Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x 14 Gen 9 First Impressions

It’s one week late, putting me at a competitive disadvantage, but my first Copilot+ PC review unit arrived today and I can finally get started.

It’s the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x 14 Gen 9, one of two third-party Copilot+ PCs that caught my eye at the launch last month. I should receive the other, an HP EliteBook Ultra, at some point as well, though at this point, it may make more sense to have it delivered to Pennsylvania, as we fly home on Saturday.

The Yoga was worth waiting for: This is a premium thin and light laptop with a gorgeous OLED display and a reasonable price tag, for both the base model and its RAM and storage upgrades. And it should prove a compelling alternative to other Copilot+ and non-Copilot+ PCs, and the MacBook Air.

I noted the basics in my Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x 14 Gen 9 Preview: This PC is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E78100 processor, 16 to 32 GB of LPRRD5X RAM, and 512 GB or 1 TB of PCIe Gen 4 2242 M.2 SSD storage, and it provides a 14.5-inch 16:10 PureSight OLED touch panel with a 3K (2944 x 1840) resolution, a 90 Hz refresh rate, 1000 nits of peak brightness, and DisplayHDR True Black 600 and low blue light capabilities. The keyboard is full-sized and is delightfully free of superfluous keys, and, true to its thin and light form factor, the expansion is all USB Type-C. And it’s all 40 Gbps/Power Delivery 3.1/DisplayPort 1.4 too. Very nice, though I should point out now, looking at it, that there’s no headphone jack.

You can check out that earlier article for more information. Here, I will focus solely on the hardware and my early experiences getting this PC up and running.

So far, so good.

The Yoga is a pretty PC with a premium aluminum chassis that’s available in a single Cosmic Blue color. It’s a nice dark blue/gray in person but comes off as more dark gray in photos. Like other modern Yoga PCs, it features a Comfort Edge design in which all edges are nicely curved for your comfort, but the bottom deck edges are color-matched to the device rather than being a shiny silver color as is often the case. It’s a great look.

Lenovo tells me it’s durable too: The Yoga Slim 7x 14 has passed the same MIL-STD 810H certifications that it subjects its ThinkPads to. I can’t speak to that yet, but it certainly looks and feels well made, with no flex to the body at all. In fact, there’s no flex in the center of the keyboard either. Nice.

The display is predictably incredible, and at 14.5 inches with a 16:10 aspect ratio, it’s a good size, not quite the 15+ inches of my MacBook Air, but just as manageable as a typical 14-inch Ultrabook. I noted the specs above, but this is about as sweet as laptop displays can be, and I’m looking forward to putting its Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos capabilities to the test.

Having struggled this year with various Meteor Lake-based laptops, I feel primed to escape from the hell of reliability, fan noise, heat, and battery life issues that seem to get worse with each passing month. And so I paying particular attention to the basics with this first Snapdragon X-based PC. As I turned it on for the first time, I was careful to listen for fan noise, and there was indeed a very low hum during my set up activities. Better than the jet engine blast of the recent Meteor Lake PCs, but not silent. We’ll see how/if that changes as things calm down.

Windows 11 on Arm is, well, Windows 11, of course. On first boot, I noted that the Yoga was running version 24H2 build 26100.863, which is the latest build. Granted, Lenovo set the thing up for me, so I will later blow it away and go through the full Out of Box Experience (OOBE).

The initial performance experience was notably good, though I noticed later that the Power mode was set to “Best Performance” for some reason. So I switched that to “Balanced” like a normal PC. Then I remembered this was a Lenovo PC, opened the Lenovo Vantage app, and checked out how the power management modes were configured. It was set to “Common,” which is fine, but I enabled the Automatic so it could adjust power management automatically.

In any event, I started off as I always do by installing all available updates via Windows Update while I made a few configuration and personalization changes, and noted which apps were preloaded in the Start menu. I also updated all the in-box apps with the Microsoft Store app, uninstalled McAfee and OneNote, and started installing a few basic apps so I could write this article. I’ve left it off power to see how well the battery holds up.

The Windows 11 on Arm experience will be defined in part by how well, or if, the apps we all need work on this platform. Because this is such a huge topic, I will focus on that for my next write-up as I install my apps and see how things go. But for the short-term, I installed Chrome, Brave, iA Writer, and Affinity Photos 2: Just enough to write, edit the photos I took, and post it all to the site.

And I will write about that experience next. More soon. Really soon–like, today soon–if I can swing it.