Gadget Review: This laptop is a professional and personal delight

The Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i is a mighty, mighty laptop. You wouldn’t know it when you first set eyes on it, but under its grey or silver smoothly finished skin and within its slim shell, there lurks sheer power — for both excelling in casual everyday use and for a seamless professional experience.

The looks are deceptive though. Lenovo’s design department errs on the side of safety and caution rather than flamboyance. And in the Pro 9i it has followed the same principle, nailing the looks and componentry as primarily sturdy, with a modicum of style.

Lenovo’s iconic watchband hinge adds a touch of flair to the overall solidity and ensures smooth transitions between laptop, tent and stand modes. The hinge is stiff enough to hint at years of trouble-free usage, giving you a sort of tactile assurance that it can take repeated opening and closing motions for years.

The finish of the outer plastic shell is as smooth as you can expect from any high-end laptop on the market. Both the available colours – storm grey and silver - look smart on the device and neither readily takes smudges. When you open the flap, the mouse pad is wide, with reassuringly tactile clicks. The backlit keyboard feels like it can take with aplomb your demented punching on those I-work-because-I-have-to days. The mesh speaker grills on either side of the keyboard are also meticulously finished, as is the surface of the display.

The display itself is one of the standout features of the Pro 9i. It is a 4K, 14.5-inches affair, with a resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels, delivering stunning and crisp visuals, with vibrant colours and excellent contrast. Whether you're watching movies, editing photos or working on creative graphics projects, the display offers an immersive viewing experience with minimal glare despite its maximum vibrancy.

Under its hood, this Lenovo packs a punch that becomes apparent at the mere mention of its powerful hardware configuration. Equipped with an Intel Core i9 EVO processor, 32GB of RAM, and a speedy 1TB solid-state hard drive, it is at the upper edge of what’s available on the market today. Even more cutting-edge is its NVDIA GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card with its own 8GB RAM built in.

What all this means is that this laptop breezes through everyday tasks and handles demanding applications with ease. Whether you're multitasking, gaming or running resource-intensive software, the Pro 9i delivers snappy performance and responsive operation. The RTX 4060 card further enhances graphical performance, enabling smooth visuals and seamless multimedia playback.

In fact, we found our test mule to be one of the fastest launchers of the complete Adobe suite of programmes, such as Photoshop, InDesign and their ilk. Launching the programmes themselves from scratch never took more than three seconds, while opening RAW and graphic files of even over 100MB each took only marginally longer at about five seconds. While this is on a fresh unit, the speeds are high enough to hint that even with the inevitable slowdown that age and loading up the hard drive brings, the Pro 9i will deliver years of fast use.

However, while this Lenovo remains a premium offering, a couple of aspects remain amiss, sticking out like sore thumbs on an otherwise great package. The first is the ports, or lack thereof.

The Pro 9i features a rather sparse connectivity. Of the two USB C ports, one is taken up by the laptop’s charging cable, leaving only one free during tethered use or charging. And then there are only two USB ports. For those using this laptop for the high-end graphics applications that it is capable of, you will need to add a port replicator if you want to connect your pen tablet, external keyboard and mouse, and any other peripherals.

Also, despite its many strengths, the Pro 9i falls short in the battery life department. Lenovo’s claim is up to 15 hours, but real-world usage never saw us get past even half as many hours with a combination of video and graphics use, running demanding applications.

All said though, with only a couple of drawbacks, this sturdily built, 1.67kg-light, high-end capable package from Lenovo is a great buy for Dh7,999. It is a capable professional tool as well as a delightful personal computer.

Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i laptop computer

Hits:

- Fast, high-end performance

- Vibrant display screen

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