Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Gen 10 Aura Edition Review: Creative dream

Design and Keyboard

• Stylish convertible design
• Meagre port selection
• Lovely keyboard and trackpad

The Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Gen 10 Aura Edition looks the business with its dark blue colourway and blend of matted and glossy finishing that sets it apart from other laptops up and down the price ladder. The only other laptop I’ve tested in recent memory that was this blue was the HP Elitebook Ultra G1i, although I don’t remember its chassis’ surfaces attracting as many fingerprints in places.

A 1.32kg weight makes this Lenovo laptop a little heavier than I was expecting, given that we’ve seen larger-screened laptops clock in with a lower mass than this, and comparable 14-inch ultrabooks even break below the 1kg barrier, such as the Asus Zenbook A14. This Lenovo option is still portable with a slender frame, although that weight is worth bearing in mind.

It’s just 15.9mm thick, which makes this one of the thinnest laptops in its class – great for modernity, although it has had a detrimental impact on connectivity. The Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Gen 10 Aura Edition features three Thunderbolt 4-capable USB-C ports across the left and right sides, plus a USB-A and a headphone jack. Without the likes of a microSD reader or similar, it just feels a little bit like a five-year-old MacBook Pro in places.

Opening up the lid reveals a convenient 75% layout keyboard with a function row and proper arrow keys, plus a fingerprint reader in the bottom right corner and some non-standard function keys on the right. These are for changing settings such as power modes, muting the laptop’s audio, and opening up Lenovo’s Vantage system app on the fly, which is handy.

The keyboard itself feels snappy and tactile with generally sensible placement that made for a real pleasure to type on over the testing period. Lenovo has typically been excellent with laptop keyboards, and that’s still the case with the Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Gen 10 Aura Edition. It is white backlit to a decent degree for after-dark use, too.

As for the trackpad, that feels slick and smooth for gestures and navigation, while giving your fingers some pleasant real estate. It’s one of the better ones I’ve used in recent times.

Display and Sound

• Sublime OLED touchscreen
• Immense colour accuracy
• Clever soundbar-style speaker array

With its feature-rich display specs, the Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Gen 10 Aura Edition is clearly positioned as a beefy portable laptop for creatives. For instance, as much as it’s a compact 14-inch model, this is an OLED screen with a sublime 3840×2400(or 4K in 16:10 aspect ratio) resolution, making for immense detail and sublime definition. 

It is only 60Hz, which is a bit of a shame, but there is rich HDR support with both VESA DisplayHDR True Black 500 and Dolby Vision on the menu. The touchscreen feels slick and responsive with this panel, although a smoother refresh rate would have helped a bit in my eyes.

It should come as no surprise that the colour accuracy of this screen is virtually perfect, with 100% sRGB, 99% DCI-P3 and 95% Adobe RGB coverage. This enhances the panel’s ability in both productivity and more intense, colour-sensitive tasks.

A peak brightness of 363.2 nits, as measured with my colorimeter, makes this laptop suitable for indoor and outdoor loads while providing a generally punchy experience. We’ve also got the inky black level and immense contrast ratio I’ve come to expect from OLED screens, with measured levels of 0.01 and 26510:1, respectively. The 6500K colour temperature is also perfect.

The Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Gen 10 Aura Edition’s speakers are a high point, with the array built into the 360-degree hinge of the screen, meaning there is clear audio whether you’re using this as a conventional laptop or as a tablet. Audio has decent depth and clarity, plus a surprising amount of low-end grunt.

Performance

• Potent performance from Core Ultra 258V chip
• Surprisingly beefy integrated graphics
• Solid RAM and SSD combo

Lenovo has stuck with a tried-and-tested Lunar Lake chip for this laptop that I’ve used a lot in its rivals, with the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor with its eight cores and eight threads. This means we’ve got solid performance for both basic productivity and more advanced, intensive loads.

The scores it achieved in the Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 tests are in the ballpark for what I’d expect for this chip, and better than those garnered by the same chip inside the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 2-in-1 Gen 10 Aura Edition, meaning we’re getting good single core scores and decent multi-threaded performance, even if Intel has ditched hyperthreading with it.

Both the PCMark 10 and 3DMark Time Spy scores were higher than anticipated, proving two things. Firstly, this laptop is ideally suited for the productivity and business-style tasks it may be used for, and its Arc 140V integrated graphics are immensely capable. This is handy for both more intensive creative loads, such as photo and video editing, and even a spot of gaming.

32GB of fast DDR5 RAM provides enough headroom for those creative loads and heavier multi-tasking work, while a capacious 1TB SSD provides ample space for a solid amount of apps and locally stored files. Its speeds of 6953.27 MB/s reads and 6738.50 MB/s writes are rather fast, even if they’re overshadowed by PCIe Gen 5 SSDs that are becoming increasingly common in some of this laptop’s rivals.

Software

• Reasonably clean Windows 11 install
• Only a couple of Lenovo-specific apps
• Copilot+ PC AI smarts are present

The Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Gen 10 Aura Edition comes with a reasonably clean install of Windows 11 with little in the way of additional software apart from pre-installed McAfee antivirus. 

The Lenovo-branded software that shipped with my sample was Lenovo Vantage, which allows you to do everything from check on system utilisation to fiddling with power and battery settings. It’s a handy catch-all app.

The Core Ultra 7 258V chip inside is powerful enough to meet Microsoft’s minimum requirements for this ThinkPad to be classified as a Copilot+ PC. This means you can access some of Microsoft’s special AI features that have been featured on most of the other recent ultrabook releases, such as the option for AI filters and generative image work in Paint and Photos, and the nifty Windows Studio webcam effects for auto-framing and maintaining eye contact.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 16 hours and 59 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for two working days

Lenovo has packed a large 75Whr cell into the Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Gen 10 Aura Edition, which they say can help it last for up to 29 hours in a video playback test. If this laptop could achieve that in our battery test, it’d easily make it the longest-lasting laptop I’ve tested, ahead of the likes of the Dell Pro 14 Premium and Microsoft Surface Laptop 7.

In dialling the brightness down to the requisite 150 nits and running the PCMark 10 Modern Office battery test, this Yoga laptop lasted for 16 hours and 59 minutes. As much as that’s not brilliant against Lenovo’s claims, it’s still a high-riding figure. It means this laptop performs well against its rivals, such as the Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro and HP Elitebook Ultra G1i.

The 65W charger is also decently quick to recharge that capacious 75Whr battery, taking 45 minutes to get it back to 50 percent, while a full charge took 105 minutes.

Should you buy it?