There are two downward-firing woofers on the bottom

• Excellent speakers and audio system
• Powerful processor
• All-day battery life
• Good value for specs

Bad Stuff

• Staid design
• 16:9 screen is cramped and dimmer than the competition
• Bloatware mars the experience

About this speaker system, to start. But the 9i’s secret is that the custom tweeters are housed in a rotating soundbar, which is built into the laptop’s hinge. The positioning means that the grills are always facing outward, regardless of whether the laptop is in clamshell, tablet, or tent mode.

I’m not exaggerating when I say this is the best audio I’ve ever heard from a laptop of this size. Its volume more than fills a room, and it sounds great in all orientations with booming bass. The surround quality was also superb.

The excellent sound is thanks to speakers embedded in the hinge that always face you, no matter which way you use the 9i. Unfortunately, the garish logo is always visible, too.

The 9i comes preloaded with Dolby Atmos Speaker System software, where you can swap between presets for Movie, Music, Game, and Voice as well as personalized profiles and a dynamic mode that detects your content and adjusts the audio accordingly. These do make a difference – namely, the Music mode brings the vocals out more.

Lenovo Yoga 9i specs (as tested)

• Model: 82BG000CUS
• Intel 11th Gen Core i7-1185G7 processor (up to 4.8GHz, four cores)

To complement the sound, the 9i has a very nice 1080p touch display with accurate details and colors. I’d have no problem watching movies and YouTube videos on it, and you can switch between different picture modes (Dark, Light, and Vivid) with preloaded Dolby Vision software. The screen is quite glossy, however, and kicked back a frustrating amount of glare in brighter rooms. And it’s not the brightest around, maxing out at 290 nits in testing. I also wish Lenovo would ditch the 16:9 aspect ratio, as it has for some of its premium models in the business space.

The final thing to call out about the chassis is its garaged stylus. Garaged styluses are sometimes a huge pain to tug in and out, but this one was smooth to remove. The garage’s location on the right side of the Yoga’s rear edge isn’t the most convenient, but it’s definitely preferable to having to store the pen yourself.

The stylus has a new “elastomer” tip that’s supposed to mimic the feeling of a pen on paper. That’s a fair description of how it feels in practice, but it also means it’s not as smooth to write and draw with as other touchscreen styluses. (It’s also tiny – much smaller than most real pens.) And there are two (very small) buttons, which can be mapped to various tasks – erase, left click, copy, paste, whatever you want – in Lenovo’s Pen Settings software. You can check the pen’s battery here as well. Lenovo says it can last 40 minutes on a 15-minute charge.

The 9i has a new stylus that feels more like pen on paper when writing on the screen. It lives in a garage on the back side of the laptop.

There’s not too much to say about the rest of this chassis. The backlit keyboard is acceptable and roomy, but a bit flatter than my favorites on the market. The device is fine-looking and sturdy enough, but it doesn’t have the same sleek professionalism as the Spectre x360 14 or the Surface Pro 7 Plus (and the prominent Lenovo logo on the hinge looks a bit corny to me). It’s not the lightest laptop around, but it’s still portable at 3.02 pounds. And the port selection is about as good as you might expect for a laptop this thin, including a USB 3.2 Type-A Gen 2, two Thunderbolt 4, and an audio combo jack.