Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition review: Intel excellence inside, middling outside

Intel is back, baby. At least for now.

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition is a fine-looking 15-inch thin-and-light productivity laptop with an AI coprocessor — another entry in an increasingly crowded field. It has most of what you’d expect from a laptop like this: all-day battery life, a nice screen, a great keyboard, full-sounding speakers, and just a couple of irritating shortcomings.

But the most interesting thing about the Yoga Slim 7i is what’s inside. It’s the first laptop we’ve tested with Intel’s new Lunar Lake processor architecture. Intel has a lot to prove: in the last six months, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips proved Arm processors could match Intel’s Meteor Lake CPUs for performance while trouncing them on battery life. And laptops with AMD’s Ryzen AI chips arrived with similar performance, more powerful graphics, and decent-enough battery life to keep them in the game, too. Lunar Lake is essentially Intel’s last chance to stay competitive in thin-and-light laptops.

The good news is that Lunar Lake basically pulls it off. The bad news is that, for a $1,300 laptop, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i falls short in a few too many areas to make it an easy recommendation.

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition has a sharp 15.3-inch screen, an Intel Core Ultra 7 256V processor, 16GB or 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, excellent speakers, a great keyboard, a mediocre trackpad, and a whole lot of branding. 

The Aura Edition tag is Lenovo’s way of saying it has a Lunar Lake chip and mostly amounts to some AI bloatware. It’s also a Copilot Plus PC. That means that among other things, it has a dedicated neural processing unit (NPU) that can perform at least 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS) — the NPU in the Core Ultra 7 256V can do up to 47 TOPS. This puts Lunar Lake laptops like the Yoga Slim 7i in direct competition with the slew of Snapdragon-equipped Copilot Plus PCs released this year, as well as those like the Asus Zenbook S 16 with AMD’s Ryzen AI chips. 

Whether you’re working with AI and actually need that NPU or (like most people) you’re just looking for a fast laptop with good battery life, Lunar Lake shows solid gains over Intel’s last-gen Meteor Lake chips in single-core performance and power efficiency. And it means you don’t have to jump ship to Windows on Arm to get improved battery life and standby time.

In daily use, the Yoga Slim 7i feels fast, rarely showing any signs of lag or slowdown. The only times I noticed the tiniest stutters were as I swiped between many Chrome tabs I had open across four virtual desktops. There’s life in that x86 architecture yet.

In single-core benchmarks, the Lunar Lake Core 7 Ultra 256V in the Yoga Slim 7i is imperceptibly faster than the Core Ultra 9 185H (Meteor Lake) chip and about 5 percent faster than the Snapdragon X Elite 78-100 in Lenovo’s similar Yoga Slim 7x. But it’s nearly 10 percent slower than the higher-clocked Snapdragon X Elite 80-100 of the 15-inch Surface Laptop 7 or the AMD Ryzen AI 9 370 HX in the Asus Zenbook S 16.

In multicore, the Lunar Lake chip fell further behind — between 18 and 27 percent slower in Geekbench and 25 to 38 percent in Cinebench. Lunar Lake has four fewer cores than the Snapdragon chips and half of what the Core Ultra 9 18H is working with, so it makes sense that multicore performance is going to take a hit, but it’s a smaller hit than you’d expect given the lower core count.

The bigger offender is the Arc 140V iGPU, which isn’t any better than Meteor Lake in our tests and is about 20 percent slower than the GPU in the AMD-powered Zenbook. Ars Technica and Tom’s Hardware both ran more graphics benchmarks, with mixed results — Lunar Lake’s GPU beat Meteor Lake in some tests, including several actual games, but fell behind in others. It may call for a revisit after Intel delivers more driver updates. Regardless, none of these are gaming machines.

Intel comes out of this looking pretty good, all things considered. The Core 7 Ultra 256V isn’t as fast in our benchmarks as the higher-end Snapdragon X Elite 80-100 or Ryzen AI 9370HX, but it’s close enough, especially in single-core work. It lasted three hours longer than the Zenbook in our battery rundown test, and it doesn’t have the lingering compatibility issues of the Arm-powered Snapdragon X Elite chip.

In the Yoga Slim 7i, Lunar Lake delivers this competitive performance while maintaining excellent battery life. The Yoga got me through my days on a charge just fine and only lost up to 3 percent charge when left unplugged overnight. I did manage to kill it in nine hours on a heavy workload day, but I kept the screen pretty bright with screen timeout and sleep disabled and Windows’ Energy Saver not kicking in until 10 percent. (I accidentally left the power settings this way from a battery test; I normally stick to a laptop’s default power settings.)

On a day where I left more typical sleep / wake settings on but treated myself to variable 60 to 120Hz refresh rates instead of the default 60Hz, it lasted nearly 11 hours before needing a charge. For a decently sized screen that gets fairly bright with support for both HDR and 120Hz refresh, that ain’t bad at all.

Speaking of the 7i’s screen, its 15.3-inch, 2880 x 1800 IPS panel doesn’t have as vibrant of colors or as deep of blacks as an OLED, but it’s still pleasing to look at unless it’s side by side with an OLED. It’s rated for 500 nits of brightness, and I measured its peak at 512. The Snapdragon-powered Yoga Slim 7x has a 14-inch OLED panel at a slightly higher 2944 x 1840 resolution, but it tops out at 90Hz.

While the screen is good, the 7i’s keyboard, speakers, and port selection are fantastic — which you should expect when you step up to a larger 15-inch laptop. The keys have surprisingly deep travel, with a nice tactile feel. The 7i’s well-built metal frame is fairly thin and has smooth edges that don’t cut into your wrists when you type. The quad-speaker setup sounds quite full for a laptop, making it more than serviceable for enjoying music, podcasts, or taking calls while you work. And it has port selection befitting a productivity machine, with Thunderbolt 4 ports on either side, plus a legacy USB-A port, HDMI-out, and combination headphone / mic jack. 

So what’s the rub? The biggest offender here is its trackpad, which is oddly short and wide compared to those found on laptops like the Microsoft Surface 7. And unlike the Surface 7’s haptic trackpad, the Yoga Slim’s is annoyingly hard to click toward the top third. (Imagine trying to press a piano key near its hinge.) It’s also excessively sensitive to accidental taps, forcing me to turn off single- and multi-finger taps entirely in Windows settings.

The Slim 7i’s 1080p webcam is passable at best. Its auto-exposure tends toward the washed-out and gets wildly confused when I am backlit by a window. On several occasions, it looked like I was being raptured on a video call for a solid 15 seconds before the camera software could figure out what to do. But the image quality I can live with — unlike its awkwardly placed kill switch. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that the Yoga has a switch to cut power to the webcam at the hardware level, but its location on the right edge of the laptop is annoying. Pulling it out of my bag is usually enough to toggle it off, which means Windows Hello doesn’t work until I figure out what happened. If you’re a frequent commuter, this may get on your nerves. 

It’s a small-ish flaw I can maybe tolerate, unlike the badgering notifications from Lenovo’s preinstalled Vantage software, upselling services you don’t need. Yes, you can kill the notifications and uninstall Lenovo’s app, but bloat is bloat. And the Vantage app is another example of PC makers desperately trying to find things to do with AI and failing at the execution.

Shield mode, for example, is a setting in the Vantage app that uses your webcam to warn you if onlookers are behind you and could be reading your screen. It can even blur your screen so they can’t read it (and of course, neither can you). But it doesn’t kick in until the interloper is breathing down your neck, at which point you probably don’t need an app to tell you they’re in your space.

The downsides of the Yoga Slim 7i aren’t deal-breakers, but they’d be more forgivable on a cheaper machine. $1,300 puts you within range of the 15-inch MacBook Air (which just got a free RAM upgrade), and if you don’t need to run Windows, that laptop offers you even better build quality, an amazing trackpad, and a battery that easily lasts a full day and a bit more. 

If you need a Windows thin-and-light today, you’ll get even better battery life from a Snapdragon X laptop like the 15-inch Microsoft Surface Laptop 7, as well as similar specs and a much nicer trackpad, though you’ll have to spend a bit more and deal with (hopefully) minor software compatibility issues. And a Zenbook S 16 with AMD’s Ryzen AI gives you better GPU performance, a good trackpad, and an OLED panel for about the same price, but that lovely display isn’t as bright as the Yoga 7i’s and its battery doesn’t last as long. 

So where does that leave us? The Yoga Slim 7i shows you can get good performance and battery life from a Lunar Lake laptop — especially compared to Meteor Lake laptops like the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra, which is nearly a full pound heavier, with a screen that tops out at 60Hz. 

As a laptop, the Yoga Slim 7i is fine but not exceptional. As a demonstration of Lunar Lake’s potential, it’s intriguing. The good news is that, if you need a thin-and-light Windows laptop soon, the next few months are going to be very exciting. We’re going to be testing more Strix Point and Lunar Lake laptops from the likes of Acer, Dell, and others. And with CES right around the corner, we’re sure to see a fleet of new options for 2025.

Lunar Lake could very well be a stopgap measure for x86 on our long, inevitable march to Arm-based everything, but it’s showing signs that Intel’s old dog is learning some new tricks.

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge