What a user needs from their laptop varies greatly. Some people need a bulky laptop spec’d to the gills for gaming, editing and similar tasks. Others need a device for artistic pursuits — drawing, photo editing and so on. Some just need something they can toss in their bag and use for very light tasks, while others are happy with just a tablet. Lenovo’s offering, the Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition, checks more of these boxes than most laptops currently on the market and does it all with a strong focus on AI to improve everything it does well.
The Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition comes in Cosmic Blue and has some powerful I/O, but it’s limited by its 15.9 mm thickness (no HDMI out or Ethernet port). It has two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports that provide 40 Gbps data transfer, a USB-A port at 10 Gbps, another USB-C port on the opposite side at 20 Gbps (USB 4 compatible) and a combination audio jack. Each USB-C port is equipped for power delivery and is DisplayPort ready, so you can use whichever port works best for your setup.
Inside the Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition, there’s an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V CPU with an Intel Arc 140V 16GB GPU. The model reviewed was spec’d to the gills with a 1 TB hard drive and 32 GB of LPDDR5X RAM, running on Windows 11 Home. It has a 5 MP camera with a privacy shutter, a fingerprint sensor and a 75 Wh battery with rapid charge that can provide up to three hours of use from 15 minutes of charging. All of this is packed into a very compact laptop weighing as little as 2.91 lb.
“The Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition checks more of these boxes than most laptops currently on the market and does it all with a strong focus on AI to improve everything it does well.”
The keys on the Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition’s keyboard have a 1.5 mm travel distance and feel very responsive. The trackpad is enlarged and, unlike many others, the ability to click it — both left and right — never seemed to fail me. The soundbar is rotated to face you rather than point straight up. The audio is crisp and clear, but not overly loud, even at 100 per cent. It’s more than loud enough given that a laptop sits quite close to you, but it doesn’t have a big, booming sound system if that’s what you’re after.
The monitor on the Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition is less a display than a work of art. The 14-inch 2.8K WQHD+ OLED display with an adaptive refresh rate up to 120 Hz has 1,100 nits of brightness (with HDR) and, in my experience, produces the most beautiful, vibrant images I’ve seen on any computer, toppling even the monitors on my PC. This screen is, to me, the new benchmark for people who want a premier experience when viewing content or working on their own.
The Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition is also equipped with PureSight, which automatically adjusts the visuals on your screen, including lowering blue light output, to prioritize your eye health while maintaining the best picture possible. It can be turned on in the Lenovo Vantage app and offers options that even allow you to adjust the screen according to the time of day and your location, making the display a bit warmer as it gets dark outside.
Connecting to external devices is also a breeze with the Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition. Lenovo’s Yoga ecosystem allows for seamless connection to a range of devices, from the Yoga Slim Mouse to the TWS Yoga PC Edition earbuds. You can assemble a suite of compatible gear with ease. Connection to third-party equipment works without issue as well, which is always appreciated, and using the Quick Share app, you can connect to any Android or iOS device to transfer files with a quick tap of the device to the laptop.
Speaking of the monitor, it rotates all the way around, allowing it to be used as a stand-up tablet or a flat one, with touchscreen capability and compatibility with Lenovo’s Yoga Pen, a super low-latency stylus that turns the Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition into an excellent notebook or canvas for productivity and artistry. The soundbar also rotates with the monitor, so it always faces you no matter how the screen is oriented.
On Geekbench 6, the Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition scored 2,472 for single-core and 8,745 for multi-core performance. The single-core result was comparable to the Intel Core i7-13700T, while the multi-core score was similar to the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U. These are respectable results for a non-gaming laptop, well above the thresholds for handling both simple and demanding functions, which shows in its overall performance.
“At $1,729.99 US, the Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition delivers a premium experience for a wide range of use cases.”
The Geekbench 6 OpenCL score of 20,303 is far below most modern benchmarks, landing nearest the AMD Radeon RX 9070XT. For those more familiar with Nvidia GPUs, it performs below a GTX 1050. You can imagine my lack of surprise when the suggested settings for Fortnite were all at the lowest level — and it looked like it. I tried increasing the texture quality while keeping everything else low, and that dropped the frame rate to about 40 fps.
I didn’t bother extending my tests to games like A Plague Tale: Requiem and GTA V. I got what I needed from this test. You can game on the Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition, but what you play won’t be any title that truly taxes your GPU. Ultimately, the Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition isn’t marketed as a gaming laptop and doesn’t need to be judged as one, but it’s useful to know this if you see its display and overall performance and expect the same level from a gaming experience.
Where the “aura” really comes in for the Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition is in its native AI. The Lenovo AI Core manages your entire laptop — from the hardware through the apps — and optimizes everything to get the most out of your machine while keeping performance consistently high.
AI apps on the Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition are a big part of what makes this laptop great. Cocreator allows you to describe or draw something (with whatever artistic talent you bring to the table), and AI interprets your art into your vision. Live Captions captures dialogue in real time and delivers accurate text, even translating into English from more than 40 languages. Recall takes screenshots of your desktop, analyzes your activity, creates a timeline of your work and lets you search for anything you’ve done or are doing.
At $1,729.99 US, the Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition delivers a premium experience for a wide range of use cases. It’s a lightning-fast Copilot+ PC with advanced AI features ideal for professional or personal productivity. It’s also a premium tablet that, when combined with the Yoga Pen, becomes a superb notebook and artistic tool. It achieves all this with one of the most impressive screens I’ve seen on a laptop. You’ll most certainly feel the value this device provides.
