Lenovo Yoga Slim 9 Review: Sleek Design, Short Battery Life

The Yoga Slim 9 is a luxurious 14-inch lightweight laptop from Lenovo, boasting a distinctive design. It features glass on the lid, glossy rounded edges, and a matte green-shimmering metal finish. The display is characterized by rounded corners at the top and extremely thin bezels. The build quality is top-notch, providing an unbeatable premium feel during use.

Weighing in at 2.72 lbs (1.23 kg), it qualifies as what we call ultralight. Given all the extras it has, including glass in the chassis, glass covering a 14-inch touchscreen, and a larger battery than most laptops in its category, it’s impressive that Lenovo has managed to keep the weight in check. The keyboard is well-constructed, offering a pleasant typing experience, with clear symbols and letters both with and without backlighting.

On the side, there are a series of extra buttons for performance and fan modes, a blue light filter for the display, a fingerprint reader, and a button for quickly launching Lenovo Vantage, the settings and maintenance application. The trackpad is relatively small for a laptop in 2025, but it’s spacious enough and very comfortable to use, offering great control and haptic feedback instead of a mechanical button, allowing the entire surface to be used for clicking.

Moving Toward Good AI

There’s also a quick-launch button on the keyboard for the accompanying Lenovo AI Now application, which offers various smart features in an AI-driven chat interface, assistance with the computer, capabilities to index and search semantically through documents and media, help with written texts, and much more. However, not everything works in Swedish, and the chat seems to struggle unless I change the system language on the computer. We hope this improves over time since it is still just a beta version according to Lenovo.

The computer has good AI performance, and you also get the features included in Copilot Plus, from the Copilot chat in its own app, generative features in Paint, live captioning, and the limited webcam effects that Microsoft provides to X86 computers.

This brings us to what powers the local AI features, the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor. It delivers stable performance for office tasks and lighter media editing, and with a powerful NPU, apps like Adobe Photoshop can see a significant performance boost. The same boost can also be experienced with the powerful Arc graphics.

Loses Some, Gains in Other Areas

The Intel Core Ultra represents a step back if you’re expecting the high multi-threaded performance found in a Snapdragon X-processor, and Snapdragon remains the one with the most Copilot Plus features in Windows. However, in several other areas, the Ultra Core is just as good or better, featuring more powerful graphics, faster single-core performance, and comparable thermal efficiency and power consumption.

However, this is not very evident in this particular laptop. It performs slightly below expectations in multitasking tests, although it handles large computational tasks relatively quickly. It also has significantly louder cooling than other laptops in the same price and size range that I’ve tested this year. While it can be silent at times, it often goes up to a noticeable hum, and intensive usage ramps up the fans to a discernible whir.

With 32 GB of DDR5 RAM and a fast 1 TB SSD, it seldom feels insufficient. You might not want to edit 8K video or play the heaviest AAA games on it, but that’s not really its intended purpose. Its aim is to be mobile and productive with style, and it accomplishes that.

4K Screen! Is It Necessary?

Not least thanks to the display. It features a high-end image panel, which I suspect contributes to the laptop’s undeniably high price tag of $2,646 (27,999 SEK). A bright OLED with a resolution of 3840 x 2400 pixels, which means 4K, but in a 16:10 format. It’s almost overly sharp, and I wonder what one truly needs so many pixels for on such a small area. Side by side with a 14-inch OLED with 2K or 1440p resolution, I find it quite a challenge to see a noticeable difference.

The screen delivers vibrant colors, perfect contrast, high dynamics, and up to 750 cd/m² brightness in HDR mode. This provides enough light to avoid significant disturbances from outdoor lighting, and the screen is also VESA DisplayHDR 600 True Black certified. You can manually select 60 and 120 Hz refresh rates, with 60 being the default, likely to reduce power consumption.

It’s a touchscreen with good control, but it feels somewhat unnecessary since it cannot lay flat on a table for use as a workspace with a pen. No pen is included either, even though the screen reportedly supports it. Streaming high-definition movies to the laptop is a pleasure, and the built-in speakers match the visuals in power and quality. It can look and sound extremely good.

Great Webcam, Until You Need It

The webcam is hidden behind the screen, and when in use, the pixels in front of it dim to let light through. A very cool idea, and much better than the semi-transparent screen with a selfie camera behind it found in the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6. Here the camera is completely invisible when not in use.

Unfortunately, Lenovo fails to combine this feature with a particularly good camera. The image is murky and pixelated, as if I’m sitting in a slightly smoky room. As long as I remain still, it doesn’t look terrible and can suffice for a simple video call, but it’s not suitable for recording a vlog or hosting a video meeting or presentation.

You may need to invest in an external webcam for that. However, the problem is that you only have two Thunderbolt 4 ports for connecting peripherals, and one of them may be occupied by the power charger. There’s not even an analog 3.5 mm jack for headphones or headsets; instead, you have to connect with an adapter to one of the Thunderbolt ports, leaving you with none available. Lenovo addresses this by including a small USB-C dock that adds an HDMI port, dual USB-A ports, and an analog headset connection.

Is Lenovo Aiming Too High?

The laptop has an unusually large battery, said to have a capacity of 75 Wh. It charges relatively quickly with the included 65-watt compact USB PD charger, designed for mobile devices. The large battery is necessary since the laptop consumes more power than all other ultralight laptops I’ve tested this year. You could drain the battery in under two hours under heavy load, and with high brightness on the screen and a 120 Hz refresh rate, it could be even quicker. However, it can be energy-efficient at lower settings, achieving similar battery life to competitors thanks to its larger battery.

Had the display been less demanding, I believe Lenovo could have squeezed a lot more time from the battery. I wonder how it would perform with a less bright 1440p OLED in a 16:9 format instead. It would offer longer battery life and allow for a webcam to be placed above the screen. While hiding it behind the surface may look cool, it wasn’t genuinely a smart idea.

Ultimately, this over-ambition raises the price too much, thereby detracting from the overall experience.

Specifications

• Product Name: Lenovo Yoga Slim 9 14ILL10 83CX0007MX
• Tested: April 2025
• Manufacturer: Lenovo
• Processor: Intel Core Ultra 7 258V, 4 P-cores up to 4.8 GHz + 4 LPE-cores up to 3.7 GHz
• Graphics: Intel Arc Graphics 140V
• NPU: Intel AI Boost, 47 TOPS
• Memory: 32 GB LPDDR5X
• Storage: 1 TB SSD
• Display: 14-inch glossy OLED, 3840 x 2400 pixels, 120 Hz, 750 cd/m², multitouch
• Webcam: 1080p
• Connections: 2 Thunderbolt 4 ports
• Wireless: WiFi 7, Bluetooth 5.4
• Operating System: Windows 11 Pro
• Other: Backlit keyboard, fingerprint reader, shock-proof (MIL-STD-810H), USB-C dock included, case
• Noise Level: 0–44 dBa
• Battery: 75 Wh, 1 hour 40 minutes (high load, full brightness) to approximately 18 hours (low load, low brightness)
• Dimensions: 12.3 x 8.1 x 0.6 inches (31.3 x 20.7 x 1.5 cm)
• Weight: 2.72 lbs (1.23 kg)
• Price: $2,885