The brand new Lenovo Slim 9i 14 was created with two aims in thoughts: first, it’s the first carbon-neutral laptop to be commercially out there. Secondly, regardless of being product of many recyclable supplies, it ought to deliver premium leisure and cell luxurious. On this review, we are going to have a look at the alternatives and design methods Lenovo has adopted to see if the fact matches the pitch.
Slim 9i Specs Highlights
With the Lenovo Slim 9i 14, potential patrons gained’t have to fret an excessive amount of about understanding their {hardware} choices as a result of Lenovo made it quite simple. There’s one processor choice (together with graphics) and two glorious OLED show choices. The RAM (16 GB or 32G soldered) and storage (512GB or 1 TB) are straightforward decisions, relying in your wants.
Our testing unit has an Intel Core i7-1280P (6P+8E cores) with built-in Intel Iris Xe graphics. There’s 32 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage, although this won’t have an effect on the benchmarking efficiency in comparison with fashions with smaller reminiscence and storage footprints.
The 2 show choices are 2.8K (90Hz) and 4K OLED (60Hz) panels with related efficiency, apart from the refresh fee and pixel depend. Extra on that within the Show part.
Lenovo included its A.I. Core 2.0 function, a chip (+software program) that neatly manages energy and show settings to maximise advantages whereas decreasing energy utilization. Amongst many different issues, Lenovo can detect once you’re going away and lock your laptop instantly, each for safety and energy financial savings.
Industrial Design
The Lenovo Slim 9i 14 design is likely one of the most enjoyable elements of the laptop, giving it a distinct appear and feel that units it aside from different laptops we’ve seen this 12 months.
The Slim 9i 14 is constructed like a smartphone, with curved edges and an enormous tempered glass floor on the show’s again cowl. The glass makes it look terribly slick and stylish. On the similar time, the glass might be extra immune to minor scratches than aluminum and is less complicated to wash. Sadly, it might additionally crack in the event you mistreat it.
Lenovo is offering a cool laptop sleeve within the field as customers will in all probability need to hold this laptop as pristine as doable. The glass is examined to withstand a 50cm drop however keep away from drops altogether. The sleeve has a pen holder, however sadly, there’s no e-Pen help. For e-Pen help, have a look at the brand new Yoga i9 14, the convertible-PC counterpart to this laptop.
“THE GLASS MAKES IT LOOK EXTRAORDINARILY SLICK AND ELEGANT”
Because of the rounded edges, holding the laptop is very snug and tender, which you’ll respect as you go from assembly to assembly. The telephone is just 0.59-inch thick (14.9mm), comparable to 2 stacked smartphones.
An enormous side of this design is the world’s first Carbon Impartial laptop, licensed to the ISO 14067:2018 commonplace that describes how we must always calculate a product’s carbon footprint. Even the package deal paper is FSC licensed.
Making this laptop carbon impartial is a exceptional technical feat of engineering and a doubtlessly sensible enterprise route. Many corporations are actively on the lookout for methods to hit their ESG objectives (Environmental, Social, and Governance) to fulfill buyers.
“CARBON NEUTRAL: A REMARKABLE TECHNICAL FEAT OF ENGINEERING”
The laptop’s dimensions of 315 x 214.4 x 14.9 mm (12.4 x 8.44 x 0.59 inches) make it a really compact laptop in its class. The aluminum and glass development offers it a 3.02 Lbs (1.37Kg) weight. That’s greater than the ThinkPad X1 Carbon or ThinkPad X1 Carbon nano, two exceptionally light-weight laptops.
The Slim 9i 14 has a light-weight heft that screams “high quality materials” once you choose it up. Test one out in a retailer when you have an opportunity, because it’s definitely worth the expertise, even only for curiosity’s sake.
Keyboard and Trackpad
The keyboard is much like what Lenovo makes use of in its high-end client laptops. Smile-Form keys provide a 0.9mm (guestimate) key journey with agency and agreeable tactile suggestions. This keyboard is backlit by monochrome LED lighting (2 ranges).
The glass Trackpad is ~50% bigger than the brand new ThinkPad X1 Carbon, in order that’s an enormous change for Lenovo. It’s now very appropriate for advanced gestures utilizing 3-4 fingers, and if these are a part of your workflow, you’ll be thrilled with this trackpad.
Ports
Having three USB-C ports on the laptop is nice, particularly when utilizing the Thunderbolt 4 protocol. There’s additionally a 3.5mm audio connector and Lenovo additionally offers a USB-C multiport adapter (VGA, HDMI, USB-A) that provides fundamental connectivity.
Sound
The Slim 9i comes with a quad-speakers, Dolby Atmos-certified Bowers & Wilkins sound system with two woofers (2x 3W) on the backside and two tweeters (2x 2W) on both facet of the keyboard hidden behind the speaker grills.
“A WORLD-CLASS AUDIO EXPERIENCE”
The speaker set produces a world-class audio expertise, not just for a laptop this measurement but additionally for laptops of any measurement. For instance, the sound high quality is significantly better than our massive 17-inch gaming laptop on the workplace. It’s mind-boggling.
It’s a testomony to the standard parts and tuning Lenovo has chosen for this laptop. In the long run, Audio does depend on sound physics, so bigger laptops have the potential to function even higher and extra highly effective audio, however sadly most don’t.
Show
The Lenovo PureSight 4K OLED show we now have examined is magnificent. After all, it comes with all of the OLED advantages you’ve heard of: intense black and glorious colour replica are the 2 properties which make this display an ideal leisure medium, particularly in a dimly lit setting.
PureSight is a Lenovo model that describes a high quality degree for its greatest flat panels. The technicalities could change over time, however Puresight represents workstation-level shows of the second.
In a vivid setting like the outside, it’s tougher to understand all of the nuances the show can render. The specs of this display present 400 NITs of brightness, however we measured it at 558 NITs which was a very good shock. Each choices are shiny shows, so the colours and particulars look a bit higher than a matte panel. The draw back is excessive reflectivity.
“MAGNIFICENT.”
The 16:10 side ratio offers a bit extra vertical area, which is just about a typical in 2022 for high-end productiveness laptops. With 100% DCI-P3 (125% sRGB) colour protection and built-in X-Ceremony colour tuning, this laptop can undoubtedly cater to the wants of 2D graphics professionals who want to indicate their work below one of the best situations.
The 1080p webcam is a step up from earlier 720p built-in webcams and has an infrared sensor to log in with facial recognition securely. An e-Privateness shutter as a bodily swap off to the laptop’s proper facet. You should be inside Home windows to allow/disable the camera utilizing an Fn key. The swap allows you to do that even when locked out.
This laptop has far-field microphones, which implies it’s optimized to report sound from any route. This was initially added to help voice assistants like Microsoft’s Cortana or Amazon’s Alexa.
Efficiency
The Slim 9i 14 (“i” stands for Intel) is powered by an Intel Core i7-1280P, one of many extra performant cell laptop processors for this class of laptops. Our knowledge reveals it to deliver a big efficiency increase over the i7-1260P (as examined within the X1 Carbon) and much more over the i7-1230U (as seen as one Dell XPS 13 choice).
All productiveness and multimedia duties are dealt with with ease and velocity. Nevertheless, this platform can also be very acceptable for 2D graphics design and net improvement. Gentle video modifying is feasible since there’s 32GB RAM and a 1TB storage choice, however the lack of a discrete (GPU) would possibly cap your video-editing potential.
Enterprise-oriented laptops such because the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen10 do get the next sequential disk learn/write efficiency, which might translate to barely greater productiveness for I/O heavy workloads resembling video compression export. Nevertheless, the extent of disk efficiency of the Slim 9i 14 is excellent in its client laptop class.
Battery Life
With the usual PCMark 10 Fashionable Workplace battery check, we bought 460 minutes (7.6 hours) of steady office-like work with the display (110 NITs). You will need to notice that that is with the 4K OLED show configuration, which is probably the most power-hungry. With the two.8K show, this might climb to 9.5+ hrs, however we now have not examined that one.
Lenovo says this 4K laptop might yield 11.5 hours of native video playback at 150 NITs, whereas the two.8K mannequin would get 11.7 hours. Each claims appear plausible, however that’s a best-case state of affairs.
The 75Wh battery is kind of massive for a 14” skinny and lightweight laptop, which explains why Lenovo can suggest such show and processor choices and nonetheless preserve stress-free battery life for many customers.
There’s a 65W compact AC Adapter, or you might additionally use a third occasion adapter that complies with USB-PD (Energy Supply) on the appropriate wattage, just like the EZQuest UltimatePower 90W GaN Wall Charger.
Those that carry out solely very fundamental duties and need excessive battery life ought to examine the ThinkPad X13s, however we predict the use case is totally totally different from what is meant for the Slim i9.
Conclusion
The Lenovo Slim 9i 14 is designed as a luxurious, carbon-neutral laptop that gives “premium leisure” in a small type issue. From that standpoint, the design has achieved and maybe surpassed its objectives.
This laptop is an absolute multimedia beast that gives the final word visible and sound expertise in a 14-inch laptop type issue. Along with entertaining, we predict it’s a succesful 2D create workstation or an ultramobile net improvement laptop with sufficient CPU, RAM, and storage for these duties.
Knowledge reveals the Slim 9i 14 is most frequently in contrast to the brand new Yoga 9i, and for good causes. Internally, each computer systems have many frequent traits, however the Yoga 9i has a 360-degrees hinge (and speaker) design along with e-Pen help.
“AN ABSOLUTE MULTIMEDIA BEAST”
The Dell XPS 13 can also be one other widespread comparability. We predict the use case is totally different. The XPS 13 is considerably extra compact than the Slim 9i, however that’s as a result of it’s a 13.3” laptop (vs. 14”). The XPS 13 additionally has much less highly effective CPU choices and doesn’t provide OLED shows. It could be an X1 Carbon Gen10 or X1 Nano competitor as a substitute.
We like the place Lenovo goes with this product and are typically impressed with the commercial design, construct high quality, and chosen applied sciences.
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