Final Thoughts
After spending about a month with the Lenovo Yoga 9i I would have to say it definitely sits at the top of 2-in-1 devices for 2022. Let’s first talk about the 2-in-1 capabilities. This is of course a Yoga laptop so you can easily flip the screen around and turn it into a tablet. In tablet mode the keyboard is of course disabled and you can use the touchscreen with either your finger or the Lenovo Precision Pen 2. This is great for someone who prefers to take hand-written notes over typing them, but still wants the power of a fully-fledged laptop. Traveling? Throw the Yoga 9i in tent mode and you’ll still have room on your tray table for a drink and snack!
It was pretty evident in our testing the performance uplift you are going to get using this laptop with a 12th gen Intel processor over a laptop with an 11th gen Intel processor or even something like a Ryzen Ryzen 7 5800U. The performance of this laptop topped our charts in most of the tests which is quite impressive. In my general use case I did not run into any performance related issues, I was able to do my daily tasks, edit photos, and even do some light video editing. I would say our unit was a bit limited only having 8GB of RAM, but you can easily configure the laptop with 16GB which I would recommend.
One thing I definitely appreciated seeing on this laptop was a USB-A port, it seems like we’ve gone all Type-C, but having three Type-C’s and a single Type-A does mean you won’t necessarily need a dongle. You will however need a dongle if you want to connect a second display or grab files off an SD card. I still don’t understand why laptop makers just stopped putting SD card slots on laptops!
While definitely not a selling point it does have to be mentioned that this laptop has the best speaker system I’ve ever heard on a laptop. If you are someone who prefers speakers over using headphones you are going to love the audio quality that you are going to get from the hinge soundbar on the Yoga 9i! It is quite impressive the sound you get for it being in such a small package.
The unit we were sent is a Best Buy exclusive (Core i7-1260P, 8GB RAM, 1920 x 1200 Display, 256GB SSD), which we currently cannot find for sale. The do have a $1499 unit (Core i7-1260P, 16GB RAM, 2.8K OLED Display, 512GB SSD) and a $1799 unit (Core i7-1260P, 16GB RAM, 4K OLED Display, 1TB SSD). The $1499 unit is probably what I would opt for. Overall ThinkComputers gives the Lenovo Yoga 9i 14-inch Laptop a 9 out of 10 score and our Recommended Award!
Pros:
– Good overall performance
– Sleek design
– Inclusion of a USB-A port
– Amazing sound
– Responsive touchscreen
– Ability to flip the screen around
Cons:
– Slower write speeds on the internal SSD
– No SD card slot
– Hard to tell this gen from last gen on the Lenovo website
