Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Pro Review
An affordable laptop with a high screen resolution
Verdict
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Pro is an all killer, no filler laptop. It looks good, build quality is great, the screen is sharp and it has a quality glass touchpad. There’s no touchscreen or a hybrid hinge, but if you just want a classic laptop, this is one of the top contenders.
Pros
- High-res 16:10 aspect screen
- Good build quality, stylish design
- Glass touchpad
Cons
- Battery life doesn’t match that of AMD laptops
Availability
- UKRRP: £729.99
- USAunavailable
- EuropeRRP: €1349
Key Features
- 16:10 screenThe Pro part of the name refers to the screen style. It’s a taller 16:10 aspect display, perfect for work apps. Resolution is very high, too, at 1440p or 1800p depending upon the chosen spec. Both will look significantly sharper than the 1080p norm
- Aluminium buildThe top draw here is top-tier build quality at a few hundred pounds less than the most expensive laptops. Attractive design? All-aluminium casing? These make the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Pro a pleasure to use each day
- Glass touchpadLots of upper mid-range laptops still use plastic touchpads, but this one is glass, which feels smoother to glide across
Introduction
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Pro one of the easiest-to-recommend series of laptops for those who want a computer that looks and feels like a top-end MacBook rival, but costs a little less.
This particular Intel model, the Yoga Slim 7i Pro (the “i” after the “7” tells you it has an Intel processor) starts at £729 online. It’s not cheap, but it significantly more affordable than the closest alternatives from Microsoft or Apple.
The Pro part in the same does not mean the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Pro is more powerful than the standard Yoga Slim 7. It means the screen has a 16:10 aspect ratio rather than the 16:9 style you’ll see in lots of other mid-range Lenovo laptops.
This taller style of screen is perfect for work apps and browsing, and display quality is great for at the price. The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Pro is one of the best laptops in this class all-round, but think carefully when picking between the Intel-powered Yoga Slim 7i Pro (reviewed here) and the AMD-powered Yoga Slim 7 Pro. The AMD version is going to get you much better battery life, while the Intel handles games better and, unusually, seems to be a bit cheaper – at least at the time of review.
Design and keyboard
- Aluminium casing
- Tasteful, reserved design
- Light enough for ultra-portable use
I think Lenovo makes the best looking third-party mid-range laptops. Acer is often great for value, but rarely all that stylish. Asus has become a bit too obsessed with turning the touchpad into a screen or NUM pad.
Lenovo’s Yoga 7 series has coasted along in the knowledge many people just want a straight-up normal laptop that looks good. No gimmicks, no attention-grabbing design motifs, just good build quality and Lenovo’s signature style.
A lot of the Lenovo look rests on something quite simple: the shape of its keyboard keys. They have rounded bottoms, softening the appearance of the keyboard plate.
The entire Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Pro, including those keys and the touchpad, is decked out in Slate Grey. All the main panels are aluminium. You can also get this laptop in a Light Silver colour, with a darker keyboard, but the single-tone look works very well in this laptop.
Build quality seems excellent, and is a clear step up from the mostly plastic Lenovo Yoga 6. There’s no flex to the screen, the keyboard surround is stiff and there’s just a fractional bend to the casing when you pick up the entire laptop by one corner, which is not recommended in general.
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Pro’s display hinge could be a little stronger, as its position can move if you pick the thing up rapidly. But this is because, unlike some other 7-series laptops, this one has a 180-degree hinge.
Such a feature is not hugely useful given the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Pro does not have a touchscreen, but it does make sharing what’s on screen with a huddle of people easier.
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Pro weighs 1.39kg according to my scales, a fistful of grams more than a classic widescreen laptop in this category. But that is simply because there’s more laptop to fit in here. It’s a delightful laptop to use; metallic wherever you touch, bar the keys, attractive and light enough.
Lenovo doesn’t seem to have changed its keyboard style much for this latest 2022 generation of series 7 laptops. The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Pro has what I consider to be standard-grade key travel for a portable style-led computer.
You don’t get the kind of meaty, deep feel of a classic Lenovo ThinkPad keyboard, but these keys feel fast and of good quality. Key depth is a little greater in Lenovo’s Yoga 6, but these ones do at least have solid feedback at the actuation point and no mushiness.
The backlight has a clever trick up its sleeve too. You can set its level to one of two intensities, which is the norm, or you can use the Auto mode. This analyses the ambient light level using the webcam, to automatically light up the keys when it gets dark.
And just like the last Yoga 7 laptop I reviewed, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Pro has a glass touchpad. This is an important ‘win’ because what I consider to be some of the best alternatives, like the HP Envy 13, have plastic pads.
Glass touchpads feel smoother and less tacky, and are an often underappreciated part of what separates laptops that seem somewhat cheap to those that come across compromise-free. It’s a quality touchpad, although the clicker is a little loud.
You may also want to change its behaviour a bit. I did. The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Pro’s touchpad looks centrally located at first glance, but it is actually shifted to the left of the keyboard plate a bit. As a result, I kept on accidentally pressing the right button. I turned this off, and now use a two finger press to right-click. As with all tweakable UX things like this, just have a play around to see what works for you.
Screen
- Unusually high resolution
- Decent maximum brightness
- Not a touchscreen
The screen is what separates the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Pro from some other 7-series laptops, as it has a 16:10 screen rather than a 16:9 one.
I traded the widescreen Lenovo Yoga 6 for this laptop, and the benefits of a taller display were immediately obvious. When you write documents, which I do all day, or use other productivity apps, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Pro immediately feels more spacious.
It’s a 14-inch screen, and for many this size and shape represents the best possible balance of portability and comfort for all-day work.
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Pro’s resolution is also way beyond the 1080p typically seen in this kind of laptop. My review model has a 2880 x 1800 pixel IPS screen, which gets rid of all the semi-obvious pixellation seen in Full HD laptops of this size. Lenovo also makes versions with a 1440p screen
We get much closer to the clarity of a MacBook screen here. High-res screens are often associated with gaming and design work, but the difference is just as obvious when you’re in Microsoft Word.
Brightness is solid too, hitting 388 nits at its maximum when I tested it with a colorimeter. It may not initially come across as a bright screen, though, because to hit the 150 nits you might use indoors you need to set the slider to 79%. That seems high, but it’s just down to how Lenovo has tuned its brightness controls.
Colour is solid without reaching into the wide gamut range of an ultra-high-end laptop. It covers 97.4% of sRGB, 79.1% of Adobe RGB and 82% of DCI P3. This is enough to make the display appear well-saturated, and if you want richer colour Lenovo is offering an OLED version of this laptop.
Contrast of 1341:1 in this LCD model is obviously not close to what that OLED model would achieve, but it is actually an excellent contrast ratio for an IPS LCD. It’s also a 90Hz panel, for smoother scrolling and cursor motion.
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Pro screen follows some of the same avenues of progress seen in the company’s Legion gaming laptops, which brought 2560 x 1600 pixel panels to gaming PCs at a price where you’d typically see 1080p ones. This is my kind of progress.
Performance
- Familiar Intel 11th Gen performance
- OK for basic gaming
- Not too noisy under load
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Pro uses exactly the same specs as countless other slim and light laptops. My one has an 11th generation Intel Core i7-1165G7 processor, 8GB RAM and a 512GB SSD. The lower-end version has a Core i5 CPU and a 256GB SSD.
Lenovo has played it pretty safe for performance. Intel also makes slightly higher-powered versions of the Core i7 seen here: the Core i7-1185G7 and Core i7-1195G7. Each has higher turbo clocks and a faster-clocked take on the Intel Xe graphics chipset.
The 11th Gen Intel Core chips seems to have been hanging around forever at this point, although new laptops with 12th generation chipsets are gradually starting to be rolled out.
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Pro’s performance offers nothing new, but its comfortably speedy enough to pace through productivity tasks with ease. According to our benchmark tests, it’s not quite as fast as the Dell XPS 13, despite sharing the same chip, but the performance difference should be negligible
| Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Pro | Dell XPS 13 | MacBook Air | |
| CPU | Intel Core i7-1165G7 | Intel Core i7-1165G7 | Apple M1 |
| Geekbench 5 (single/multi) | 1493 / 5359 | 1548 / 5687 | 1731 / 7308 |
| PCMark 10 | 4910 | 4802 | N/A |
Despite being thin and light, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Pro can handle pro-grade apps like Photoshop just fine. The Intel Xe graphics let you play a wide range of games including The Witcher 3 and Control, if you spend a little time to juggle resolution and graphics settings.
The Witcher 3 sits around 40-45fps at Medium settings at 1680 x 1050 resolution. Cap the frame rate to 30fps and you’ll have a good time. Elden Ring on PC is still a bit of a mess at the time of review, but should be playable at 720p resolution, low settings. Control runs at frame rates between 30fps and 50fps at 1280 x 800 resolution, and it still looks pretty good thanks to the game’s dynamic approach to resolution scaling. You can get this performance unplugged too.
If you’re going to turn your nose up at that, you’ll want an actual gaming PC. Or there’s a slightly heavier version of the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Pro with an Nvidia MX 450 GPU, but its battery life will likely be worse is it also has a more power-hungry CPU.
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Pro’s fans only make light noise under pressure, with little of of the high-pitch sound that can be quite distracting.
Battery life
- All-day use with light work, but only just
- USB-C charging
- Thunderbolt 4 support
This is a fun laptop with quite a wide range of abilities, but as usual Intel-powered laptops like this don’t last as long as AMD ones.
In PC Mark 10’s Modern Office benchmark, which simulates everyday work jobs, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Pro battery lasts nine hours three minutes at 150-nit brightness. It can get you through a full day of light work, but without masses of juice to spare.
Lenovo claims the battery lasts up to 19 hours, which seems unrealistic. It may be that Lenovo uses this figure for both the Intel and AMD versions of the Slim 7 Pro series. 19 hours will likely be a stretch for the AMD version too, but you can expect it to last several hours longer than the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Pro.
However, an AMD laptop won’t get you a Thunderbolt port. The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Pro has two, specced to the Thunderbolt 4 standard. These are ultra-fast connectors, which may be an important future-proofing element, depending on how you use a laptop.
There’s also a 5Gbps USB-A port and a headphone jack. The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Pro’s speakears are resonable, with OK maximum volume and the tiniest hint of bass. However, I do mean a hint, and most of the sound clarity is lost if the laptop isn’t sat on a hard surface. These speakers rely on bouncing high frequency sound up to your ears as they sit on the underside of the case.
Latest deals
Should you buy it?
You want an all-rounder laptop for less than £1000:
Tasteful design, great build quality, a sharp screen and glass touchpad make the Yoga Slim 7i Pro a pleasure to use, and a match for more expensive laptops in several important respects.
You want a flashy feature:
This is very much an ordinary laptop. There’s no touchscreen, and while the hinge opens up to 180 degrees, it’s no hybrid. It is not a tablet stand-in, and excels most as a work machine.
Final Thoughts
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Pro is a wonderful mid-range ultra-portable. While it uses the same 11th Intel CPUs we’ve seen in laptops since 2020, Lenovo still manages to make some progress without resorting to stuff few people will appreciate or use.
We’re talking about the screen. The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Pro has an unusually high resolution 2880 x 1800 pixel display, not the 1080p that is still the norm at the price.
However, this is just a flourish among a series of great elements that make the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Pro so enjoyable to use. It has a good keyboard, a glass touchpad, decent enough battery life and excellent build, hitting all the most important bases for an ultraportable.
How we test
Every laptop we review goes through a series of uniform checks designed to gauge key things including build quality, performance, screen quality and battery life.
These include formal synthetic benchmarks and scripted tests, plus a series of real-world checks, such as how well it runs the most frequently used apps.
We also make sure to use every laptop we review as our primary device to ensure our review is as accurate as possible.
Used the laptop for two weeks
Used Geekbench 5, PCMark 10 and 3DMark to test performance
Used a colorimeter to test the display
Used PCMark 10 to test the battery life
You might like…
FAQs
This is a Wi-Fi only laptop. There’s no SIM slot for mobile internet.
While there are variants of this laptop with an entry-level Nvidia MX 450 GPU, most rely on integrated graphics.
The Yoga Slim 7i Pro has a a non-touch display.
Trusted Reviews test data
The table below shows the test data we collected reviewing the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Pro
Full specs
You can see a breakdown of the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Pro’s full specs in the table below.
Jargon buster
OLED
Organic Light Emitting Diode is panel technology that allows each individual pixel to produce light rather than relying on a backlight. This enables the screen to accurately display blacks by turning off the pixel, resulting in improved contrast compared to conventional LCD panels.2-in-1
A laptop with a 180-degree hinge, which allows you to twist the screen to the back of the keyboard, shifting the laptop into a makeshift tablet.
Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
