Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Aura Edition Review: A Prime Example of Intel Ultra

A powerful laptop with a long battery life and comfortable thermals—that's all I ask for, and that's exactly what Lenovo's Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition delivers. It's one of the best professional laptops available today.

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Price and Availability

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition is available at the Lenovo web store, Best Buy, Newegg, and other retailers with prices starting at $1,280.

A Slim Yet Robust Build

I'm very impressed by the Yoga Slim 7i Aura's look and feel. It's a nice, comfortable, balanced laptop with a premium metal exterior and neat beveled edges. It weighs just 3.2 pounds and measures just 0.6 inches thick, and its 15.3-inch screen is a great size when on the go. The laptop's hinge is nice and tight, too, meaning that there's no wobble when interacting with the touchscreen—the only downside to a tight hinge is that you can't open the laptop with one hand (I nearly launched it off my desk when performing the risky one-handed test).

Lenovo is the king of laptop keyboards, a fact reinforced by the Yoga Slim 7i Aura. Each key feels plush and bouncy, with 1.5mm of travel—an impressive feat for such a thin machine. The keyboard backlight is bright, but it's not overbearing when typing in the dark. And the keycaps are coated in some kind of "water- and oil-resistant" finish, which is very silky and pleasant to the touch (although the finish will probably wear down after a few years of use).

The touchpad is about as good as you can get in a Windows laptop. It's responsive, never fails to recognize a multi-touch gesture, and emits a satisfying "click" when fully actuated. I wish that it had haptic feedback like a MacBook touchpad, but that's what I say about every Windows laptop. Although Lenovo's touchpad is slightly narrower than what I've seen in some other high-end Windows laptops, I have no complaints about the size.

Audio quality tends to get overlooked in laptop reviews, but the Yoga Slim 7i Aura's upward- and downward-firing speakers deserve some praise. Not only do they get loud, but they have a pleasant, balanced sound. I rarely reached for my headphones when using the Yoga Slim 7i Aura for media consumption or gaming.

It Ain't OLED, but It's a Looker

It can be hard to accept LCD quality when you really want the inky contrast and vivid colors of OLED. Many customers, including myself, want to see an OLED panel when shopping in the $1,000+ range. Well, the Yoga Slim 7i Aura uses an IPS-LCD panel. And when I asked Lenovo about a potential OLED configuration, the company told me, "There will not be an OLED option with this gen."

Thankfully, Lenovo didn't pull any punches with this laptop's 15.3-inch IPS-LCD panel. It's got a 2880 x 1800 resolution, a 0-120Hz variable refresh rate (set to 60Hz by default), plus 100% sRGB and 100% P3 color reproduction—that's the real selling point, the color accuracy.

Movies and games look great on the Yoga Slim 7i Aura, and I found that the display was nicely tuned for creative work in Lightroom. Again, it's an LCD, but the color accuracy is exactly what I want from a Windows laptop at this price. It's on par with (or perhaps better than) my 2020 MacBook Air's Retina display, which is still one of the best laptop displays of all time, at least in my book.

And although I'm not a huge fan of touchscreen laptops, the Yoga Slim 7i Aura's multi-touch functionality proved to be pretty handy. I regularly found myself using pinch-to-zoom and other touchscreen gestures when editing images.

My only serious complaint about the display is that it's hard to read in direct sunlight. The peak brightness is just 500 nits, and Lenovo didn't bother to use an anti-glare coating. Neither of these things are out of the ordinary, of course, but I'd like to see some improvement in this area. Professional laptops should be bright enough to use next to a window on a sunny day. There's nothing worse than settling down at a coffee shop, or at an airport gate, or whatever, only to find that you need to change seats because your laptop's screen is sunlight-averse.

Desktop-Class Performance With a Great Battery Life

Like several other high-end Windows laptops, the Yoga Slim 7i Aura runs on Intel's Lunar Lake Core Ultra Series 2 platform and qualifies as a "Copilot+ AI PC." I haven't gotten much use out of the AI side of things, but the Core Ultra 7 CPU is a stunner, and it offers far better battery performance than previous generations of Intel processors.

I get about 10 or 11 hours of battery life when using the Yoga Slim 7i Aura for routine, everyday tasks—streaming video, writing articles, chatting with friends or coworkers, and so on. And when I left the laptop unplugged for a few days, I came back to find that it had hardly lost any of its charge. Very cool.

Every application I use on the Yoga Slim 7i Aura, including Photoshop and Lightroom, feels snappy and responsive. Multitasking can bog down the machine a bit, especially if you have a stupid number of browser tabs open and active (a bad habit I picked up recently), but I never ran into a situation where the laptop felt slow or weak. It churned through tasks like a champ. For reference, I'm using the 16GB configuration of this laptop, not the 32GB variant (the latter will go on sale sometime after this review is published).

And although the Yoga Slim 7i Aura lacks a dedicated GPU, its integrated Intel Arc graphics can run games like Fortnite and Minecraft at relatively high settings. I chose to sacrifice visual quality in favor of framerate and had a great time—the 120Hz display is truly an asset here. Hardcore gamers and video editors should pick a laptop with more graphical horsepower, of course, but the Yoga Slim 7i Aura is a surprisingly good option for semi-dorky casuals like myself.

The Yoga Slim 7i Aura's fans can get pretty loud and tend to kick on at every possible opportunity. Yet I only have praise for this laptop's thermal performance. It never gets uncomfortably hot, unlike the ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid I reviewed last month, and I can use it in my lap without getting sweaty. That's more than I can say for most Windows laptops, particularly those with modern desktop-class Intel CPUs.

I should point out that good battery life and thermal performance are partially due to throttling. You can squeeze a bit more performance from the Yoga Slim 7i Aura by disabling its power-saving and power-management features, some of which are tucked in Lenovo's proprietary software.

Generous Port Selection, Precarious Power Button

Skinny laptops tend to offer a proportionally slim port selection. However, the Yoga Slim 7i Aura is an exception to the rule. Each side of the laptop features a Thunderbolt 4 port capable of charging and video output. There's also a USB 3.0 Type-A port, an HDMI 2.1 output, and a headphone jack. The only thing missing is an Ethernet port, but that's fine by me, as I only use a wired internet connection when my laptop is docked at a monitor.

But I'm weirded out by the laptop's power button and webcam mute switch. These controls are located along the edge of the laptop near one of the Thunderbolt 4 ports—a Lenovo quirk that I don't really understand. I feel like the power button and webcam switch should be located above the keyboard rather than on the side of the laptop, where they may be triggered by accident.

To be fair, I never had any accidents with the power button, and it's easy to tell when a webcam is disengaged. Maybe Lenovo's on to something. I just think it's an odd choice.

I should clarify that the power button does not have an integrated fingerprint reader. Biometric login is handled by Windows Hello facial recognition. I'd rather use facial recognition than a fingerprint reader, though I understand why someone might prefer the latter.

Tap-to-Transfer Photo Syncing

One of the killer features of Lenovo's Aura ecosystem is "Smart Share," a tool that facilitates wireless photo transfers between Windows 11 and your mobile device of choice. Just tap your iPhone or Android device on the side of the laptop's screen to magically transfer or sync photos. Yeah, it's a bit gimmicky, but it's a fast and intuitive system I'd be happy to see in other laptops.

I first encountered Smart Share at a Lenovo press event in Berlin, Germany. Like many other journalists at the event, I walked away with an incomplete understanding of how Smart Share actually works. Smart Share is not a standalone app—it's built into Intel Unison, a program that facilitates wireless file transfer, cross-device notifications, phone-to-PC calling and texting, and other functionality between Windows 11, Android, and iOS.

Smart Share's tap-to-transfer functionality is based on an "AI Virtual Tap Sensor" from Elliptic Labs. Contrary to some reports, this is not a hardware sensor. It's a machine learning algorithm that parses data from a laptop's accelerometer and wireless receivers to determine when a phone is tapped on the side of the laptop's screen. This algorithm can measure the proximity between your phone and laptop, thereby eliminating the risk of accidental tap-to-transfer interactions.

Tapping your fingers on the side of the Yoga Slim 7i Aura will not bring up Smart Share—I tried it every way possible, yet I couldn't fool the machine. Smart Share only came up when I tapped my phone against the display.

Ben Schoon of 9to5Google managed to fool the tap-to-transfer algorithm at a press event, though I suspect this was due to interference from the dozens of laptops and iPhones set up to demonstrate Smart Share. Or maybe the algorithm was updated before the laptop's launch date, or Ben has the magic touch. I don't really know.

Intel Unison is not exclusive to Lenovo Aura series devices. You can install it on any PC with an Intel EVO processor. Smart Share tap-to-transfer functionality requires a new Aura PC like the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Series that's featured in this review, but Intel Unison offers the same wireless transfer functionality minus the fun tapping gimmick.

Should You Buy the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition?

I've got some nitpicky complaints about the Yoga Slim 7i Aura, but the laptop is mostly faultless. It's a competitively-priced machine with a flagship Intel Core Ultra processor, a color-accurate screen, a superb typing experience, a real-world battery life of at least 10 hours, and plenty of other premium perks. And despite its use of integrated graphics, the Yoga Slim 7i Aura is no slouch when gaming or editing videos.

If I had to buy a Windows laptop today, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura would be one of my top candidates. It nearly matches the battery life of Snapdragon X-powered PCs, yet it doesn't suffer from the growing pains and app compatibility issues of Windows on ARM. It's got a slim and lightweight design, yet it's a powerhouse with a solid thermal design and port selection.

That said, Intel deserves some credit here. The chipmaker wisely prioritized power efficiency and graphics performance in the latest generation of Core Ultra processors. Before buying the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura, I strongly suggest comparing it with other Core Ultra Series 2 machines, such as the Dell XPS 13 or the ASUS ZenBook S 14.