Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10 Review: Classy, Glassy Copilot Plus PC With Wonky Webcam

8.1/ 10
SCORE

Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10

$1,782 at Lenovo

Pros

• Incredibly compact and light
• Stunning looks and strong build quality
• Gorgeous OLED display
• Quad speakers offer big sound for a small laptop
• Excellent keyboard

Cons

• Terrible webcam performance
• Glass top cover is an extreme fingerprint magnet
• 4K resolution is overkill for 14-inch screen
• Undersized mechanical touchpad is disappointing for the price
• Just two ports

In a sea of silver and gray laptops, Lenovo’s Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10 stands out. Instead of a basic brushed aluminum or dull shade of gray, this premium Copilot Plus PC comes decked out in a muted aqua color, and its glass top cover shimmers. On the flip side of the luxuriously glossy lid is a beautiful OLED display that’s crisp, vivid and color accurate. And hiding behind the display is its most unusual feature: a webcam. Instead of in a notch or a thicker display bezel at its top, putting the camera behind the display makes this Yoga one of the most compact 14-inch laptops available — but the webcam performance takes a hit in order to get it.

Other misses on the otherwise thoughtfully designed, well-built Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10 are a distinct lack of ports and touchpad haptics. The laptop has only a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports, one of which you’ll need to use for charging. There isn’t even a headphone jack. And the touchpad is undersized with a mechanical click response; many premium laptops have more spacious dimensions with haptic feedback. Even with these demerits, though, there’s lots to like about this Copilot Plus PC.

Lenovo sells one version of the Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10 for $1,980, but it was continually discounted to $1,782 when I was working on this review. It’s also available at Best Buy for $2,000, and I found it on sale for $1,700. It’s based on an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V, which is an eight-core processor from Intel’s second generation (codenamed Lunar Lake) of Core Ultra AI chips. It also features 32GB of RAM, integrated Intel Arc 140V graphics and a 1TB solid-state drive. The 14-inch OLED display is a 4K (3,840×2,400 pixels, 120Hz panel rated for 400 nits and HDR 600.

Lenovo appears to offer customization options on its site for the Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10, but the only items you can customize are the OS (Windows 11 Home or Pro) and choosing a flavor of Microsoft Office to preinstall.

International buyers have a second option in addition to the configuration I tested. A lower-tier model of Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10 with a Core Ultra 7 256V CPU and 16GB of RAM is available in the UK and Australia. Pricing starts at 1,800 in the UK and AU$2,739 in Australia.

One last note on the Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10: It’s a standard clamshell laptop and not a two-in-one convertible as its «Yoga» name and touch display might suggest. Lenovo’s Yoga Slim models are ultrathin laptops and not two-in-ones.

Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10 performance

The Core Ultra 7 258V from Intel’s Core Ultra Series 2 family is designed for a balance of performance and efficiency. It has eight physical cores (four performance and four low-power efficient cores) and doesn’t feature Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology that allows a physical core to act as two virtual cores. Without that, the Core Ultra 7 258V’s total number of processing threads is the same as its number of physical cores: eight. By comparison, the previous-gen Core Ultra 7 155H has 16 cores (four performance, eight efficient and two low-power efficient cores) and, with Hyper-Threading, a total of 22 threads.

In addition to eliminating Hyper-Threading for greater power efficiency, the Core Ultra 7 258V is also a lower-power chip than the previous Core Ultra series. The most popular chip from the first Core Ultra series is the Core Ultra 7 155H chip, which runs between 20 and 155 watts. In contrast, the Core Ultra 7 258V stays between 8 and 37 watts.

Like similar Lunar Lake-powered laptops, the Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10 is better on single-core tests and actually takes a step back in multicore performance compared with laptops such as the HP Spectre x360 14 and Lenovo Yoga 9i 14 Gen 9 with the Core Ultra 7 155H CPU. Check out the performance charts below to see the numbers for our single- and multicore benchmarks of Geekbench 6 and Cinebench 2024.

Where Lunar Lake does take a leap forward is with its integrated GPU. The Intel Arc 140V graphics are superior to the first-gen Intel Arc graphics as well as Qualcomm’s integrated Adreno GPU on its Snapdragon X series chips. On the 3DMark Steel Nomad test, the Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10 and three other models (the Asus Zenbook S 14, Acer Swift 14 AI and HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14) with the same Core Ultra 258V processor topped the chart.

On Procyon’s AI Computer Vision benchmark that measures integer math proficiency for AI workloads, Intel has made a big leap in AI performance from the first-gen Core Ultra series to the second. The Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10’s score on the test was in line with other second-gen Core Ultra-based Copilot Plus PCs as well as those with Qualcomm Snapdragon X series chips and nearly three times the score of the HP Pavilion Plus 14, which is a recent budget laptop with a Core Ultra 5 125H from Intel’s first-gen series.

On our YouTube streaming battery drain test, the Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10 lasted 13.5 hours, which is hours and hours less than what you get with other Copilot Plus PCs such as the HP OmniBook X 14, Acer Swift 14 AI and Microsoft Surface Laptop 7. But each of those models has a lower-resolution IPS display that doesn’t consume battery resources at the clip that a 4K OLED panel does. The Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10 provides enough battery time to get you through a workday, but other Copilot Plus PCs will let you leave your charger at home for days at a time if you’re willing to trade some display fidelity for battery life that approaches or even exceeds 20 hours.

Unique but not flawless design

Tucking the webcam behind the display is the Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10’s most unusual design element, and I’ll go into detail about it shortly, but the most striking aspect of this Copilot Plus PC is on its surface. Namely, its top cover. Instead of aluminum, it’s made from glass and has a smooth, glossy finish. It’s a shade lighter than the rest of the vaguely aqua-colored body that Lenovo calls Tidal Teal. And like the tide, the top cover’s look is always changing depending on how the light catches, shifting from bright teal to a deep aquamarine and often a mix of both.

The glass cover is not just for show. The reinforced glass is impact-resistant to help protect the OLED display on the other side of it. I love the look and feel of the glass cover, but it does have one downside — it’s an extreme fingerprint magnet. You’ll probably want to keep a cleaning cloth in your laptop bag if you decide to go with the Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10. Smudges are easily wiped away; I found them much easier to remove from the glass surface than the battles I sometimes find myself waging against fingerprints on a MacBook or other aluminum-topped laptops. It is BYOC; I was surprised that Lenovo didn’t include a cloth in the box, given how quickly smudges accumulate.

The glass top cover adds a luxurious feel to the Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10, but also adds a bit of weight. This is basically the opposite approach that Asus took with the lightweight Ceraluminum material for the Zenbook A14, which weighs a scant 2.2 pounds. The Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10 is more compact than the Zenbook A14, but is about half a pound heavier at 2.7 pounds.

With ultrathin bezels, the Yoga Slim 9i 14 is essentially a 14-inch laptop in a 13-inch form factor. And wouldn’t you know it, but the 13-inch MacBook Air weighs roughly the same as the Yoga Slim 9i 14. Among 14-inch Copilot Plus PCs, the Yoga Slim 9i 14’s compact design allows it to be lighter than average. The Acer Swift 14 AI, HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 and Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 are each a little heavier at just under 3 pounds.

The Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10’s 4K HDR OLED display is spectacular, but the 4K resolution is overkill for most people, given the size of the panel. As it is, Lenovo sets the default scaling to 300%, so you aren’t close to using all of the display’s pixels. (With display scaling set to 100%, text and icons are impossibly small.) A 3K resolution would more than suffice and help extend battery life and perhaps lower the price somewhat. As constituted, however, the 4K panel at its default scaling is stunning. The picture is sharp with vivid colors and effectively zero-nit black levels.

Color accuracy was excellent. On my tests with a Spyder X colorimeter, it covered 100% of the sRGB and P3 spaces and 94% of AdobeRGB. It also hit 394 nits of brightness, which is enough for an OLED — its superior contrast means it doesn’t need to be as bright as an LCD panel to create a good image.

Really, the only drawback I found with the display is its glossy finish. The edge-to-edge glass combined with the incredibly thin bezels creates an impressive visage, but glare and reflections can be a problem in bright rooms and especially outdoors — even when seated in the shade.

Where’s the webcam?

With the Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10, Lenovo introduces a new webcam placement it calls a camera-under-display (CUD) design. We’ve seen webcams hidden behind the display on some phones and tablets before, but this is the first laptop with such a webcam. To find room for the camera, Lenovo slapped a metal piece behind it on the laptop’s lid. This bump-out overhangs the top edge ever so slightly to create a convenient lip to swing open the display. But back to the camera itself: it’s shockingly terrible. It feels very first-gen of the so-called CUD technology.

The camera has a sky-high pixel count of 32 megapixels. It can snap 7,520×4,232-pixel photos but only 1080p video. And both at their maximum quality settings look hazy and fuzzy. It looks like they are shot through a gauze. Which I suppose they are, since the camera sits behind display layers. There’s no notch or any other indicator that there’s a camera hidden beneath the display. Only when the camera is active does a small black circle appear for the camera to view through the display. The design is clever and space-saving, but the execution leaves something to be desired. A webcam with a massive 32-megapixel sensor should be able to capture crisper, cleaner images and video, especially at the laptop’s premium price.

The webcam can’t do facial recognition for secure, biometric logins, but there is a fingerprint reader in the lower-right corner of the keyboard for such a thing. While the webcam lacks a physical shutter since it’s hidden away, there is a kill switch on the right edge of the laptop that cuts power to it, so you can protect your privacy when you aren’t using the camera.

Under the keyboard are four speakers in the form of two 2-watt tweeters and two 2-watt woofers. They all fire downward from two speaker grilles near the front edge of the laptop. The audio output would have offered greater separation between the highs and mid-tones and bass tones if the tweeters fired upward and only the woofers fired from the bottom panel, but the overall sound isn’t bad for such a small laptop. Music playback is only so enjoyable with such muddied sound, but movies and shows sound lively with the quad speakers. And the speakers can definitely fill a small room — you’ll get out of range of seeing details on the 14-inch display before you have trouble hearing the laptop’s audio.

The keyboard is exceptionally comfortable and has that lush-but-firm-and-responsive feel of a ThinkPad keyboard. The touchpad, however, is a mild disappointment. I don’t mind its diminutive size — that’s a trade-off for the laptop’s ultra-compact design — but I wish Lenovo found a way to add a haptic touchpad. The mechanical click response is consistent from left to right, but the diving-board effect can be felt where clicks feel firmer and firmer the higher up on the touchpad you go. A haptic touchpad offers the same click response everywhere on its surface, and you can also customize the click feedback to your liking. A haptic touchpad would be quieter when clicked, too; the Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10’s touchpad isn’t loud, but you can definitely hear its clicks.

Lenovo went ultraminimal with the ports for the Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10. It has just a pair of USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports — one on each side of the laptop. I like being able to charge the battery from either side, but when you’re charging, there’s just a single Thunderbolt 4 free. And you’ll need to provide your own adapters — Lenovo doesn’t include any in the box.

Is the Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10 worth buying?

If you spend much of your day on Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams meetings and the like and rely on the built-in webcam, then no. The under-display webcam isn’t up to the task of professional video calls, but it’s fine for casual chats. I mean, who doesn’t look better under a bit of soft focus, right?

Even with its faults, I would still recommend the Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10 to anyone with an eye for style who wants a high-end Windows ultraportable. Its bold design, solid build quality and beautiful OLED display make it worthy of its elevated price. Still, the cheaper, lighter and longer-running Asus Zenbook A14 remains my favorite Copilot Plus PC, with the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 making another great choice for its elegant design and awesome haptic touchpad.