Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i 14" Tidal Teal 2024 Review

So, you're looking at the Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i. It's a 14-inch ultraportable that's basically built for people who want a gorgeous screen and a lightweight design above all else. At 1.25kg, it's easy to carry, and that 32GB of RAM means you can have a million browser tabs open without breaking a sweat. But let's be real, this isn't a machine for heavy lifting or gaming. It's for the person who values style, portability, and a killer display for movies and web browsing.

The thing that grabs you immediately is that OLED screen. It's a 4K panel with a 120Hz refresh rate, and it scores in the 98th percentile. That means it's one of the best displays you can get on a laptop, period. Colors pop, blacks are truly black, and scrolling feels smooth. It's the kind of screen that makes everything else you do on it just feel a bit more premium.

Who is this for? If you're a business traveler who watches a lot of Netflix in hotel rooms, or a creative professional who needs accurate colors for photo editing (but not heavy video rendering), this is a fantastic fit. The 'Best for' scores tell the story: it's an 89.8 for entertainment and an 88.1 for being compact. It's built to be a pleasure to use on the go.

Under the hood, you've got an Intel 8-core CPU and integrated Intel Arc graphics with 16GB of shared VRAM. The performance story here is a bit of a mixed bag. The CPU lands in the 55th percentile, which is perfectly fine for everyday tasks like office work, video calls, and web browsing. You won't feel it slowing down. But it's not going to win any rendering races.

The GPU, sitting at the 59th percentile, confirms this isn't a gaming laptop. That 23.8 gaming score doesn't lie. You can play some older or less demanding titles at lower settings, but forget about modern AAA games. The real performance star is that NVMe SSD and the 32GB of fast LPDDR5X RAM. Everything feels snappy because the system has plenty of memory and can load files instantly. For the tasks it's designed for, it's plenty fast.

At $2000, the Yoga Slim 9i asks a lot of you. You're paying a premium for that incredible OLED screen, the sleek and portable design, and the high amount of RAM. You're not paying for raw processing or graphics power. It's a value proposition centered on the user experience and build quality, not benchmark-topping specs.

Compared to other laptops at this price, you could get machines with dedicated GPUs and more powerful CPUs. But they likely won't have this specific combination of a top-tier display, ultraportable form factor, and 32GB of RAM. You're buying a luxury ultraportable, not a workhorse. Whether that's worth it depends entirely on how much you value that screen and portability.

The most direct competitor is the ASUS Zenbook Duo. It also has a fantastic OLED screen and focuses on a premium portable experience, often at a slightly lower price. The trade-off is that the Zenbook might not feel as sleek or have quite the same build quality as the Yoga. For the Apple crowd, the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M4 is a beast. Its CPU and GPU performance will demolish the Yoga's, and its screen is also excellent. But you're locked into macOS, it's heavier, and you lose the touchscreen and 2-in-1 flexibility.

On the other end, you have gaming laptops like the MSI Vector or Gigabyte AORUS. For the same $2000, you'd get a dedicated RTX GPU, a much more powerful CPU, and a high-refresh screen built for gaming. The trade-off is huge: they'll be over twice as heavy, have worse battery life, and their screens, while fast, won't match the color accuracy and contrast of this OLED. They're completely different tools for a different job.

If your priority is having one of the best laptop screens on the market in a package that's easy to carry every day, and your work is mostly browsing, media, and office apps, the Yoga Slim 9i is a fantastic choice. It's a premium experience built around that gorgeous OLED display. Just go in with your eyes open about its performance limits.

But, if you need to do any serious video editing, 3D work, or gaming, you should look elsewhere. That $2000 could get you a much more powerful machine like a MacBook Pro or a gaming laptop, even if you sacrifice some portability or screen quality. This laptop knows what it is: a beautiful, portable window for content, not a powerhouse for creating it.