Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition review: the Intel comeback continues

More laptops are rolling out with Intel’s new Lunar Lake chipset, which is aimed primarily at matching Qualcomm and Apple in terms of efficiency and battery life. We’ve reviewed a couple of such machines with mixed results so far, and another just crossed my desk. The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition is an attractive machine on paper and offers us another chance to test the newest chipset.

The Yoga Slim 7i is a bit unusual, in that it’s a 15-inch laptop when most manufacturers are pivoting to 16-inch displays. That pits it against the Apple MacBook Air 15 and the Microsoft Surface Laptop, both of which are very strong competitors. As I discovered, the Yoga Slim 7i earns itself a spot at that table.

Specs and configuration

There are two basic models of the Yoga Slim 7i Aura Addition. The $1,280 base model has an Intel Core Ultra 7 256V chipset, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and a 15.3-inch 2.8K IPS display (the only option). Upgrading to a 1TB SSD costs an additional $42. The high-end model is $1,422 for a Core Ultra 7 258V, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD.

The MacBook Air 15 starts at at around the same point, $1,299, for an 8-core CPU/10-core GPU M3 chipset, but it has just 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. To match the Yoga Slim 7i base model, you’ll spend $1,699. The high-end MacBook Air 15 is $2,499 for 24GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD. The Surface Laptop also starts at $1,299 with a Snapdragon X Elite chipset, and that nets you 16GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD storage. Upgrading to a 512GB SSD comes out at $1,499, and then with 64GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, it’s a lot more expensive as well at $2,499.

The Yoga Slim 7i is more attractively priced than its immediate competition. As we’ll see, that makes it a strong value.

Design

The Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition (Yoga Slim 7i from here on out) is a great laptop to look at and to hold in hand. To begin with, its all-aluminum construction is quite solid, with no meaningful bending, flexing, or twisting in the lid, keyboard deck, or chassis.

It’s at least the equal of the MacBook Air and the Surface Laptop, both of which are also incredibly well-built. The hinge is a little tight and so you need two hands to open the lid, but it does avoid any wobble. The rounded edges make it comfortable to hold, although like many laptops today, the palm rest edges could be a bit smoother.

And the Yoga Slim 7i lives up to its name. Even with a 15.3-inch display, it’s quite thin at just 0.55 inches. The MacBook Air 15 is thinner at an insane 0.45 inches, while the Surface Laptop is considerably thicker at 0.72 inches. The Yoga Slim 7i and MacBook Air are roughly the same weight, at around 3.3 pounds, while the Surface Laptop is a bit heavier at 3.67 pounds. That makes the Yoga Slim 7i a remarkably portable laptop with a large display.

Aesthetically, the Yoga Slim 7i sticks with Lenovo’s latest design that’s modern, minimalist, and elegant. It omes in a dark gray color with reasonably small display bezels and Lenovo’s now-iconic reverse notch at the top that houses the webcam electronics.

That’s the opposite of Apple’s display notch on the MacBook Air. The Surface Laptop has slightly larger bezels. Really, all of these are gorgeous laptops in their own ways, and the Yoga Slim 7i deserves consideration on that basis alone.

Keyboard and touchpad

The keyboard is the same as Lenovo uses across almost all its laptops. It has large, sculpted keycaps with plenty of key spacing, and the switches are reasonably deep with a snappy, precise feel. I like it quite a bit, almost as much as my favorite, Apple’s Magic Keyboard. I was up to full speed immediately, and I was able to type this review without any fatigue.

The touchpad is less impressive. It could be larger, to begin with, and both the MacBook Air and Surface Laptop have larger touchpads. Also, it’s mechanical, where more premium laptops are offering haptic versions — such as the best, the Force Touch haptic touchpad on MacBooks with the innovative Force Click feature. Lenovo has some good haptic touchpads on other models, such as the ThinkPad Z16, so I wish it had added it here.

The display is touch-enabled, which I like. It’s not a do-or-die feature, but I miss it when I’m using a MacBook.

Connectivity and webcam

Connectivity is very good, with a mix of modern and legacy connections. It’s better than the MacBook Air’s two Thunderbolt 4 ports, while the Surface Laptop is close with two USB4 and one USB-A. I do wish the Yoga Slim 7i had an SD card reader. Wireless connectivity is fully up to date.

The webcam is a 1080p version, and it supports the full complement of Copilot+ AI functionality like enhanced Microsoft Studio Effects. The Neural Processing Unit (NPU) exceeds the Copilot+ baseline of 40 tera operations per second (TOPS), and thus can handle more efficient on-device AI processing as more features roll out. The Surface Laptop also supports Copilot+, while the MacBook Air 15 runs Apple Intelligence — a very different approach to on-device AI than Microsoft’s initiative.

Performance

The biggest story here is the introduction of Intel Lunar Lake, also known as Core Ultra Series 2. The new chipset is focused on efficiency, running at 17 watts and  representing a direct replacement for the 15-watt Meteor Lake U-series. The Core Ultra 7 258V in my review unit has eight cores (four Performance and four Low Power Efficient) and eight threads. Right now, there’s no direct replacement for the 28-watt Core Ultra H-series, which will be coming with Intel Arrow Lake.

The challenge is that it’s coming up against the Qualcomm Snapdragon X series, which is also aimed at efficiency. As we’ll see, the Yoga Slim 7i is at a real disadvantage in terms of performance. The 12-core Snapdragon X Elite and 10-core Snapdragon X Plus are faster, as is AMD’s new Ryzen AI 9 and earlier Meteor Lake H-series machines.

Interestingly, the Yoga Slim 7i was more competitive with the other laptops in our comparison group in the Cinebench R24 multi-core test while falling a little behind the other two Lunar Lake laptops in the single-core test. It was also slower in the Geekbench 6 single-core test, but competitive in multi-core. And then, in our Handbrake video encoding test, it was significantly faster than the Asus ExpertBook P5 and ZenBook S 14. The MacBook Air M3 is much faster than all these laptops in single-core performance and competitive in multi-core.

Overall, the Yoga Slim 7i is fast enough for demanding productivity users, but Lunar Lake is clearly not a leap forward in performance compared to other new chipsets. Note that it uses the integrated Intel Arc 140V graphics, which are faster than earlier generations, but still quite a bit slower than even integrated discrete graphics.

Battery life

Efficiency is where the rubber meets the road in evaluating Lunar Lake. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X, which runs on Windows on Arm, was a huge step forward for Windows laptops, but it wasn’t strong enough to unseat Apple’s M3 chipset in overall battery life.

Our previous two Lunar Lake machines didn’t quite match, and so I was eager to run out battery tests on the Yoga Slim 7i. The laptop has a 15.3-inch display and 70 watt-hour battery, which is slightly more than the 66 watt-hour batteries in both the MacBook Air 15 and the Surface Laptop.

With that in mind, the Yoga Slim 7i did fairly well. It matched the Surface Laptop in our web-browsing test, while the Surface Laptop lasted a long longer looping our test video. The MacBook Air M3 results here are with the 13-inch model, but the 15-inch machine would likely do at least as well.

Overall, this helps solidify Lunar Lake as one of the most efficient Windows chipsets yet, but not necessarily the most efficient — and it’s still not quite as efficient as Apple’s M3. And the upcoming M4 chipset is likely to be even more efficient.

Display and audio

The Yoga Slim 7i has one display option, a 15.3-inch 2.8K (2880 x 1800) IPS panel running at up to 120Hz. Out of the box, it’s it’s quite nice, although I admit that I’m spoiled by OLED displays and by Apple’s mini-LED panels in its MacBook Pros. I would prefer a slightly sharper resolution, but I’m sure most people won’t mind.

According to my colorimeter, this is good display given the technology. It was very bright at 532 nits, around the same as the Surface Laptop’s 561 nits and more than the MacBook Air’s 475 nits. Its contrast was very good for IPS at 1,460:1, with the MacBook at 1,200:1 and the Surface Laptop at 1,440:1. Its colors came in at 99% of sRGB, 74% of AdobeRGB, and 74% of DCI-P3, which isaverage for IPS. Both the Surface Laptop and MacBook Air were better, at 100%, 85%, and 95%, and 100%, 90%, and 95%, respectively. The Lenovo display was very color accurate at a Delta-E of 0.93, compared to the MacBook Air 15 at 1.23 and the Surface Laptop at 1.27.

You won’t fault this display for most work, but the other two laptops will be better for creators.

The four-speaker audio, with two tweeters and two woofers, was excellent.  There was a bunch of distortion-free volume, with clear mids and highs and a decent amount of bass. Apple’s MacBook Pro 14 still has better audio with its six-speaker setup, but the Yoga Slim 7i sounds better than both the MacBook Air 15 and Surface Laptop.

A great new Windows laptop with much better battery life

The Yoga Slim 7i faces some stiff competition among the limited number of 15-inch laptops. It’s just as well-built as its competition and it looks great. It’s very portable — though not quite as thin as the MacBook Air 15 — and light enough that you won’t mind carrying it around.

It’s also surprisingly affordable, more so than the other two I’ve mentioned throughout this review. That makes it very attractive. It’s not the fastest laptop, but it gets very good battery life. If you’re looking for a larger laptop with a lot to offer, the Yoga Slim 7i should be on your list.