The Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i is a tough sell, but the display is insane

With a 165Hz 15.3″ OLED display with up to 1,100nits of peak brightness, a high-end Intel Core Ultra 9 CPU with dedicated NVIDIA RTX graphics, and a wide array of ports (including an SD card slot), you would think that the Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i would be a true pro-level laptop, especially given its high-end price, plus the fact that Lenovo put “Pro” in the name. And indeed this laptop has a lot going for it, but is lacking in a few key areas that might give premium laptop buyers and professionals pause, and it’s certainly much heavier than the insanely-lightweight Yoga 7 Slim Ultra.

Does the Yoga Po 7i live up to its fantastic spec sheet, and is it worth your money?

Operating System

Windows 11

CPU

Intel Core Ultra 9 386H

The Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i Aura Edition is a premium laptop with a 15.3″ OLED Touchscreen and is powered by the Intel Core Ultra 9 CPU with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. 

Pros & Cons

• Big, crisp OLED touchscreen display
• NVIDIA dedicated graphics
• Charges quickly

• Expensive
• Performance isn’t great
• Battery life is inferior

Lenovo kindly loaned us the Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i for this review. It has not seen this review before publishing or had a say in the content.

Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i price and availability

The Yoga Pro 7i can be had in multiple configurations. The higher end version we have is powered by the 16-core Intel Core Ultra 9 386H processor with 32GB RAM and is offered with dedicated NVIDIA RTX 5060 graphics for around $2400 when bought directly from Lenovo, though you can also find this at Best Buy.

If you like this form factor and want to pay less, you can spec this laptop with the lower Core Ultra 7 CPU, which brings the price down to $2149. But we’ll be talking about the $2,399 version in this review, which is what Lenovo sent us.

That price seems a high ask when a similar (and superior) laotop, the ASUS Zenbook A16, can be had for less at around $1700.

6/10

Operating System

Windows 11

CPU

Intel Core Ultra 9 386H

The Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i Aura Edition is a premium laptop with a 15.3″ OLED Touchscreen and is powered by the Intel Core Ultra 9 CPU with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. 

The Yoga Pro 7i has a lot of ports

But that’s where the “Pro” starts and ends

If you like ports, the Yoga Pro 7i has a lot of them. On the left, you get two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports (though a proper hub can unlock even more), an HDMI 2.1 port and an SD card reader that supports UHS-II speeds. Certainly, this amount of I/O is pro-level, especially with that SD card slot, which is ideal for anyone that takes photography seriously.

Then on the right, you’ll find two USB-A ports (USB 3.2 Gen 2), a headphone jack, a power button with LED indicator, and a hardware camera kill switch. I have to say that it’s great having USB-A ports on a laptop so that you don’t have to worry about carrying dongles and adapters if you want to plug in older accessories.

The large trackpad utilizes a haptic vibration motor to simulate a click, giving the trackpad a quality, solid feel, unlike mechanical trackpads found on lesser laptops that you can feel press inward.

The keyboard is a high point, offering a nice 1.5mm of key travel (offering a satisfying tactile feel) and is backlit. Each key is slightly concave, offering an ergonomic surface on each key. And yes, you do get a forgettable Copilot key, but you can remap it to do something more useful.

The Yoga Pro 7i has fantastic audio

With quad speakers and Dolby Atmos, plus a headphone jack

Credit: Brandon Miniman / MakeUseOf

While the speaker array is not as loud and clear as my 16″ MacBook Pro, it’s close. The Yoga Pro 7i has a quad-speaker audio sytem with Dolby Atmos that positions sets of speakers to the right and left of the keyboard. The resulting audio is exceptional with great highs, crisp volume even at high levels, and even some bass.

Yoga Pro 7i has a top-shelf Intel Core Ultra 9

More impressive on paper than in benchmarks and daily use

It was relatively easy to get the Yoga Pro 7i to hit its thermal limit and for the CPU fans to come on, even during light loads. That’s a shame considering the laptop has a high-end Intel Core Ultra 986H 16-core CPU and 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM and a 1TB PCIe Gen 4 M.2 NVMe SSD.

What does that mean? The Yoga Pro 7i is not a performance champ both in the benchmarks and with heavy workloads where the laptop seems to get a bit sluggish. However, thanks to a lot of fast RAM, the laptop handles many Chrome tabs just fine in my testing.

And it does game decently well. I was able to get Counter Strike 2 to consistently get frame rates around 66FPS on default settings, but the laptop had to work hard with a lot of fan noise during gameplay.

Battery life is good but not great

But the Yoga Pro 7i charges rapidly

Credit: Brandon Miniman / MakeUseOf

The Yoga Pro 7i has an 84Wh battery which charges very quickly with the included 140-watt charger (I got from 0-100% in only about 84 minutes). Battery life overall isn’t great, especially when compared to ARM-based laptops like those from Apple or those with a Snapdragon CPU. With moderate/heavy usage and medium screen brightness, the Yoga Pro 7i lasted me 4–5 hours before needing to recharge. My MacBook Pro with its M3 Max chip can go almost 9 hours before needing a charge in my testing.

Easily handles external displays

The dedicated GPU handles a lot of pixels easily

Credit: Brandon Miniman / MakeUseOf

I had no problem running a 4K external monitor through the Yoga Pro 7i’s Thunderbolt 4 port thanks to the Nvidia RTX 5060 GPU that handles the graphics on this laptop. As mentioned, the graphics performance on this laptop is solid, but it struggles a bit with gaming.

The display is excellent indoors

The screen is 165Hz, but highly reflective, and no pen is included

Credit: Brandon Miniman / MakeUseOf

The high 165Hz refresh 15.3″ 2560×1600 OLED touchscreen display is fantastic indoors, but terrible outdoors because of insufficient brightness and a super reflective coating on the display. But indoors, the display is fantastic with punchy colors and very deep blacks.

While the Yoga Pro 7i does technically support pen input on the touchpad (which can act as a drawing surface), it’s not as useful as other laptops that allow the screen to fold flat like a tablet in order to take notes. The screen on this laptop opens to 175°, which isn’t flat enough to use the display to comfortably take notes. If you want to use a pen, you’ll have to pay $40 for the Yoga Pen Gen 2, which is not included—but should be at this price.

Should you buy the Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i?

It’s hard to justify at this price

Credit: Brandon Miniman / MakeUseOf

You can do better at nearly $3,000 with this configuration. Usually, this price tier is reserved for the absolute best in Windows laptops, and while this laptop has a glowing spec sheet, it just doesn’t perform as well as other notebooks at this price. If you want my recommendation for a 16″ Windows Laptop with better features, performance, and price, check out the ASUS Zenbook A16.

You should buy the Yoga Pro 7i if:

• You need a Windows laptop with large, high-refresh OLED screen
• You want a lot of I/O, including an SD card slot and USB-A

You should skip the Yoga Pro 7i if:

• You need top-shelf performance
• You want all-day battery life
• You need laptop that can be viewable outdoors

6/10

Operating System

Windows 11

CPU

Intel Core Ultra 9 386H

GPU

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060

RAM

32GB LPDDR5X

The Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i Aura Edition is a premium laptop with a 15.3″ OLED Touchscreen and is powered by the Intel Core Ultra 9 CPU with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD.