The 9i offers great usability, with gently concave keys with plenty of travel, a responsive touchpad, and the flexibility to flip the screen to turn the laptop into an inverted V-shaped tent or lay it flat for a full tablet experience. A simple stylus is included for those who want to do more detailed work. Typing was a breeze. The chassis design remains the same, with all corners and edges rounded, and it weighs just 2.4 pounds and is 18mm thick.
When it comes to performance, Intel’s latest chips give all kinds of laptops an edge, but as with most devices I’ve tested recently, it’s not a sudden surge in power. My benchmark scores were mixed across a range of general business and graphics-intensive apps, but ultimately came in slightly above average compared to the field of similarly equipped devices.
Photo: Best Buy
But battery life is a big concern. Gilbertson achieved double-digit runtimes in the 2023, but in my YouTube test, the laptop powered down after just under seven hours. That’s really disappointing for a machine of this size, and I ran the test a few times to make sure I wasn’t doing something wrong. The score remained the same. Oddly, the 9i was also pretty slow to boot up, taking a whopping 38 seconds to get to a usable state. That’s more than double the typical boot time for a 2024 laptop. And that doesn’t include the time it takes to figure out where the power button is.
The 2024 Yoga 9i is a reasonable price at $1,450, but we’d recommend keeping an eye out for a sale or two. Still, even at list price, it’s as proven a product as ever, as Lenovo themselves will say.
