Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10 review: A gorgeous laptop with few important flaws

Today’s most common and, I”m guessing, most popular size is the 14-inch laptop. You can still get 13-inch machines or jump up to 16-inch displays, but there’s a real sweet spot that’s both large enough to use comfortably but affords a chassis that’s a lot easier to carry around.

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10 hits almost all of the right notes in that laptop size, with good enough performance, a gorgeous display, and a thin and light chassis. The only thing holding it back is too-little connectivity and battery life that’s impacted by a very high-resolution OLED display.

Specs and configuration

As of when this review is being written, there are just two configurations of the Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10. The base configuration, which costs $1,760, includes an Intel Core Ultra 7 256V chipset, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a 4K+ OLED display (the only option). For $1,835, you can select a Core Ultra 7 258V with 32GB of RAM. That’s the configuration I reviewed.

Those are premium prices, and they’re higher with other laptops in the same class — at least, looking at list prices. The HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 starts out at $1,500, but it’s on sale for considerably less. The ASUS Zenbook S 14 is around $1,600 with similar configurations. It’s possible that Lenovo will cut the price when the laptop has been around for longer, but for now, it’s a little expensive.

Design

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Every now and then a laptop comes along that’s just exquisitely designed. It stands out thanks to some combination of materials and aesthetic, and it stands in stark contrast against the more common minimalist designs that have come to dominate laptops. Even attractive and elegant laptops like Apple’s MacBooks and HP’s OmniBooks are very simple.

The Yoga Slim 9i 14 is a different thing. It has a glass cover on the lid that gives the dark blue color on my review unit a lovely sheen, the rounded edges are a dark chrome that highlight the color way, and overall the lines create a real gem of a laptop. It’s a gorgeous machine that manages to avoid being ostentatious. The brighter blue keyboard is the one touch that I think might go a little over the top. But aesthetically, this laptop competes with the best-looking machines I’ve reviewed.

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One thing it shares with some other very good machines is a lid that’s a little flexible. The MacBook Air also has that slight weakness, but it’s worse with the Yoga Slim 9i 14 because of the glass. I’m not saying that glass might crack or shatter, but it does give me a little pause. It’s a solid laptop overall, so I won’t fault it. But a little stronger metal would have been welcome.

In terms of its size, the Yoga Slim 9i 14 is a reasonably thin and light laptop. It sports extremely narrow bezels — there’s a camera-under-display (CUD) design keeping the top bezel as thin as possible — that make it eminently portable even with a 14-inch display. It’s not as thin as the MacBook Air 15 that’s an insane 0.45 inches thick, but it’s reasonably light and more than thin enough at 0.67 inches. As I handled the Yoga Slim 9i 14, it felt just right.

Keyboard and touchpad

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I mentioned that the keyboard’s bright blue color was the one aesthetic touch I didn’t really like. However, I can’t complain about its design. The keycaps are plenty big, there’s a lot of key spacing, and the switches are light and snappy. Typing up this review was comfortable and not at all fatiguing, and while I still prefer Apple’s Magic Keyboard, barely, I would be more than happy with this one.

The touchpad is a little less impressive. It’s a little small, to begin with, and it’s mechanical where more premium laptops are including haptic versions. Lenovo does offer that as an option on some of its machines and it might do that here, but it’s not listed as an option. The touchpad worked okay, but its button clicks were a little loud and sharp.

The display is touch-enabled, which I like. That might not be as important to many buyers.

Connectivity and webcam

Connectivity is this laptop’s one true weakness. There are only two USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 4 support, and like the Dell XPS 13, there’s no audio jack. Most 14-inch laptops have more ports, including some that are thinner. The HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 has a USB-A port to go with its two Thunderbolt 4 ports, and it has a 3.5mm audio jack. Wireless connectivity is fully up to date, though.

The webcam, on the other hand, is a 32MP version, which is the highest resolution I’ve seen. It’s mated with the Lunar Lake chipset’s fast Neural Processing Unit (NPU) running at 45 tera operations per second (TOPS), exceeding the 40 TOPS requirement for Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC AI initiative. That means that all of the usual Copilot+ AI features are supported with fast and efficient on-device processing.

Performance

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The Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10 comes equipped with the Core Ultra 7 256V or 258V, which are both part of the Core Ultra Series 2 (or Lunar Lake) generation. I reviewed the latter, which has eight cores (four Performance cores and four Low Power Efficient) and eight threads. It’s the lower-power version of Intel’s latest chipsets, and it’s aimed at higher efficiency rather than faster performance.

As we can see, the Yoga Slim 9i 14 performs well for the chipset, coming in behind the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and Apple M3 in most of our benchmarks. It’s fast enough for demanding productivity users, which are the laptop’s primary target. The integrated Intel Arc 140V graphics aren’t anything special, meaning this isn’t a great laptop for gamers or creators.

Battery life

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The Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10 has a 75 watt-hour battery, which is usually a fair amount for a 14-inch laptop. And, it uses a Lunar Lake chipset, which has given some great battery life in the laptops we’ve tested so far — among the best we’ve seen in Windows laptops. It has even given the class leader MacBook Air M3 a run for its money.

But, there’s also a very high-resolution 4K+ OLED display. While some of the machines in this comparison group also had OLED, none of them went past 2.8K resolutions. That makes for a real hit on battery life.

Therefore, while the Yoga Slim 9i 14 didn’t do as well as some of the other machines here and, in fact, is closer to previous generation Windows laptops with lower-resolution IPS displays, these are still good results for a laptop with such a sharp panel. Some users will care more about better battery life, and I get that. But, if you really like sharp displays, you might consider this to be a reasonable compromise.

Display and audio

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There’s just one display option with the Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10, a 14.0-inch 16:10 4K+ (3840 x 2400) OLED touch display running at 120Hz. I like my displays to be as sharp as possible, and this is as sharp as you can get. Text looks awesome, which matters a lot to me as a writer, and this laptop provides the sharpest text I’ve seen in a while where 2.8K displays have become a lot more common. Colors are also incredibly dynamic and bright, and of course there are the usual OLED inky blacks.

My colorimeter loved this display. It’s bright at 417 nits, way above our older 300 nit baseline, and it exhibits near-perfect blacks and a phenomenally high contrast ration of 28,790:1. Colors are wide at 100% of sRGB, 96% of AdobeRGB, and 100% of DCI-P3, and color accuracy is excellent at a DeltaE of 0.55 (1.0 or less is indistinguishable to the human eye).

Everything looked great on the display, from pin-sharp black text on a white background, to images and video, and then high dynamic range (HDR) streaming content at 4K was awesome. The Yoga Slim 9i 14 isn’t fast enough for video editors, but for everyone else, this is a spectacular display.

Audio is provided by four speakers, including two tweeters positioned underneath the keyboard and two downward-firing woofers. I found the sound quality to be very good, with sufficient volume, clear mids and highs, and more bass than usual. It’s right up there with Apple’s MacBook Air four-speaker setup, but not as good as the MacBook Pro’s six-speaker audio. Nonetheless, it’s a strength.

A lovely little gem of a laptop

You won’t find many better-looking laptops, so the Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10 has that going for it right out of the box. It’s highly portable, gets good enough performance, and has a great keyboard. And you won’t find a better display on a laptop today.

At the same time, battery life isn’t as good as some other Lunar Lake laptops thanks to that gorgeous display. And, connectivity is a letdown. It costs a pretty penny, but the Yoga Slim 9i 14 is a great laptop for a lot of users, and it’s highly recommended.