Lenovo Yoga Book 9i Review: A Dual Display Laptop Done Right

Lenovo Yoga Book 9i: Battery Life

The Lenovo Yoga Book 9i comes packing an 80Wh battery, which is simply impressive for a sub-3lb laptop package. Without delay, we fired up PCMark’s Battery test that runs a 1080p video playback workload in a continuous loop with the Windows 11 Movies and TV player, until the battery is exhausted. In all tests, Windows Quiet Hours / Focus Assist has been enabled, and the displays are calibrated with lux meters on pure white screens to as close to 115 lux as possible. Wi-Fi is left enabled, which we feel is a common use case.


While this laptop did not dethrone major competitors or even lead the pack, the battery life of this machine is impressive, given that it has to drive two displays. Running for just shy of five and a half hours is more than enough to work on the go and get back to the office or home office with charge with time to spare, so we can't complain here.

Lenovo Yoga Book 9i: Thermal And Acoustic Performance

To test the thermals and acoustics of the Yoga Book 9i, we threw it at 3DMark’s built-in stress test until the fans were whirring away at full tilt and the laptop was thermally saturated. This was done on Lenovo's, in theory, worst-case scenario of Performance mode to see how loud the machine could get.


As it turns out, though, this laptop does not get all that loud under load. We noted a roughly 3.5 dBA change over ambient background noise when spinning up this laptop. What’s more, is that the fans are not offensive, and you might hardly notice them, depending on how quiet the environment is around you.


Toward the top where the middle sound bar is, we noted that the hottest spot of this machine hit around 106ºF. Moving toward the bottom of the laptop, temps did taper off, but the upper portion of that gradient was pretty toasty and not the most comfortable to touch. However, heat up here generally shouldn't be a problem, especially if you use the Bluetooth keyboard and the display is in a propped-up configuration. ­

Lenovo Yoga Book 9i: Conclusions

The Lenovo Yoga Book 9i is a radical departure from a typical, clamshell laptop, and simply put, it is just fun to use. Though it is not the highest performing laptop we’ve seen, the dual 2.8K OLED touch displays, great webcam, solid speakers, stylus support, and innovative user interface all make for differentiated and high-quality computing experience. We could easily see this being an outstanding notetaking, drawing, design or general productivity laptop with far more screen real estate than you can get on any traditional notebook. 

As previously mentioned, the only ask that we might have is perhaps the inclusion of an SD card reader to complement the Thunderbolt ports to make loading photos and videos easier, but we understand why that might be excluded due to space constraints. Aside from that, what you see is what you get with the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i, with it's unique, useful dual display features.

While its price tag of $1,999.99 might be hard to justify for some, the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i offers premium build quality and a great, innovative feature set. In fact, we recommend the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i to anyone looking for a laptop that has more versatility and can make use of its expansive dual display screen real estate and pen input capabilities.