Panther Lake makes Lenovo’s flagship convertible thinner, faster and longer-lasting, at the cost of a smaller GPU. The screen, the speakers and the pen still set the standard for 14in 2-in-1s.
Everything happens past 180 degrees
A convertible is judged by what happens once the screen folds past 180 degrees. Before that point, it’s a laptop with a touchscreen, and plenty of clamshells offer that. After it, the machine has to be light enough to hold in one hand, balanced enough to draw on and quiet enough to forget about. Most 2-in-1s fail at least one of those tests. The Yoga 9i has passed all of them for several generations, and the Gen 11 is the best version of it yet.
Lenovo kindly provided the Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition (Gen 11) for this review. The unit is part number 83SE000YPG, printed on the box as the Yoga 9 2-in-1 14IPH11, with an Intel Core Ultra 7 355, 32GB of LPDDR5X, a 2TB SSD and the 2.8K OLED touchscreen, finished in Cosmic Blue, the only color this generation comes in.
What changed is mostly invisible. Intel’s Panther Lake platform, sold as Core Ultra Series 3, replaces last year’s Lunar Lake chip. Lenovo spent the efficiency gains on a thinner chassis and a smaller battery, then gave back some graphics performance in the process. Across the full run of work, pen and media I put through it, that bargain held up. The graphics part of it is the one thing I’d argue with Lenovo about, and it gets a section of its own.
Technical specifications
| Component | Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition (Gen 11), 83SE000YPG |
|---|---|
| Processor | Intel Core Ultra 7 355, 8 cores (4 P-cores, 4 LP E-cores), 8 threads, up to 4.7GHz, 12MB cache |
| NPU | Up to 49 TOPS |
| Graphics | Integrated Intel Graphics, 4 Xe3 cores |
| Memory | 32GB LPDDR5X-7467, dual-channel, soldered |
| Storage | 2TB M.2 2242 PCIe 4.0 SSD, single slot |
| Display | 14in OLED touch, 2880 x 1800, 16:10, 120Hz VRR, glass, VESA DisplayHDR True Black 1000, 100% DCI-P3 |
| Camera | 5MP RGB plus IR, physical privacy shutter |
| Audio | Four speakers (2 x 2W tweeters, 2 x 2W woofers) in a rotating soundbar hinge, Dolby Atmos; four microphones |
| Ports | 2 x Thunderbolt 4 (USB4 40Gbps, USB PD 45 to 65W, DisplayPort 2.1), 1 x USB-A 10Gbps (Always On), 1 x HDMI 2.1, 3.5mm combo jack |
| Wireless | Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be, 2×2), Bluetooth |
| Battery | 70Wh, 4-cell (L25M4PH1, 15.48V), Rapid Charge Express |
| Pen | Lenovo Yoga Pen Gen 2 (AES 3.0) with magnetic case |
| Dimensions | 317.2 x 222.6 x 15.29mm |
| Weight | 1.29kg |
| Operating system | Windows 11 Home |
Design and build quality
Put simply, the Gen 11 is the Gen 10 after a diet. It measures 15.29mm thick and weighs 1.29kg, against 15.9mm and 1.32kg last year, while growing a fraction wider and deeper to 317 x 223mm. Thirty grams sounds trivial. On a device you hold like a clipboard for an hour of note-taking, it isn’t.
The shell is sandblasted, anodized aluminum on top and bottom, and half the aluminum in the bottom cover is recycled. The side rails are polished to a high gloss, a jewelry-box touch that Lenovo has kept for several generations, and the corners are softened in what the company calls Comfort Edge. That rounding is easy to dismiss in photos and obvious the moment you hold the machine folded back, because nothing digs into your palm. The chassis has passed MIL-STD-810H testing, and it feels it: no creak from the deck, no give in the lid when you open it one-handed by the small lip on the top bezel.
The hinge deserves credit. It’s stiff enough that the screen doesn’t bounce when you tap it in laptop mode, which is the most common failure on lesser convertibles, yet smooth enough to swing through laptop, tent, stand and tablet without a fight.
Cosmic Blue is the one thing I’d hesitate over. It is a gorgeous color, close to black under lamplight and properly blue by a window, but the anti-fingerprint treatment is only partly effective. The palm rests collect oil, and the glossy rails show every touch. Keep a microfiber cloth in the bag.
Canvas Mode and the Yoga Pen Gen 2
The pen is the reason to choose this over a clamshell with a touchscreen, and this year Lenovo finally gave it a proper home. The Yoga Pen Gen 2 ships in a magnetic case that clips to the back of the lid. That case does a second job in what Lenovo calls Canvas Mode: fold the machine into tablet mode, lay it on a desk with the case attached, and the screen tilts toward you at a shallow angle, like a drafting board.
It’s a modest idea with an honest premise. Drawing on a tablet lying dead flat is uncomfortable, and every 2-in-1 maker knows it. Lenovo fixed that with an accessory already in the box rather than a kickstand bolted onto the chassis, which keeps the laptop thin and the fix free.
The pen itself runs on AES 3.0, with tilt support, palm rejection, programmable buttons and extended hover, so the cursor shows up before the nib touches the glass. Latency on this panel is low enough that handwriting in OneNote feels like ink rather than a sluggish approximation of it, and shading with the side of the tip works as it should in sketching apps.
Setup and the first hour
The box contains the laptop, the pen and its case. Whether a charger is included varies by region, and some markets now ship laptops without one. That’s less of a problem than it sounds: both Thunderbolt 4 ports accept USB Power Delivery at 45 to 65W, so any decent USB-C charger in that range works.
Windows 11 Home setup is the familiar parade of accounts and privacy screens. Configure Windows Hello first. The IR camera recognizes a face quickly and reliably, and in tablet mode it’s the only practical way to sign in.
Next, open Lenovo Vantage and choose a color profile. The panel ships in its native wide gamut, which pushes web images and skin tones a little too hot. Vantage offers factory-calibrated sRGB and Display P3 modes, and switching takes seconds.
Then clear out the extras. The machine arrives with a McAfee+ Premium trial and a Microsoft 365 trial alongside Lenovo Now and Dolby Access. Keep Dolby Access, which handles the speaker tuning and Dolby Vision. The rest is trialware, and a flagship shouldn’t carry it.
Keyboard and touchpad
The best change on the Gen 11 is the one you see first. Lenovo removed the column of quick-function keys that sat along the right edge of the keyboard on recent Yogas, and replaced it with a conventional layout. Those keys pushed Enter, Backspace and right Shift out of place and never earned the disruption. Without them, touch-typing works from the first sentence.
Travel is short, as it has to be at 15mm, but the keys are firm and well spaced, and the backlight is even across the deck. The weak spot is the arrow cluster: Left and Right are full size, Up and Down are half height. Spreadsheet users will feel it. The power button lives on the right edge, reachable in every mode.
The glass touchpad measures 80 x 135mm and uses Windows Precision drivers. It’s large, accurate and dependable with gestures, and palm rejection keeps stray touches out of your typing.
The 2.8K OLED screen
The display remains the Yoga 9i’s strongest argument. The 14in PureSight Pro OLED runs at 2880 x 1800 in 16:10, about 242 pixels per inch, so text looks printed at normal reading distance. The refresh rate varies up to 120Hz, which keeps scrolling and pen strokes fluid and lets the panel slow down when the image is static.
It’s also properly bright for an OLED: around 500 nits in SDR and just over 1,000 nits on small HDR highlights, with roughly 655 nits across a full white screen. Coverage reaches 100 percent of sRGB and 100 percent of DCI-P3, and the X-Rite factory calibration pays off. The sRGB profile averages a Delta E of 1.2 and the P3 profile 1.9, accurate enough for photo and web work without a colorimeter. HDR films with Dolby Vision, in the apps that support it, look better here than on nearly any other laptop this size.
The catch is the glass. This is a very reflective panel, and near a window or under a strong ceiling light it turns into a mirror; the brightness fights back, but it can’t win outright. Brightness control involves some light pulsing, at an amplitude low enough that few people will notice. As with any OLED, set the taskbar to hide automatically if this machine is going to show the same desktop for years.
Speakers and camera
The rotating soundbar is the design detail that has defined the Yoga 9i for years, and it still has no real rival. Two 2W tweeters live in the hinge cylinder and two 2W woofers sit under the deck. Because the bar turns with the screen, the sound points at you in every mode, including tent and tablet, where most laptops fire into the table. Dialogue is crisp, the stereo spread is wide for a 14in machine, and there’s enough volume to fill a hotel room cleanly. The bass is present but shallow, as physics demands at this thickness.
The 5MP camera gives a sharp, well-exposed picture on calls, the four-microphone array handles voices well, and a physical shutter covers the lens. Software toggles are fine. A piece of plastic is better.
Software
The NPU is rated at up to 49 TOPS, above Microsoft’s 40 TOPS bar, so this is a Copilot+ PC with the full set of Windows AI features: Recall, Live Captions with translation, Cocreator in Paint and the image tools in Photos. Live captions earn their place on calls in other languages. The rest is optional.
Lenovo Vantage handles what matters: power modes, color profiles, battery charge limits and firmware updates. It’s busy and pushes sign-ups, but once you’ve picked a color profile and a charge limit, there’s little reason to open it again, which is the highest compliment I can give laptop utility software.
Performance: Panther Lake in 15mm
On paper, the Core Ultra 7 355 looks modest: eight cores and eight threads, split between four Cougar Cove performance cores boosting to 4.7GHz and four Darkmont low-power efficiency cores. In practice, it’s the fastest chip this chassis has ever carried.
It scores around 2,700 in Geekbench 6 single-core and around 11,600 multi-core, and roughly 620 in Cinebench 2024 multi-core. Lunar Lake machines built around the Core Ultra 7 258V land between 535 and 575 in that same test. The weak multi-threaded performance that was the Gen 10’s clearest flaw is fixed.
What matters more is how it behaves in the short bursts that make up real work. When an app launches or a batch of photos exports, the P-cores hold close to 3.95GHz at about 29W, matching the same chip in a much larger 15in gaming laptop. The Yoga feels instant in a way thin convertibles rarely do. Under a load that won’t let up, clocks settle near 3.56GHz at 28W, which is where a 15mm body has to land. Through office work, dozens of browser tabs, Lightroom edits and 4K playback, it never ran short.
Every Gen 11 configuration ships with 32GB of LPDDR5X-7467, and that is the right call on a machine you can’t upgrade later. The SSD sits on a PCIe 4.0 x4 link, so storage speed is never the bottleneck.
Graphics: where the Gen 11 goes backward
Here is the flaw that matters. The Core Ultra 7 355 carries Intel’s smaller Panther Lake GPU, with four Xe3 cores, and it is slower than the Arc 140V in the Gen 10 it replaces. In 3DMark Time Spy’s graphics test, this machine scores around 3,000; Arc 140V laptops score around 4,000. That’s roughly 25 percent less graphics performance, and it shows up in games, GPU-accelerated video effects and some creative filters.
Lenovo doesn’t offer the Core Ultra X7 with the much larger Arc B390 in this chassis. I understand why: heat and battery life, both of which came out well. But on a flagship aimed at creators, handing back a quarter of the GPU is the wrong trade, and it’s the main reason this isn’t a 9.
Casual games are fine. Counter-Strike 2 averages 52fps at 1200p on Medium, playable if nowhere near what the 120Hz screen can show, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider runs at 41fps at native 1800p on its lowest preset. Current AAA releases need cuts that waste a screen this good. If you game more than now and then, look elsewhere.
Thermals and noise
Two fans cool the chip, which is generous for a convertible this slim. At idle and through light work (browsing, writing, calls, video), the Yoga 9i is silent.
Under full CPU load, the processor runs at 83 to 84°C, normal for a modern chip in a thin chassis. Long, heavy loads bring the fans up to an audible but unobtrusive level. The machine’s priorities are clear: when a job refuses to end, it gives up clock speed before it gives up comfort. For a device that spends as much time in your hands as on a desk, that’s the right order.
Connectivity and upgrades
The rear edge is all hinge, so the ports sit on the sides. On the left are HDMI 2.1, a Thunderbolt 4 port and the 3.5mm combo jack. On the right are a second Thunderbolt 4 port, a 10Gbps USB-A port that keeps powering accessories while the machine sleeps, and the power button. You can charge from either side, a small luxury on a crowded desk, and both Thunderbolt ports carry 40Gbps and DisplayPort 2.1 for single-cable docking.
There’s no card reader. The Yoga 7 2-in-1 below it keeps a microSD slot, which makes the omission here harder to excuse for photographers. Wireless is Wi-Fi 7 with a 2×2 antenna.
Upgradeability is limited, and it should shape which configuration you pick. The memory is soldered. There’s one M.2 slot, in the short 2242 size, so more storage means replacing the drive, not adding a second. Opening the machine means removing seven screws, three hidden beneath the long rear rubber foot, which is glued and clipped in place. The battery, SSD, fans and Wi-Fi module are replaceable once inside.
Battery life
Lenovo shrank the battery from 75Wh to 70Wh this year, and Panther Lake’s efficiency more than made up for it. At 180 nits in SDR with Battery Saver on, the Yoga 9i lasts 15 hours and 39 minutes of offline video playback, an outstanding result for a laptop driving a high-resolution OLED. Lenovo rates it at up to 17 hours in MobileMark 30 at 250 nits and up to 24.5 hours of local 1080p video.
In the kind of day it’s built for (a browser heavy with tabs, video calls, documents, the pen out for notes), it’s a charge-at-night machine. On days away from the desk, the charger could stay behind.
Rapid Charge Express promises three hours of use from 15 minutes on the charger. Lenovo also rates the cell to keep at least 80 percent of its capacity after 1,000 cycles, and with Vantage’s charge limit switched on, that’s a good sign for a laptop you plan to keep for four or five years.
Configurations and value
Every Gen 11 model shares the Core Ultra 7 355, 32GB of memory and the 2.8K OLED. What’s left to decide is storage (512GB, 1TB or 2TB) and the Windows edition.
Storage is the decision to get right, because the single 2242 slot makes changing it later a chore of cloning or reinstalling. The 2TB model tested here suits anyone with a photo library, video projects or downloaded media. The 1TB is the sensible choice for most people. The 512GB is hard to recommend on a machine built to last this long.
Windows 11 Home suits personal use. The Pro edition only earns its place if your employer needs BitLocker management, domain join or group policy.
Two siblings are worth weighing. The Yoga 7 2-in-1 14IPH11 is built on the same Panther Lake platform and adds a microSD reader, with a 5Gbps USB-A port and HDMI up to 4K at 60Hz; it’s the convertible to consider if you don’t need the flagship extras. The Yoga Slim 7 Ultra 14IPH11 carries a 75Wh battery in a clamshell body and makes more sense if you’ll never fold the screen back.
Verdict
The Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition (Gen 11) is the most finished version of a design Lenovo has refined for years. The OLED is among the best laptop screens at this size, the rotating soundbar still makes rival convertibles sound thin, the pen now has a home and a new job, and the keyboard lost the quick-key column that spoiled it. Panther Lake cured the Gen 10’s weak multi-threaded performance, and the battery makes the charger optional most days.
The cost is graphics. The four-core Xe3 GPU is a genuine step down from the Arc 140V, and on a machine pitched at creators, that’s hard to wave away. Add a very reflective screen, soldered memory and one short SSD slot, and the list of compromises is complete. All of them are visible up front. None of them undoes what this machine gets right.
Buy it if you want a single 14in computer that works as a laptop, a sketchbook and a movie screen, and you value the display and all-day battery over GPU power. Skip it if you edit video with heavy GPU effects, game regularly or work under bright office lights every day; a clamshell with a matte screen and a bigger graphics chip will serve you better.
