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May 16, 2023

Lenovo Slim 9i Review

The word "premium" can indicate a lot of things in a laptop review. It can describe the cost—like the $2,070 price of the Lenovo Slim 9i—or the construction, materials, or features. (The base model,

The word "premium" can indicate a lot of things in a laptop review. It can describe the cost—like the $2,070 price of the Lenovo Slim 9i—or the construction, materials, or features. (The base model, mind you, starts at $1,249.) The Lenovo Slim 9i manages to tick all the right boxes, pairing a luxe metal-and-glass design with potent processing and some especially fine extras. From the 14-inch OLED touch screen to the extra-large, glass-surfaced touchpad, it's an ultraportable laptop that looks and feels as rich as its high-end price for our tested model. Only short battery life keeps it from higher marks and the award podium.

Our review model, the Lenovo Slim 9 14IAP7, is a 14-inch ultraportable with a Intel Core i7-1280P processor, a 14-core beast that offers plenty of power, as well as efficiency for all-day battery life. Lenovo pairs it with 32GB of memory and 1TB of solid-state drive (SSD) storage, and the processor's integrated Iris Xe graphics processor supports everything but AAA gaming. At the moment, there's only the one 12th Generation Core configuration available, selling for $2,070 from Lenovo; the $1,249 base model uses an 11th Gen Core i7-1195G7.

The Slim 9i is part of Lenovo's line of ultraportable laptops, which are defined by thin, featherweight designs. Unlike carbon-fiber-based models from Lenovo, the Slim laptops use an all-metal chassis and top it off with an elegant, glass-covered lid. The glass itself is tapered, with a rounded edge that makes the laptop comfortable to hold when closed.

Even more important, with a design that measures just 0.59 by 12.4 by 8.44 inches, the Slim 9i weighs only 3 pounds. That puts it in the same ultraportable class of laptops as the Apple MacBook Air (2022, M2) or the Dell XPS 13 Plus.

With a coppery color that Lenovo calls "Oatmeal" paired with the white glass lid, the sleek ultraportable stands in stark contrast to business-oriented models, like the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon. The combination of a polished rounded edge with a bead-blasted matte finish across the palm rest and underside of the chassis renders the metal construction extremely comfortable to the touch. Unlike some metal-chassis ultraportables, there is no hard edge to dig into your wrists as you type.

Above the display is a small protruding bar that houses the webcam and also serves as a lip for easily opening the lid. It's not as pronounced as the one used on the Lenovo ThinkPad Z13, but it offers a 1080p webcam with infrared (IR) sensor for Windows Hello secure login.

The 14-inch Slim 9i may be thin, but it doesn't skimp on the user experience. The OLED display boasts 3,840-by-2,400-pixel resolution, putting it into 4K territory with a taller 16:10 aspect ratio. The touch screen offers all of the vibrant color and bright HDR highlights we expect, but the real treat is the deep, inky black levels that only OLED can provide.

That panel is surrounded by stunningly thin bezels, making it feel even larger than the 14 inches it really is. Our only issue with it—and it's a small one—is that the display is a bit glossy, making it prone to glare and reflection.

To either side of the keyboard you'll see subtle speaker grilles, which house the Slim 9i's Bowers & Wilkins speakers. They provide surprisingly rich sound whether I am watching movies on Netflix or listening to "Silent Shout" by The Knife on YouTube.

Lenovo's laptops are frequently praised for their keyboards. The Slim 9i is an interesting example of this, because it's not the best laptop keyboard Lenovo has made, but it's still above average. Using the keyboard side by side with that of the Lenovo ThinkPad Z13, the typing isn't as comfortable as I've experienced with other Lenovo laptops, but it still has good typing feel, if short key travel.

The expansive touchpad is generously large, with a smooth glass surface and a deep, satisfying click. Measuring 3.15 by 5.31 inches, it's wide enough to scroll widely through documents and spreadsheets, but precise enough for fine detail. The only issue with that wide design is that its right and left click zones are so far apart.

Ultraportable laptops have lately adopted a minimalist approach, cutting down the number of available connectors on a laptop in the name of thinner profiles and less complicated internals. The Lenovo Slim 9i is no exception, but it's a bit more robust than some thin-and-light machines we've reviewed.

On the right, you'll find a single Thunderbolt 4 port, along with a power button, and the slider switch for the webcam's privacy shutter. On the left, you'll find two more Thunderbolt 4 ports, along with a 3.5mm audio jack.

Though still a streamlined selection, it's more generous than many of the competing systems, which routinely offer only two USB-C ports (often with only one delivering full Thunderbolt 4 capability) for any and all connections, sometimes even jettisoning the audio jack. The Slim 9i is also equipped with Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth.

With a $2,000-plus price, the Slim 9i sits alongside the top configurations of the best ultraportables on the market, like the Apple MacBook Air (2022, M2), the Dell XPS 13 Plus, and the HP Spectre x360 13.5 (2022). And like the Lenovo ThinkPad Z13, it's a laptop that's made as much to show off luxury appeal as it is for portability. But, as our performance testing shows, it has what it takes to back up that flash with real capability.

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet work, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's boot 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 Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we 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).

Our final productivity test is workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

Even though the Slim 9i is facing off against similarly equipped systems—the Dell XPS 13 Plus boasts the same CPU, while everything is still within a similar class—we saw some surprising variety in performance results from the different systems.

Some tests demonstrated the near-identical capabilities of these systems, with almost indistinguishable scores in tests like PCMark 10, while others showed the Slim 9i having a clear advantage. In Handbrake, the Lenovo led the pack with a video transcode time of 6 minutes and 30 seconds, and again surged ahead in Cinebench with 11,035 points. That extra capability in the last two tests (which are highly sensitive to core count) is likely due to the beefed-up memory allotment, which doubles the 16GB found in the competing systems, and especially the extra cores afforded by the P-series CPU and Performance-core and Efficient-core hybrid design.

The combination of CPU and RAM also produced a leading score in Photoshop, where it led the pack in a test that several of the systems had trouble even running.

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 both low-level routines, like texturing and high-level, 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.

The differences were less pronounced in the graphics department, but there's stiffer competition here. The Slim 9i turned in excellent scores in both 3DMark tests, but the AMD-powered Lenovo ThinkPad Z13 seemed to have the advantage over the Intel Iris Xe graphics all of the Intel-based models were using. Similarly, the Apple M2 chip that powers the MacBook Air left everyone else in the dust in our GFXBench tests, but compatibility issues kept it from doing the same in 3DMark.

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window)) 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.

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).

For premium laptops, OLED has become the display technology of choice. This is partly due to its excellent black levels to reach 100% color gamut and decent brightness, but also because its extra efficient when running in dark mode. It's not the only panel type out there, considering the IPS displays used in the MacBook Air and the ThinkPad Z13, but the Slim 9i's OLED screen looks as pleasing as anything I've seen in this price range.

Battery life is a different issue. While some ultraportables deliver truly all-day battery life, like the MacBook Air (16:49) and the HP Spectre x360 (15:10), the Slim 9i hit its limit just moments shy of the 10-hour mark. That's certainly enough for the average day of work or school, or a coast-to-coast flight, but it's not as impressive as we hoped.

The glitzy Lenovo Slim 9i is every inch a premium ultraportable laptop, matching the best in the category ounce for ounce in almost every respect. From the polished metal-and-glass design to the generous port selection and expansive touchpad, it's a laptop that feels well worth the premium price, and it has the performance to match.

That said, the battery life, while adequate, falls far short of the 15-plus hours that most laptops in this price range can deliver. It's not enough to erode our four-star recommendation. But if you need the sort of longevity that premium ultraportables routinely offer these days, the Slim 9i's sub-10-hour battery life is a real drawback to an otherwise superb thin-and-light laptop.

The Lenovo Slim 9i is a fantastically thin and light ultraportable that combines slick design with capable performance.

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