightness of 750 nits, it gets plenty bright enough to be used outdoors in bright conditions.

Lenovo even went the extra mile and went with a touch screen for those who prefer that method of input. Movies looked amazing and scrolling through websites was very pleasant thanks to the fast refresh rate and crisp resolution. This laptop excels for both media consumption and work tasks.

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10 comes in two different configurations. You can get it with either an Intel Core Ultra 7 256V processor and 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM for $1,760 or with an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor and 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM for $1,900. Both models come with the same 1TB of M.2 Gen 4 storage. The processors are nearly identical, which means you are essentially spending an extra $140 for the RAM.

My review unit came with the Intel Core Ultra 258V processor and 32GB of RAM and this thing flies for daily use. In addition to running quietly most of the time, the Intel processor and ample RAM had no trouble keeping up with routine tasks. There were no slowdowns or hiccups during my test period. It also exceeds the required 40 TOPS (Tera Operations Per Second), making it a certified Microsoft Copilot+ PC.

Running the Yoga Slim through a variety of benchmarks reveals excellent performance. Using a balanced power profile, it managed a single-core score of 2667 and a multi-core score of 10821 in Geekbench 6. In Cinebench R24, it managed a single-core score of 113 and a multi-core score of 633. Benchmarks aren't everything, but the results put it squarely in the Apple M1 Max territory for performance.

The Intel Arc 140V GPU is also a powerful integrated graphics chip that can handle the latest games if you are running max settings. At 1080p and Medium settings, you'll be set. You may need to turn down the settings for the most graphically intense games, but you can most assuredly game on this laptop.

As proven in a long line of business-class laptops like the ThinkPad T16, you can always count on Lenovo to build a solid keyboard. Lenovo says that they redesigned the Yoga keyboard and that it now delivers 1.5mm of key travel and has a 0.3mm keycap dish. The keys themselves have an oil and water-resistant coating to keep them clean and smudge-free. I am happy to report that the typing experience is excellent. Each key has plenty of travel and requires just the right amount of force to activate.

The keyboard is full-sized and to my delight, lacks a numpad to the right. You get a full row of function keys at the top of the keyboard and some quick action keys to the right. These quick action keys allow you to change the power and audio profiles, change visual settings, and has a programmable favorite key. This is also where you'll find the dedicated fingerprint reader. There is no Windows Hello on this laptop, so you'll be using the fingerprint reader to quickly unlock the laptop.

The trackpad, while a touch smaller than I'd like, also offers a nice experience. It's a glass touchpad, giving it a nice feel, and is very responsive to all gestures and clicks. It's also very quiet, and well-built, with no hint of rattle when pressing on the trackpad.

I was interested to see how the 75Whr battery handled the combination of the 4K OLED display and Intel Core Ultra 7 processor. During my week of testing the battery routinely managed 10 to 11 hours of battery life of real-world use. This is a combination of scrolling the web, watching YouTube videos, and the occasional Netflix stream.

While it doesn't match the battery life of laptops like the Apple Macbook Air M3, I was still happy with the results. It takes a lot of power to drive the beautiful display and it's a tradeoff that I am more than happy to make. The battery will get you through a traditional workday and still have some juice left to spare.

The audio was also good, but not great. This laptop has two 2W tweeters hidden under the keyboard and two 3W woofers located on the bottom of the chassis. When placed on a table, they were quite clear and offered a pleasurable listening experience. My issues started when using it on non-flat surfaces (like my lap). At times the woofers would get blocked by my legs, creating a muffled and distorted audio experience that detracted from what I was listening to.

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This laptop features an under-display 32MP camera, which on paper should be more than enough for video calls. Unfortunately, the camera is so bad that it borders on being unusable. Activating the camera brings up a camera ring to show on the display, which was a nice touch, but the resulting image was a mess. The image was dark and pixelated, making for a terrible experience.

So after testing, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10 has left me impressed. The laptop is beautifully designed and demands to be looked at. It also offers a gorgeous display that excels at displaying text and visual images for work and content consumption. The overall performance was also quite good, handling day-to-day tasks with ease, and can even be used for gaming during your downtime.

It's not perfect and there are a couple of potential dealbreakers depending on your individual needs. The laptop itself is beautifully designed, but not everyone wants a laptop that's going to attract attention. With only two Thunderbolt ports, it's also very light on connectivity options. The camera is downright bad, and the 10 to 11 hours of battery life may be too short for some.

If those aren't dealbreakers for you, then the Yoga Slim 9i is a fantastic laptop. With a starting price of $1,760, it's on the pricey side. It also has stiff competition, some of which undercut its price by a couple hundred dollars. However, this laptop offers a unique look and powerful performance that will surely please most users. You can currently find it available for sale in Lenovo's online store.