Lenovo Yoga Slim9i Review

This is probably one of the most beautiful laptops I’ve seen in 2025 so far. It’s the Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i, but it’s not for everybody. You have to have the appetite and dedication to keep this thing safe because instead of constructing it with a metal lid, Lenovo has decided to place glass on top. Now, the benefit to this is it makes it different than other laptops on the market. You can do things like have this cool shimmery, shiny, reflective material that just looks really nice depending on how the light reflects off of it.

Design and Build Quality

The downfall to this is you get a lot of fingerprints, and it doesn’t matter what Lenovo tells you; it’s just not going to be as durable as metal. Now, when you pick this up, the edges are nice and sanded, they’re polished, they look really good, and it’s very comfortable to hold. You only have two ports though—only two Thunderbolt 4 ports, with one on the left-hand side and another one on the right. So, if you’re docking this thing, you’re definitely going to have to connect it to some sort of hub. If you’re carrying extra peripherals with you, you’re going to need a hub in your bag as well.

The laptop is super light, like 2.76 lbs, so not very heavy at all. Then, of course, on the bottom, they went with a standard metal lid.

Display and Webcam Innovation

The other interesting fact about this laptop is when you open it up, and it kind of takes a little bit of work with one hand, you have one of the most beautiful-looking displays I have ever seen. Now, this is OLED, this is 4K, this is 120Hz, but it has a trick up its sleeve. Instead of having your traditional punch-hole webcam or notch at the top, Lenovo has created one of the first under-display cameras on a laptop. Unlike the Galaxy Z Fold 6 and prior devices, you don’t see it—like, you literally cannot see it, no matter how much you stare at it—which just gives this a beautiful look. It just looks like one solid piece of glass, especially because they were able to make the bezels so small.

Now, the cool thing is you can still disable the camera. On the right-hand side, there’s a little switch over here, but once it’s activated, you see the circle pop up, and then there’s a little light on the external notch that lets you know that the camera is activated. Now, here’s the thing about this 32-megapixel camera with infrared: the quality is hot garbage. If you’re going to be using this laptop for video conferencing every single day, probably not the best webcam to do it with. But if you don’t care about webcam quality—like, you’re just not using it a lot and you’d rather have this kind of seamless look—then this laptop achieves it.

Power Button and Keyboard Experience

The power button is on the right-hand side, which means if you’re moving it around with your hand like this, sometimes you will place the laptop in sleep mode. It just happens by accident. But the benefit to having the power button on the right-hand or left-hand side of the laptop is that when you’re powering the laptop off in a desktop experience, you don’t have to open the lid to do it—you can just tap the side and turn on your computer. Everything else is also top-notch. Instead of using the webcam, there’s a little fingerprint scanner on the bottom right to log you in quickly. The keyboard just feels so good to type on. It’s 1.5 mm of travel distance, you have nice and big arrow keys. Obviously, you’re not going to get a numerical keypad on a laptop with a 14-inch display, but there’s just not a lot of flex in the middle either.

Performance and Specifications

Now, because this laptop is so small, they had to reduce the height of the touchpad. It’s a glass touchpad. Now, my SKU here is rocking an Intel Core Series processor, Lunar Lake, the 258V. It comes with 32GB of very fast DDR5 RAM. You have the 14-inch OLED touch display with a 120Hz refresh rate, you have a terabyte NVMe SSD, and a very high price tag. Performance is what you’d expect from Lunar Lake. It’s just not the fastest compared to all the other thin and light notebooks on the market. AMD is going to be faster. Sometimes Snapdragon will beat this out in certain situations, and obviously, the new Airlake stuff is going to be faster than this as well. Doesn’t matter if it’s single-core clock speeds or multi-core speeds, this is definitely not one of the fastest laptops on the market. I wouldn’t buy this for video editing, but it’s absolutely fine for Photoshop. The scores are really good for that type of stuff. If you’re a developer, this wouldn’t be my first choice for performance. But for everyday use—like just browsing the net and doing general productivity—this is a great option.

GPU and Cooling System

The one thing that this chassis does well is giving you a good integrated GPU. This can handle some older titles just fine. Fan noise is exactly where it should be. Yes, it’s going to hit the higher 40s if you have this on high-performance mode, but obviously, you can tailor that down and have no fan noise if you want your laptop to be quiet. Now, the other benefit of this little guy is that it has four speakers, and they sound absolutely awesome.

Internal Components and Battery Life

To get inside, you have to remove four screws and this little pad, and there are two more screws underneath. Once you’re in, this is what it looks like: you have two fans, two thick copper heat pipes to keep the CPU and integrated GPU nice and cool, and you have a swappable NVMe SSD. This is an M.2 2230—it’s the smaller ones. I would have loved to see a bigger one just so that you can get the best read and write speeds if you really want them. But you do have a pretty big 75Wh battery, and battery life on this was pretty good. Not the best I’ve seen on a Lunar Lake laptop, but still really, really good compared to a lot of other laptops on the market.

Conclusion

Alright, here’s the bottom line: I like this laptop a lot. It looks really nice, and if you don’t care about having the best webcam, you don’t care about paying a little bit more than you should, and you are ready to baby this thing, then I think you’re going to have one of the most beautiful laptops to use. But if you’re talking about practicality and if you want to value your dollars, then this is not the machine for you. This is for a very select niche of people that just want a very beautiful product to utilize. Now, there are some benefits to this. Yes, you’re not getting the fastest CPU performance, but you are getting a super-light product with really good battery life.