Lenovo Y Yoga 9 9i 14in (Shadow Black)
The excellentexcell 4K display and bass-boos bass-boosting soundbar lift this conve convertible from the crowd, butbu it has flaws
SCORE
PRICE £1,416 (£1,700 (£ inc VAT) from lenovo.com
With one sweep of its active sty stylus, the Dynabook Por Portégé X30W-J ( see p p56) has rewritten our expectations of convertible laptops. la In part due to the Yoga 9i’s larg larger 14in screen, it looks and feels portly by comparison: vital stats of 318 x 211 x 16.4mm (WDH) and 1.35kg mean it’s not comfortable in one hand for a prolonged time.
It’s also plain. This even applies to the special edition “Shadow Black” version here, which includes a leather cover on the lid. This adds visual interest but feels like plastic – not the intended effect. The screen bezels could be slimmer too: 5mm at the side is great, 8mm at the top is okay, but 13mm at the bottom is archaic.
One advantage the Yoga 9i holds over the Dynabook is that its bundled Lenovo Active Pen is garaged in a slot at the rear behind the power button. The slot is unobtrusive and secure, while the stylus itself supports 4,096 pressure levels and, according to Lenovo, a 15-minute charge will keep it powered for 90 minutes. I found the pen capable but slender, making it harder to hold than thicker pens such as the Dynabook’s.
This being a Lenovo, it’s no surprise that the keyboard has a precise, firm action, but if you’re used to ThinkPads you’ll miss their keys’ deeper travel. But what everyone will miss, if they buy the Shadow Black model, is a normal trackpad. The entire width of the Yoga 9i’s palmrest is made from a single piece of tempered glass, which means you can’t feel the boundaries of either the trackpad or the fingerprint scanner and, thanks to both being g marked by a shiny black line against a matte black background, you can’t see ee where they are unless the light is reflecting off the palmrest just so.
Even once you’ve found the trackpad, you may not like the click action. It’s haptic – like the Force Touch pad on modern MacBooks – but gives a vague, unnatural-feeling buzz when pressed. Perhaps familiarity will eventually soften my negative opinion but I’d rather have a boring touchpad that just works. Luckily, you can have this if you don’t buy the Shadow Black version.
You’ll save money too. The updated Yoga 9i 14in range, which features 11th-generation Intel silicon, starts at £1,099 for the
Core i5 model with 8GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD and a Full HD display. If you want a Core i7 then prices start at £1,469, but this includes a stingy 256GB SSD. The £1,549 model makes much more sense, with a 512GB SSD, 16GB of RAM and a 4K panel.
This £1,700 Shadow Black model adds not only the leather cover and dubious touchpad but also a 1TB SSD, so it’s a shame Lenovo sent our sample with a 512GB SSD. It’s a WD SN730 unit that returned strong read and write speeds of 2,785MB/sec and 1,464MB/sec respectively, and we’d expect a smidgen faster results from the 1TB version.
The 14in 3,840 x 2,160 IPS display ticks all the right technical boxes: a 489cd/m2 maximum brightness, 99% sRGB coverage, 1,574:1 contrast ratio and an average Delta E of 0.33 are all suitably strong for a premium laptop. It may not have the pop of the Asus’
“The 60Wh battery inside lasted 11hrs 35mins in our video-rundown test, which is excellent considering the 4K display”
OLED panel opposite, but it supports Dolby by Vision to ensure HDR-compatible compatible programmes look ook their best. Lenovo has cleverly built the speaker array y into the lid hinge so it faces towards you in laptop mode and points up when in “tent” or tablet mode. Lenovo calls this speaker peaker assembly a “Rotating ng Soundbar”, and it’s not pure hyperbole erbole because, unlike so many any laptops, the Yoga 9i packs plenty nty of bass and p pushes up p to respectable ble volumes. That’s handy for video calls, and for once the (non-Windows Hello) 720p webcam here shoots decent video; note the privacy shutter, too.
An Intel Core i7-1185G7 quad-core processor runs the show, with the help of 16GB of soldered LPDDR4x 4,266MHz RAM. This powerful combination meant the Yoga 9i just shades the Portégé X30W-J in the
PC Pro benchmarks, with 132 versus 127, but with the same integrated Iris Xe graphics we saw essentially identical speeds in games. That means it’s pretty fast, but you can forget AAA titles at 4K; Doom ran at an average of 49fps at 1,280 x 720, 28fps at 1,920 x 1,080 but at a glacial 7fps at 3,840 x 2,160. Squeezing powerful chipsets into thin laptops can cause problems with heat management, but the dual fans in the Yoga 9i do a sterling job of keeping things cool, even if they’re loud at full speed. As for battery life, the 60Wh battery inside lasted 11hrs 35mins in our video-rundown test, which is excellent considering the 4K display.
As a result, this laptop only narrowly falls short of an award; I found the trackpad and fingerprint scanner just too irksome. Its strongest argument when placed against the Portégé boils down to the excellent combination of speaker and screen, but that’s not enough to compensate for its weaknesses.
Four-core 3GHz (4.8GHz burst) Intel Core i7-1185G7 processor Intel Iris Xe graphics 16GB LPDD4RX RAM (4,266MHz) 14in touchscreen IPS display, 3,840 x 2,060 resolution 1TB M.2 PCIe SSD 2x2 Wi-Fi 6 Bluetooth 5.1 2 x Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C) USB-A 3.1 Gen 2 3.5mm combo jack 720p IR webcam Lenovo active stylus 60Wh 0Wh battery Windows ows 10 Home 318 8 x 211 x 16.4mm (WDH) DH) 1.35kg
1yr C&R warranty