The Lenovo Yoga 9i is a 2-in-1 convertible that’s a full-fledged laptop that also swivels to become a touch-enabled device. At a base price of Rs. 1,30,600, let’s see what works well and what doesn’t for this Windows 11 laptop.
What works
Display: The convertible has a 14-inch (2880 x 1800) OLED with an aspect ratio of 16:10. The display swivels almost 360 degrees to close on the back of the keyboard, which can be used by touch. The display quality here is really top-notch, both for video and image display. Content creators often prefer a display with a 16:10 aspect ratio, so that’s covered too. The display has vivid and sharp colors with deep blacks and does a good job of handling most multimedia output. There’s support for HDR and Dolby Vision, and I’ve only been able to try the HDR mode, which handles with decent contrast and retained brightness. The touch dynamics are also satisfactory. It doesn’t have the fastest touch response seen on a laptop today, but it still does a decent job of not being a bottleneck when using the device in converted mode.
Keyboard and Trackpad: The notebook has a backlit keyboard with an additional set of function keys for functions such as performance boost and intelligent appearance for webcam effects. The keys have good feedback and are comfortable to type with for long and continuous use, although some people may find the travel a little less than expected. The trackpad next to it is large and does a good job of tracking your multi-finger taps and gestures.
Build Quality: Another thing I liked about the Yoga 9i is the good build quality. Even though it’s a convertible, there’s hardly any flexing throughout the aluminum body. The hinge and speaker setup is well done, with no streams or loose part noise at any time. I liked its champagne-like color, which Lenovo officially calls oatmeal, although the extra paint applied to the port cutouts could have been a bit more subtle.
Which is absolutely fine
Performance and Windows Experience: The notebook features an i7-1280 chipset with the highest clock speed of 4.8 GHz, along with integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics and 16 GB of soldered LPDDR5 RAM. The Yoga 9i can handle most day-to-day tasks and even the video processing is decent, but not great given the GPU present.
The Windows 11 operating system contains additional bloatware that throws a lot of unnecessary notifications, e.g. B. McAfee upgrade notification, Lenovo Vantage. You are better off uninstalling them if you don’t intend to use them at any time.
Another thing I noticed was that the laptop went to sleep despite changing the default settings in Windows. As a result, background tasks continued to pause if no key was pressed for 3 minutes, even though a much higher limit was selected in Windows 11 settings and battery saver was disabled. A few reboots later, the settings were finally correct, but that’s something you don’t accept from a high-end laptop today. I haven’t seen this particular error on any Windows 11 laptops recently so I can’t say it’s just an OS issue, but it seems like it has more to do with this exact model.
Another issue I had was heat and fan noise. Even with just three tabs open in a web browser and the music player turned on, the laptop was generating a lot of heat and the fan was being pushed to its limit, creating a lot of noise that you wouldn’t normally expect with such a workload, which also happened quite regularly.
PS: I didn’t get a compatible charger with the notebook for Indian plugs, so I couldn’t check the charging speed for the included charger, but all three USB Type-C ports can be used for charging, e.g. B. the 125 watt charger that Motorola provides with its edge 30 ultras in the box (which I also used).
Verdict
The Lenovo Yoga 9i has a lot of pros that are high – display and build quality – while it has some serious cons that are really low – heat, fan noise, and regular software bugs. The laptop seems to perform really well in the hardware department while lagging behind due to some software issues that often plague everyday tasks. Until Lenovo fixes these reproducible bugs, this notebook seems a bit difficult to recommend, despite its convertible qualities.
