We won't quite echo Buddy the Elf and shout, "You sit on a throne of lies!" However, the Yoga brand that's been a Lenovo hallmark since 2012 no longer means anything. The Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 9 (starts at $1,482; $1,899.99 as tested) is a conventional clamshell laptop—it's not a 2-in-1 convertible any more than the Yoga AIO desktop is. But if you're looking for a fast, luxurious notebook for demanding creative apps, the Yoga Pro 9i could be just the ticket. It earns an Editors' Choice award as a relatively affordable high-performance desktop replacement.
Configurations: Expensive, But Not Exorbitant
The $1,482 base model of the 16-inch Yoga Pro 9i combines an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor, 16GB of memory, a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive, and a 3,200-by-2,000-pixel IPS non-touch display backed by an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 graphics chip.
Our test unit (model 83DN0007US), $1,899.99 at Best Buy, ups the ante with a Core Ultra 9 185H chip, 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and Nvidia's 8GB GeForce RTX 4060. Its screen has the same 3,200-by-2,000-pixel resolution and game-worthy 165Hz refresh rate but features Mini LED technology rated at a dazzling 1,200 nits of brightness for HDR content—not to mention, touch capacity.
That's not cheap, but it's still south of the $2,000 line, which is more than you can say for near-workstation creative laptops like the Dell XPS 16 ($3,399 as tested) or the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra ($2,999.99 as tested). The Lenovo's screen is a bit shy of 4K resolution, and it settles for Nvidia's RTX 4060 instead of an RTX 4070 or 4080 GPU, but it's an undeniable deal.
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Design: Plenty Portable, With Plenty of Ports
Clad in Luna Gray anodized aluminum, the Yoga measures 0.72 by 14.3 by 10 inches and weighs 4.52 pounds. (IPS-screened models are trivially thinner and lighter.) That's within a few tenths of an inch of the Galaxy Book4 Ultra and the XPS 16, though the Samsung is lighter at 4.1 pounds and the Acer Swift Go 16 lighter still at 3.53 pounds. You'll feel a bit of flex if you grasp the screen corners or mash the keyboard.
Slim bezels surround the laptop's 16:10 aspect ratio display. You won't find any fingerprint reader, but the webcam centered above the display has IR face recognition for password-free logins with Windows Hello and an e-shutter switch on the laptop's right flank. The company brags about its "Lenovo X Power" cooling that enables the CPU and GPU to run at 130 watts, yielding a performance advantage in our benchmarks (see below).
The laptop's left-side ports include the AC adapter connector, HDMI 2.1 for an external monitor, two USB-C ports—one 20Gbps and one 40Gbps Thunderbolt 4—and an audio jack. On the right side, you'll find two 5Gbps USB 3.2 Type-A ports (one always on), an SD card slot, and the webcam kill switch. Wireless connectivity comes courtesy of Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth.
Using the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16: Big, Bright, and Bold
You can use Windows Settings or press Fn+R to switch the 3,200-by-2,000-pixel Mini LED screen between a 60Hz and 165Hz refresh rate. Lenovo calls it a PureSight Pro panel, which means exceptionally bright, with rich, vivid colors that pop. Its details are sharp, with no pixelation around the edges of letters, and the screen's whites are pure, which is helped by the ability to tilt the display back as far as you like, though it won't push past 180 degrees as a Yoga convertible's will. Its viewing angles are wide, though the touch glass catches reflections.
The 5-megapixel webcam captures well-lit and colorful images and videos with no noise or static at up to 2,560 by 1,440 (16:9) or 2,592 by 1,944 (4:3) pixels. Oddly, the Windows Camera app doesn't include the recently added AI Studio Effects (background blur and auto framing).
Lenovo's keyboard is brightly backlit and includes both Microsoft's Copilot key and a numeric keypad at the right; the latter has small Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys above it, so you don't have to pair the Fn key with the cursor arrow keys (though you can if you like). Unfortunately, those arrow keys are arranged in the awkward HP-style row we loathe, with hard-to-hit, half-height up and down arrows stacked between full-size left and right.
The typing feel is somewhat shallow and hollow but reasonably snappy, with decently forceful yet quiet feedback. Its large, buttonless glass touchpad glides and taps smoothly with a silent, comfortable click.
Six speakers (four woofers and two tweeters) pump out loud, enjoyable audio with more bass than I've heard from all but a few laptops. Vocals and instrumentals are clear instead of tinny, even at top volume, and it's easy to make out overlapping tracks. Lenovo included Dolby Atmos software to provide dynamic, game, music, movie, voice presets, and an equalizer.
A Lenovo Vantage app centralizes system updates, Wi-Fi security, and settings such as power/noise/cooling modes, presence-detection lock, and login. Lenovo also provides a McAfee trial and pitches subscriptions for performance optimization, identity protection, and locate-and-lock security services.
Testing the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16: Proactive Productivity
We pitted the Yoga Pro 9i against four other mid-to-upscale 16-inch notebooks with vivid OLED screens for our benchmark charts. The Dell XPS 16 and Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra one-up the Lenovo's graphics with Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4070 and carry a Core Ultra 7 and Core Ultra 9 chip, respectively. The HP Spectre x360 16 is a 2-in-1 convertible that, thanks to its Core Ultra 7 and RTX 4050 GPU, undercuts the Yoga's price at $1,709.99 as tested. So does the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo ($1,449 as tested), which settles for its Core Ultra 7 processor's Intel Arc integrated graphics.
Productivity Tests
We run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.
Three other benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.5 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. We also use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
Finally, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems. It uses Adobe's famous image editor, Creative Cloud version 22, to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes various general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks, from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
MSI's Prestige laptop performed admirably despite its Core Ultra 7 CPU against two Core Ultra 9 chips, but the Lenovo led the way in both our productivity and processing benchmarks, save for the storage test. Its performance approaches that of far pricier mobile workstations. Our HandBrake test resulted in a particularly positive showing for the Yoga, which was more than 30 seconds faster than the second-place Galaxy Book.
Graphics Tests
We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).
We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses low-level routines, like texturing, and high-level ones, like game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation, respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.
Can a GeForce RTX 4060 beat an RTX 4070? Given the correct wattage and thermal implementation, it absolutely can, which seemed to be the case here. The Yoga Pro 9i excelled in our gaming simulations. The MSI's integrated graphics were hopelessly outclassed by the others' discrete GPUs. While the gaming test results aren't all that important, they're a telling sign of how well this laptop would handle rendering 3D objects and animations for creative professionals.
Battery and Display Tests
We test each laptop and tablet's battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
It finished far back in last place, but the Lenovo's 12 hours of unplugged operation isn't awful for a powerful desktop replacement—we've been spoiled by laptops' battery life lately. The SpyderX Elite software runs in SDR mode, so we couldn't confirm Lenovo's claimed 1,200 nits of HDR brightness. However, its screen surpassed its advertised 600 SDR nits, showing enough clarity and color to satisfy demanding creative pros. Though, if you work with the Adobe RGB color gamut at all, just know that other laptops in this comparison achieved better coverage for that one specifically.
Verdict: One of the Best Deals in Creator Laptops
We praised the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo for selling a spiffy OLED screen for $1,450. The Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i is more expensive at $1,900 but combines a spiffy Mini LED display with a faster Core Ultra 9 CPU and Nvidia GeForce graphics, outpacing laptops that cost half again as much. We would appreciate the laptop even more if it weighed less and its arrow keys were in the proper inverted T instead of a row. Still, its screen, performance, and sound make the ninth Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 an easy Editors' Choice award winner.
The Yoga Pro 9i 16 would be an almost perfect high-performance laptop with one of Lenovo's ThinkPad keyboards instead of its consumer-grade keys. Even as is, it's an impressive value.
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