Lenovo’s Powerhouse 16-inch Laptop Unleashes Great Performance With Great Display Options
| Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i – Starts at $1472, $2043 As Tested Lenovo’s flagship receives some major updates and additional firepower, along with a fantastic Mini-LED display option. Just don’t bank on great battery life. |
||
|
 |
|
Lenovo’s latest entrant into the burgeoning 16-inch laptop platform space is the Yoga Pro 9i, which offers significant hardware upgrades over the company’s previous generation machine, such as Intel Meteor Lake Core Ultra processors, more power fed to its on board GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs, an improved cooling solution, and on-device AI features, all in the same svelte 0.71-inch profile as the previous generation. Despite these upgrades, the Yoga Pro 9i price is remains relatively affordable, starting at $1482 for its base config.
For this year’s model, the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i is only available as a 16-incher, as opposed to the previous gen’s 14- and 16-inch options. Also new is the somewhat standardized naming convention. Gone is the “Slim” designation (as it has been for U.S. consumers) but the “Yoga,” with it’s hinge flexibility, remains. Also, recall that budget-friendly, student-centric models are just branded Yoga by Lenovo, while the Yoga Pro lineup targets creators, artists, designers, and gamers, typically with more impressive horsepower to back that up.
The nearly maxed-out Yoga Pro 9i that we tested has machines like the Dell XPS 16 squarely in its sights, featuring more than enough firepower from its Intel Core Ultra 9 185H Meteor Lake-H CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 laptop GPU combo. There’s enough muscle on board here to make quick work of productivity tasks, not to mention heavier duty content creation grinds or lengthy jaunts through a game environment after hours. And in our opinion, the 3.2K Mini-LED touchscreen display we have on our machine is worth the smallish upgrade premium—your eyes will thank you for this one.
Our test unit (model Yoga Pro 9i 16IMH9) still cuts a nice figure despite its more powerful innards. It’s not the most totable if you’re hand-carrying this from meeting room to meeting room, but at least its thin aluminum profile with minimal embellishments is sexy where it counts and tough enough to withstand a few bumps along the way.
All of these features combined make for a great 16-inch, premium foundation but can the new Yoga Pro 9i keep pace with the current competition? Let’s dive in further and find out.
Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i Specifications And Features
Find The Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i At Best Buy
In the U.S., this laptop starts at $1,482, which is configured with an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H (P-cores up to 4.8 GHz), 16GB DDR-5X-7467MHz soldered RAM, 512GB SSD M.2 storage, a 16-inch 3.2K 165Hz IPS panel with 400 nits (100-percent DCI-P3), and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 laptop GPU with 6GB DDR6. Our review unit topped out at $2,040, though a similar configuration with that standard IPS panel is currently on sale at Best Buy for $1899.99, with upgrades to the processor (Intel Core Ultra 9 185H processor, $110 extra), 3.2K Mini-LED touchscreen with 1,200 nits brightness for $160 extra (100-percent Adobe RGB, 100-percent DCI-P3), and an RTX 4060 laptop GPU with 8GB DDR6 ($100 extra). As of this writing, Lenovo’s configurator doesn’t offer the RTX 4070 that some other markets have; we hope that becomes an option soon.
All configurations come with a large backlit keyboard with numpad, a 5MP front-facing camera backed by a dual mic array and convenient physical privacy shutter, Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, 4-cell 84W LiPo battery, and 170W AC power brick. In addition, the machine apparently utilizes AI to dynamically balance power requirements as needed, which in turn might prove to be a two-edged sword (more on that later).
Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i Design, Build Quality, Display And Features
True to its pedigree (and price point), the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i sports a quality build with top-notch materials at key touch areas, such as the lid cover, the keyboard area, and even the power button has a smooth solid click to it. We believe this machine will definitely hold up well as a daily driver.
It’s a small shame that the 16-inch display isn’t edge-to-edge; there are bezels all around here. That said, the camera hump at the top serves as a nice finger grip when you need to pop the lid open and rather breaks the monotony of rectangles on pretty much every laptop design out there. As you open the lid, you’ll find a smooth hinge mechanism that stays in place at pretty much every angle until 180 degrees.
And let’s just stop and appreciate what Lenovo has done with the display on the Yoga Pro 9i. This mini-LED panel is delightful in its color accuracy and 165Hz refresh rate. Lenovo gives users two modes to play with—SDR, for reduced power consumption at the expense of black depth and deactivation of local dimming, and HDR that turns on local dimming, as well as doubles average brightness. Speaking of which, though reflection handling could be better, as you can see above, the brightness output of this top end panel is capable of punching through even daylight conditions.
There’s no creaking or buckling when you press down on the upper deck. Fingerprints are kept at bay on the metal surfaces, display, and trackpad, but not so much on the keys, which seem to have traded some oleophobic resistance for added grip. The 15 x 9.5 mm glass trackpad is large with low latency. For the most part, it works as intended, although there were more than a few times we were able to catch palm rejection off guard. Trackpad performance is very good, and the click mechanics feal substantial.
One surprising turn for the Lenovo flagship is the typing experience on this backlit keyboard. The company touts the 1.5mm stroke and key setup as smooth and accurate, but we found rebound to be a little too stiff for touch typing. Depending on who you ask, the numpad is either a welcome addition (compared to, say, the Dell XPS 16) or makes for a more cluttered deck. We still think the CoPilot key should be placed elsewhere on laptops since finger memory is used to CTRL being there. It’s also too close to the Left arrow key, so accidentally grazing the CoPilot key when gaming or scrubbing YouTube videos causes Window’s AI assistant to launch. Every. Single. Time. With some work though, that key binding can be reconfigured with something like Microsoft Powertoys.
Acoustically, the Yoga Pro 9i’s Dolby Atmos-tuning and location of its left and right speakers are actually pretty good in the mid- to lower-high range, especially with vocals. Obviously bass doesn’t hit down low, but the DSP and Atmos do a good job of enveloping users with some modicum of bass response. There might also be some kind of bass porting within the driver setup helping the situation. Volume output is also quite impressive, with comfortable listening levels achieved at about 20 percent (even for my 47-year old ears). Overall, the performance of the six speakers (three per side) is similar to that of a small 25-30W soundbar.
On the left side of the machine, there’s a SlimTip power port, HDMI 2.1, 2 USB-C 3.2 Gen.2 (at 20 Gbit/s, includes Power Delivery 3.0, DP 1.4), a USB-C 4.0 (plus Thunderbolt 4 @ 40 GBit/s, DP 2.1, and PD 3.0), and a 3.5mm audio port. The starboard side has the power button, two USB-A Gen.1 (5 Gbit/s), SDXC card reader, and the webcam eShutter.
Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i Software Experience
On the software front, the Yoga Pro 9i is actually quite light-handed in terms of third-party preinstalled bloat. There’s the limited-time McAfee security software and Lenovo/Windows alert, reminders, and ads about how much life is much better with AI. Yes, you can leave them, but with their incessant reminders and pop-ups, you’ll be quickly inclined to remove or disable them.
Apart from that, set up is straightforward: just sign into your Microsoft account (or create a new one) and off you go. Probably one of the most frequented applications users will tap on during their ownership of the Yoga Pro 9i is NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience and NVIDIA Control Panel. Yes, the machine automatically switches between integrated graphics and its GeForce RTX 4060, but with battery life a premium on a device with this much power on tap, some users may be using these NVIDIA tools to tweak graphics settings to their needs.
Speaking of tweaking, Lenovo has its own hub that’s almost a duplication of Windows 11 Settings but pulls them all into one place. It’s called Lenovo Vantage and it’s where you can change things like power modes, activity modes (manually or rely on AI for auto detection), and sound settings.
Right then, let’s get performance testing, next…