Lenovo is the world’s largest PC maker and offers a wide range of laptops that have been specially designed to meet the needs and preferences of consumers with different needs and preferences. Particularly, the Yoga series of Ultrabooks from Lenovo has been widely recognized as being one of the best Ultrabooks on the market today.

As part of the Lenovo Yoga series, the company recently released a new device under the Yoga series, namely the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Carbon. Despite the lengthy name of this laptop, it boasts a compact design that is impressive for a laptop of its size. The laptop boasts a 13-inch screen, an ultra-thin, lightweight carbon-magnesium body, and is one of the thinnest laptops in the world due to its 13-inch screen. Despite its super thin design, this laptop is still able to house a 2.5K display, an Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, and lots more.

I was able to borrow a unit from Lenovo India for the purpose of testing it out. Over the course of about a month, I had the opportunity to experiment with the product on and off. The following are my thoughts on the matter.

Design & Build

As the name suggests, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Carbon’s chassis is made of carbon and magnesium alloys. Due to the fact that it does not weigh much more than 970 grams, holding it is much like holding a thin book. There is no doubt that the device is razor thin, with a thickness that rivals that of an iPad Pro when it is unfolded. Because of its curved sides, it actually feels like it is even thinner than it actually is.

There is a military-grade certification for durability on the entire body of the product. There is also a lot of quality workmanship in the product, however, the piece I received makes a creaking noise when I put my wrist to the right side of the trackpad. In my opinion, this is a case that is totally unique.

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Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Carbon Review 03 –

The laptop has been designed in such a way that it is well suited for portability as a whole. There is not much space that it takes up in a backpack, so you can carry it easily.

It is unfortunate that the device is only equipped with two USB Type-C ports, one side-facing power button, and a key to open the camera shutter, due to its thin design. The Thunderbolt 4 port is on one side of this Type-C port, while the USB 3.2 Gen 2 port is on the other side of the Type-C port. There is support for both DisplayPort 1.4 as well as Power Delivery in both of them.

Thanks to Lenovo, an adapter is bundled in the box with the laptop. As well as the 3.5mm headphone jack, this accessory also has ports such as USB Type-A, HDMI, VGA, and a USB Type-A port.

Display & Speakers

The display on the notebook is a 13-inch IPS LCD panel sporting a resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels (2.5K) and up to a 90Hz refresh rate. The 16:10 screen offers 400 nits peak brightness level and can cover 100% of the sRGB color gamut.

The panel comes hardware-calibrated with a delta error of ΔE < 1. Therefore, in addition to being sharp, it can output real-to-life colors. There’s no need to tweak any display settings, as the default profile is great.

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The auto-brightness works flawlessly and the display gets bright enough outdoors to get some work done or consume content. The 90Hz refresh rate keeps every animation on the screen smooth.

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Since there’s also support for Dolby Vision, the panel is ideal to stream content on Netflix. The 4W speakers with Dolby Atmos support further elevate the multimedia experience. These bottom-firing speakers can get loud enough to enjoy movies and TV series. However, you have to place the computer on a hard surface (such as a table) and sit close to the product to experience surround sound effects.

Performance & Software

The notebook is powered by a 12th Gen Intel Core i7-1260P mobile processor. The silicon is paired with 16GB LPDDR5 RAM and 1TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD. For graphics, it uses Intel Iris Xe GPU.

This configuration is more than enough for the target audience of the product. I did not face any lag whatsoever during my entire usage. Microsoft Windows 11 Home operating system did not cause any problems either.

Though the laptop’s chassis is small, it still has a cooling fan. The fan only runs at maximum speed when the thermals go high while performing heavy tasks and installing certain system updates.

The device remains almost silent most of the time as thermals are well-controlled for day-to-day operations, like running a browser (Google Chrome), Microsoft Office, and some coding on Microsoft Visual Studio Code.

I did not play any games on the notebook, as it is not intended for gamers. However, it should be able to run most of the titles without major problems, thanks to its hardware.

Finally, you get Lenovo’s first-party software suite that offers features like background blur/noise cancellation, voice-to-text, translator, customizable hotkeys, and more.

Battery & Charging

The notebook is backed by a 50Wh battery. Lenovo claims that it can last up to 10 hours. However, the company’s test conditions only include 10 hours of 1080p local video playback at default volume level with the display set to 150 nits brightness, maximum resolution, and 60Hz refresh rate.

Ideally, you should get around 5–7 hours of battery life from this product. For me, it averaged around 5 to 5.5 hours with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS turned on along with Microsoft Phone Link running in the background. My workflow includes applications like Google Chrome and Microsoft Office.

I even tried switching the refresh rate to 60Hz from 90Hz. I gained only about 30 minutes, so I decided to use the high refresh rate option with the maximum 2.5K resolution.

As far as charging is concerned, the bundled 65W adapter can charge the laptop fully in about 1.5 hours. But the average endurance let me down. The x86 chip and a smaller battery are the culprits here.

Miscellaneous

Unlike most laptops, this one does not feature a fingerprint sensor. Hence, you have to rely on Windows Hello face recognition, which uses an IR camera.

The system detects when a person is nearby and tries to authenticate the face. On successful authentication, the notebook dismisses the lock screen to open the desktop by default, but you can turn it off.

The face authentication system works with dim to no lighting too. But if you are like me who wears glasses, it may not work all the time due to reflections. So I had to take my glasses off to sign in most of the time.

Lenovo should have included a fingerprint sensor, which is more reliable than any biometric authentication system out there.

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Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Carbon Review 06 –

The laptop’s hinge is pretty smooth, as the lid can be opened easily with a single finger. But the notebook should be on a table to perform this action. It is not possible on the lap, at least, for me.

The auto-backlit keyboard takes up almost the entire bottom part as it features an edge-to-edge design. Though it has a mere 1mm key travel due to the chassis’ thinness, the typing experience is good.

What’s not good about the laptop is the subpar 720p webcam. Also, it comes with a comparatively big 65W power adapter, which does not match the thin and light form factor of the device. It would have been nice if the company had included a smaller, multipurpose GaN charger with USB PD compatibility.

Lastly, the availability of the product is limited across markets. For instance, though it is offered in three colors (Moon White, Storm Grey, and Cloud Grey), you can only get it in one (White) color option in India.

In fact, Lenovo is only selling a single SKU of this device (same as the review unit) in the country priced at ₹1,31,990.

Conclusion

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Carbon is targeted at customers who are on the move. It fulfills almost all the needs of this audience.

If only it had better battery life, it would have been the perfect thin and light laptop on the market. Even with the drawbacks discussed above, it is a highly recommendable Windows laptop for portability.

Hopefully, one day, in the future, Windows OEMs will finally launch thin and lightweight laptops based on ARM architecture, with improved battery life and performance that can rival the Apple M series chips found in MacBooks.

Until then, the MacBook Air with an M series chip is the best laptop out there for people who are always on the move. But if your workflow requires Windows, then Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Carbon along with LG Gram 14 and Dell XPS 13 are probably the only ones you should look for.

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