The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i 15 Aura Edition is a slim and gorgeous laptop that’s let down only by its dodgy Lunar Lake processor. The good news? An incoming fix should solve that problem. And while it’s not a big deal, I do feel like Lenovo has lost the script a bit on branding.
Despite its Yoga name, this is a laptop, not a convertible PC. To me, this is an IdeaPad or IdeaPad Pro. A really nice IdeaPad or IdeaPad Pro.
Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday — get free copies of Paul Thurrott's Windows 11 and Windows 10 Field Guides (normally $9.99) as a special welcome gift! The Yoga Slim 7i is thin, light, and gorgeous, and I love that Lenovo combined a large, 15.3-inch display with a centered keyboard devoid of a superfluous and inefficient numeric keypad.
I was immediately drawn to this laptop when I first saw it at IFA 2024 back in September, as it stood out with this unique set of attributes. And now that I’ve had it on hand for several weeks, I like the design even more. This is my preferred form factor for a laptop.
No, it’s not flashy, but that’s part of the charm. The Yoga comes in a single color, a dark gray that Lenovo calls Luna Grey, and the centered keyboard keys are a darker gray, providing a subtle but nice contrast. It’s a professional look, and I like how the speaker grills on either side visually frame the keyboard.
And while there are little branding bits all over the place, that, too, is subtly done. There’s a Pure Sight Pro (whatever that means) logo above the keyboard and to the left, a Lenovo Aura Edition logo below the keyboard and to the left, and then the traditional shiny YOGA branding on the right of the wrist rest. There are two removable stickers, one for e-support and one for the Intel processor, on the left of the wrist rest.
And then a shiny Lenovo logo on the outside of the display lid. That sounds like a lot, and it is. But most of that stuff is small and barely noticeable.
The fit and finish is impressive, with an amazingly stiff and well-made chassis. I have to push down with force on the center of the keyboard to see any flex at all. Lenovo ships the Yoga Slim with a single display option, but it’s a terrific choice, a 15.
3-inch 2.8K (2880 x 1800) multitouch IPS panel with a 16:10 aspect ratio and a dynamic 120 Hz refresh rate that outputs a bright 500 nits of light and supports 100 percent of the P3 and sRGB color spaces and is certified for TÜV Low Blue Light and Eyesafe. It’s gorgeous, with incredibly thin bezels, especially on the sides.
And its curved corners elegantly match the curved corners of the display lid, though the taller top bezels make them appear a bit off. While some will grouse that there’s no OLED display option, this panel is the right choice. It’s optimal for productivity work, with no annoying reflections.
And as noted below, it provides a wonderful multimedia experience as well, thanks to its Dolby Vision HDR capabilities and high resolution. I think it’s nearly perfect. It also supports a variety of advanced display options.
In addition to the refresh rate, you can configure automatic color management in the Windows 11 Settings app, and you’ll find a lot more in Lenovo’s crowded Vantage app. There’s a superfluous Color temperature setting that works separately from Night sight in Windows, a Super resolution feature for Chromium browser-based video playback, and color space management capabilities (that should be available directly in Windows but isn’t). Vantage links to the Windows 11 Adaptive brightness setting in Windows Settings, too, but that option isn’t available, oddly.
The display lid lies flat, which I love. It’s a bit stiff, which means it stays in place nicely in use. But it’s also impossible to open one-handed.
The Yoga Slim 7i 15 Aura Edition is powered by an Intel Core Ultra 7 Series 2 (“Lunar Lake”) processor, 16 or 32 GB of 8533 MHz LPDDR5X RAM, and 512 GB or 1 1TB of M.2 PCIe Gen4 SSD storage. That sounds straightforward enough, but as you may know, Intel spent much of the past year racing to get Lunar Lake to market, dropping its previous processor architecture along the way and introducing , one that features non-upgradeable RAM on-package with the processor.
And that explains the first oddity I see here: There are two processor choices, a Core Ultra 7 256V and a Core Ultra 7 258V. And they are—wait for it–identical to each other. The only difference is the RAM: If you order a PC with 16 GB of RAM, you get the Core Ultra 7 256V.
And if you order one with 32 GB of RAM, you get the Core Ultra 7 258V. I know. I’m confused by this as well, but since “Lunar Lake” a one-off, we won’t need to deal with this strangeness ever again.
In any event, the review unit shipped with 16 GB of (non-upgradeable) RAM, so it also contains the Core Ultra 7 256V processor. Like its mostly identical sibling, this system on a chip (SoC) has an 8-core processor with 4 performance cores and 4 low-power efficient cores, Intel Arc Graphics 140V, and an Intel AI Boost NPU. And just about all the new and different compared to the previous-gen “Meteor Lake” processors it/they replace.
For example, the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor delivered 6 performance cores, 8 efficient cores, and 2 low-power efficient cores. Its first-generation Intel Arc graphics are significantly less powerful than the version offered by the Series 2. And its first-generation Intel AI Boost NPU was rated for just 13 TOPS, compared to 47 TOPS for the Series 2.
The goal with Lunar Lake was to deliver on that thing Intel has never delivered on, by creating a competitive mobile processor that offers reasonable performance in day-to-day productivity tasks plus terrific efficiency and battery life. But in using the Yoga Slim, I was immediately struck by constant, annoying performance and reliability issues. The system would pause in the middle of some operation, forcing me to wait while the seconds ticked by, and in some cases, visually glitching while the processor struggled to keep up.
Something was wrong. What I discovered, finally, was that these issues are universal–everyone with a Lunar Lake-based laptop is seeing the same thing–and that there’s an easy workaround for the performance issues while we wait for Intel to issue a fix: You can’t leave the system on the default “Balanced” power mode. Instead, you configure it to “Best performance” and go about using the PC normally while trying to forget that the change you made impacts the battery life in a dramatically negative way.
I discuss that uptime hit later in the review, but it’s not good. Fortunately, pulling the switch on “Best performance” gives Lunar Lake the performance that Intel intended all along. And it’s pretty good.
Not as good as the AMD Ryzen AI 9 375 HX that’s in . But to be fair to Intel, these chips don’t necessarily compete head-to-head: The 200V series used by the Yoga Slim is the modern equivalent of the old U-series, it’s not a high-performance part. For that, I guess we’d go with a mobile “Arrow Lake” 200S series chip, though I’ve not tried such a thing yet.
To get Lunar Lake out the door, Intel went with the most popular configuration, the one that would target thin, light, and ultra-mobile laptops. And now it handles my typical productivity workloads well enough, assuming I stick near a power outlet. Interestingly, it can also play modern games, though not with the frame rates or quality I saw with that OmniBook Ultra.
For example, I can play with the Yoga Slim, did, in fact, spend many hours doing so. (For science, of course.) But where the OmniBook and its more powerful AMD Radeon graphics allowed me to experience this title at native resolution with terrific graphics quality at an impressive 90 to 120 FPS, the Yoga Slim was more pedestrian: Low/very low graphics quality, depending on the setting, and at roughly 40 FPS.
Here are two shots that demonstrate some of the low-quality models I see in the game. But it does work, and it is playable. So while the Intel Core Ultra Series 2 isn’t as advanced from a graphical perspective as the new AMD chips, it’s a noticeable step in the right direction when compared to its predecessor.
And while there’s precious little to do with it, the NPU in the Yoga Slim is on par with what we see in the Snapdragon X and AMD Ryzen AI chips. And Intel, like AMD, can correctly claim to be 100 percent compatible with the x86 software base, something that’s more of a perception issue than a real-world problem for Snapdragon X, but still a factor in many people’s buy decisions. So Lunar Lake is in an OK place.
Especially if what you’re looking at is that standard productivity workload. And don’t mind being tethered to power for now. Speaking of which, there was more fan noise with the Yoga Slim than I’d like, in part because its bottom-oriented air intakes require a hard, flat surface to work correctly.
And hearing the fan was pretty common, regardless of what I was doing. But in general, I was OK with the overall package. Hopefully, a coming firmware update will correct things, and allow customers to have good performance battery life.
Fingers crossed. Connectivity is as modern as it gets, with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 support.
I don’t have any Wi-Fi 7 equipment, but the Yoga Slim worked perfectly with the Wi-Fi 6E-based Eero network we have here in Mexico City. Despite its slim profile, the Yoga Slim delivers a nice number of both modern and legacy expansion ports. And it delivers on my expansion port wish list by providing at least one USB-C port on each side of the chassis, an ideal configuration.
On the left, you’ll find a full-sized HDMI 2.1 port (which can output to one 4K display at 60 Hz), a Thunderbolt 4/USB Type-C ports (40 Mbps data transfer, DisplayPort 2.1, and Power Delivery), and a combo audio jack.
On the right, there’s a single full-sized USB Type-A port (USB 2.0/5 Mbps data transfer) with a drop-draw hinge, a second Thunderbolt 4/USB-C port (with identical capabilities to the first one), the power button, and a physical webcam privacy switch. This is mostly acceptable, but I don’t understand why we still see USB 2.
0 ports in 2024. The Yoga Slim provides a superior multimedia experience, with Dolby Vision HDR capabilities in the display and Dolby Atmos audio backed by four two-watt speakers–two upward-firing tweeters and two downward-firing woofers. Audio is particularly good, with a wide, immersive sound stage that never distorts, even at 100 percent volume.
Even dogs like and are almost watchable on this PC, thanks to its terrific audio and video capabilities. Almost. You can configure Dolby Atmos to a Dynamic mode that adapts to the content you’re enjoying, which I like, but Dolby Vision has three hard-coded modes, Bright, Dark, and Vivid.
Oddly, Dolby Atmos configuration is duplicated in Lenovo Vantage, but Dolby Vision configuration is not. Lenovo provides a decent hybrid work setup with the Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition, thanks to its Full HD (1080p) webcam, four microphones, and AI-based noise-canceling functionality throughout. The webcam is decent, but a bit soft, especially in low light.
And the microphone array is notably good for a laptop: I experimented with various microphone noise-canceling settings in the Vantage app, but the test recordings I made were pretty consistent and of higher than usual quality. There are also noise-canceling options for the speakers. Lenovo provides an easily located hardware switch on the right side–a so-called e-shutter, or electronic shutter–that disables the webcam, which I like.
And there’s a standard microphone toggle key in the keyboard’s function row. I had high hopes for the Yoga Slim keyboard, given the generally excellent quality of Lenovo premium PC keyboards. And while it mostly delivers, the full-sized, island-style keys are soft and curiously slippery thanks to an oil- and water-resistant coating, which still feels a little weird after several weeks of use.
Lenovo reports that the key throw is a standard 1.5 mm, but they feel deeper than that, and the keyboard isn’t particularly quiet in use. And these things combine to create an unusual sensation that’s unlike any of the other laptops I use.
It’s possible I’d just get used to it if this were my only laptop, but the key throw distance is concerning as it requires more effort. It’s not bad, overall. Just different.
I do like that the keyboard floats centered in the laptop and isn’t bogged down with an unnecessary and error-inducing numeric keypad. There are few superfluous keys aside from the unavoidable Copilot key (and two Aura Edition-specific keys described in the software section), the Ctrl and Fn keys are in the right locations, and the Home, PgUp, PgDn, and End shortcuts all work normally. The power button is on the side of the device, which is unusual, but that means it doesn’t take up space in the keyboard too, which is fine.
The glass touchpad is mechanical and a bit large, which is always concerning. But it was always reliable and accurate, at least once I disabled three- and four-finger gestures. Like the keyboard, it’s a bit loud and requires some effort: Clicking is accompanied by an audibly noticeable “clunk” sound that sounds low-quality, though the hardware part itself is anything but.
But normal movements are smooth and clean, and gestures work well. Overall, I like the touchpad and had no major issues using it. Lenovo outfits the Yoga Slim with a reasonable set of security features, though I wish there was a fingerprint reader.
The webcam provides Windows Hello Enhanced Sign-in Security (ESS) capabilities, the new standard for Copilot+ PC-class PCs and a nice differentiator. And it protects your privacy with a physical e-shutter switch on the right side of the PC, which I prefer to hard-to-see and use physical sliders other PCs place right on the camera. The system also supports presence detection, but through the Lenovo Vantage app instead of in Windows Settings.
This includes what Lenovo calls zero-touch login (auto-on when you approach plus Windows Hello), zero-touch lock (auto-off when you leave), and zero-touch video playback, which pauses a video when you move away and resumes it when you come back. I enabled all that for the duration of the review and it always worked well. Lenovo also provides a few related Wi-Fi features.
Wi-Fi Security uses AI to protect the PC from potentially dangerous public Wi-Fi access points. And Wi-Fi auto-recovery ..
. I don’t know what the point of that is, it automatically connects the PC to trusted Wi-Fi networks, which is a feature Windows already provides. I left Wi-Fi Security on, but never experienced it.
The Yoga Slim 7i 15 Aura Edition is made with 50 percent recycled aluminum in the bottom base, 90 percent post-consumer recycled plastics in the power adapter case, and 50 percent PCC plastics in the keyboard, and its plastic-free packaging is made with dry-pressed paper pulp cushioning and a 100 percent bio-based bamboo fiber system bag. From a serviceability perspective, the bottom cover is removed with five exposed Torx screws. The battery, SSD, and WLAN (Wi-Fi/Bluetooth) modules are all easily replaceable.
The Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition is thin and light for a 15-inch laptop. It’s 13.4 x 9.
2 x 0.6 inches at its thickest, 0.5 inches at its thinnest, and weighs just 3.
2 pounds, not much more than a typical 14-inch laptop. By comparison, my 15-inch Surface Laptop 7 is thicker at 0.72 and it weighs 3.
67 pounds. Unfortunately, real-world battery life fell short of my hopes and expectations. And this tally is complicated by the “Best performance” switch noted earlier in the review.
Before then, I was seeing an average of almost 6.5 hours of uptime. But since making the switch, that figure has predictably plunged, to just about 4 hours and 20 minutes on average.
That’s not good. Both figures represent less uptime than the HP OmniBook Ultra, which offers much more powerful processing and graphics capabilities and still delivers 8.5 hours of battery life.
And it’s nowhere close to the Surface Laptop 7’s 11 hours of uptime. Efficiency and instant-on performance and reliability were excellent, however. I didn’t get the same near-perfect experience I saw with the HP, but the Yoga Slim offered a reliable instant-on experience and never hot-bagged or killed the battery overnight.
It only lost 2-3 percent of battery life each night. Lenovo bundles a standard 65-watt USB-C power adapter with the Yoga, and I used that to charge its 70 watt-hour battery from near dead to 100 percent in under an hour. While Lenovo does an exemplary job of avoiding crapware on its ThinkPad laptops, its consumer-oriented product lines aren’t as well cared for.
The Yoga Slim shipped with Dropbox promotion and McAfee, four Lenovo utilities, three Intel utilities, and Dolby Access. As bad, Lenovo Vantage–which the company uses for support and driver downloads–displayed upsell notifications for accidental damage protection and other superfluous paid services until I finally gave in and turned off notifications. But the app itself is half utility, half advertisement, with entries for paid services like McAfee Online Protection, Lenovo Smart Care, Lenovo Identity Advisor, Lenovo Smart Performance, and Lenovo Smart Lock mixed in with the necessary stuff.
Lenovo Now is even worse, or maybe it’s just as bad. It tried to pin a widget to my desktop along with several Lenovo shortcuts before selling me on Lenovo Identity Advisor (again), three more crapware app installs, Lenovo Premium Care Plus Support ($72.93 per year), Accidental Damage Protection ($19.
37 per year), Lenovo Smart Lock ($49.99 per year), and Lenovo Smart Performance ($29.99 per year).
And then it advertised Amazon Music, Fubo, and a Dropbox Cloud Storage offer before letting me register the PC; doing so would have signed me up for “email-exclusive offers, promotions, and more” if I hadn’t opted out. My God, Lenovo. Getting past the bundled crapware and upsells, you’re probably curious about the “Aura Edition” bit in this product’s name.
Like the “i” in “7i,” this is tied to Intel, or more specifically a partnership with the processor company by which the two develop unique features that will only be made available to Aura Edition-branded PCs. There are three: Smart Care, Smart Modes, and Smart Share. Smart Care is perhaps the least interesting.
It’s a centralized support offering that provides free live customer service chats and calls for one year, an AI-based virtual assistant called Lena Chat, and various other support capabilities. It’s available in the crowded Vantage app–a standalone app would be better–and, yes, you can pay to upgrade to a more capable tier that offers priority parts and labor, on-site repairs, accidental damage protection, and other perks. You can also extend your free Smart Care subscription in one-year blocks at $30 per year.
I can’t say that I was super-interested in this offering, but I did try some Lena Chat interactions, which occurs on the web, not in the Vantage app. It’s not great and seems to just be a natural language front-end to searching Lenovo support on the web. When I asked “Why is my keyboard backlighting not working?” it gave me a short list of possible questions I could be asking, one of which was the grammatically incorrect “Keyboard Cannot Turn on Backlit.
” It then provided a photo of a ThinkPad keyboard and a rather convoluted list of possibilities that indicated it had no idea whether this specific PC even supported this feature. That doesn’t feel personal or intelligent to me. It also listed related questions that were as grammatically question as the one I chose, like “Keyboard Light No On” and “Keyboard Cannot Turn On Thinklight.
” Terrible. Smart Modes is tied to a new “Mode” key that’s the default action when you press F9. This brings up a small on-screen overlay that lets you switch between the available Smart modes, which include Shield, Attention, Collaboration, Wellness, and Power, and it links to the Vantage app, where you can also configure so-called Scenario modes.
I leave that on Automatic, so the system will automatically go into Common, Gaming, Media, Creative, Meeting, or Learning as needed. But the Smart modes are more specific, and they’re not mutually exclusive. For example, I might want to enable Shield mode, which uses the camera to detect someone looking over my shoulder at the screen and can blur the screen automatically, but I might also want to enable Collaboration mode, which enhances video quality in low-light conditions, at the same time.
This feels like a lot of complexity to me. Worse, when I tried to enable Shield mode, it just errored out with no explanation of why. Smart Share, however, is excellent.
This feature builds on Intel Unison, which can be used for ad-hoc file shares between a smartphone and your PC or can be configured, similar to Windows 11’s Phone Link, to create a permanent pairing between the two devices for sharing contacts, photos, text messages, and notifications. But it works more seamlessly, allowing you to drag and drop items between the two. You can launch Smart Share with another dedicated key, F11, or–better yet–just tap the phone against almost any edge of the PC (on the left or right): The Smart Share window appears so you can drag and drop.
It’s pretty cool. As a prosumer-class premium ultra-mobile laptop, the Yoga Slim 7i 15 Aura Edition is priced accordingly. Prices start at $1280 for a version with a Core Ultra 7 256V processor, 16 GB of RAM, a 512 GB SSD, and Windows 11 Home.
You can upgrade to the Core Ultra 258V/32 GB of RAM package for just $100, which seems like a great investment in future-proofing. As does the $42 upgrade cost of a 1 TB SSD. Windows 11 Pro will set you back an additional $48, so the Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition maxes out at $1470.
I had high hopes for the Intel Lunar Lake processors, but this is, for now at least, the Achilles Heel of the otherwise solid Yoga Slim 7i 15 Aura Edition experience. It’s a big, thin, gorgeous laptop with a nice productivity-focused display, terrific audio/visual experiences, future-proof specs, ample expansion capabilities, and reasonably good typing and pointing capabilities. I love the form factor, and the quality.
And I could put up with a little performance and efficiency wonkiness as long as there was some hope of improvements down the road. That does seem to be the case, and while the power mode workaround solved my performance issues, the resulting battery life is disappointing and nothing like what I expected. Or what the competition offers.
If it weren’t for the Lunar Lake processor issues, I would recommend the Yoga Slim 7i 15 with hesitation. For now, a wait-and-see approach is probably smart. If Intel and Lenovo can get in front of the processor issues, as expected, this will be a solid choice.
Paul Thurrott is an award-winning technology journalist and blogger with 30 years of industry experience and the author of 30 books. He is the owner of and the host of three tech podcasts: with Leo Laporte and Richard Campbell, , and with Brad Sams. He was formerly the senior technology analyst at Windows IT Pro and the creator of the SuperSite for Windows from 1999 to 2014 and the Major Domo of Thurrott.
com while at BWW Media Group from 2015 to 2023. You can reach Paul via , or . Join the crowd where the love of tech is real - become a Thurrott Premium Member today! Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday.
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Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i 15 Aura Edition Review
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i 15 Aura Edition is a slim and gorgeous laptop that's let down only by its dodgy Lunar Lake processor. The post Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i 15 Aura Edition Review appeared first on Thurrott.com.