Yoga Slim 7i Carbon 13 is not a new name from Lenovo. It’s been the moniker attached to premium 13.3-inch thin and light laptops for several years now.
The 7th generation after the name is a key factor, the latest in Lenovo’s ultra-compact laptops with 12th generation Intel Alder Lake silicon and general technical and aesthetic improvements for 2023. It indicates that it is an edition.
Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Carbon review: What you need to know
You can’t help but love ultraportables. You can carry a fully functional computer with you and not feel like you are carrying anything. But the feeling still lurks that you’re paying more for less. Plus, high-end ultraportables don’t come cheap. Because we tend to have less and less ports and connectors for the money.
Indeed, the latest trend in these types of laptops is to offer few physical connections. The Yoga Slim 7i Gen 7 takes it to the next level and even gets rid of the unobtrusive 3.5 mm headphone jack, which even Apple hasn’t dared to do yet.
In my opinion this is a step backwards, but otherwise this is an impressive package. It comes with a very powerful processor, a quality display and speaker system, and a pretty good keyboard All packed into a small but very well built and well designed chassis. Battery life is also good for Intel-based machines with small batteries.
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Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Carbon review: price and competition
Configurations tested: Intel Core i7-1260P CPU, Intel Iris Xe GPU, 16GB quad-channel RAM, 1TB SSD, 13.3″ 2560 x 1600 IPS display. Price: £1,099.
The Yoga Slim 7i Carbon on my desk, a model with all the trimmings, will set you back a relatively affordable £1,099. A Slim 7i with a Core i5-1240P chip, 8 GB of RAM, a 512 GB SSD and a non-touchscreen is also available, according to Lenovo, but not yet available in the UK. Of course, there is a fair amount of competition in the ultraportable laptop market. Here are four great alternatives to consider.
Apple’s M2 MacBook Air is, of course, a highly regarded laptop. It doesn’t support touch, but the 13.6-inch Air’s display is larger than the Lenovo’s, with a nice 1080p webcam parked above it. Despite the M2’s strong foundation, you get exceptional battery life. That alone is reason enough to choose Apple’s ultraportables.The 17-hour result in the battery test is far superior to the Windows competitors. But if you want a 1 TB SSD, you’ll have to spend £1,649.
Asus’ OLED screen ZenBook S 13 comes with a 13.3-inch 2.8K display and a powerful AMD Ryzen 7 6800U CPU/Radeon 680M GPU underpinnings, and like the new Lenovo, it weighs less than 1kg and has the new Yoga Better than The 720p webcam isn’t that big, but the battery life. At under £1,000, the shade is a great value.
Depending on who you talk to, the Dell XPS 13 Plus is either a triumph of form over function or a modern design classic. The capacitive function keys, invisible touchpad, and edge-to-edge keyboard take some getting used to, but they work well. It’s not the cheapest option, as you’ll have to spend £1,700 to match Yoga’s specs.
Huawei’s MateBook X Pro may be a little bigger and heavier than the new Lenovo, but with its wide 14.2-inch display, it’s not unexpected. Its 3K touchscreen is great, like the new Yoga he refreshes at 90Hz and the 6 speaker sound system is really good. With four USB-C ports, it’s much easier to use than the competitors above, and at £1,650, it’s a great value.
Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Carbon review: design and build quality
The latest Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i is more rounded overall than its predecessor. It’s still not what I’d call a design classic, but it’s slick enough to slip into your backpack almost unnoticed, and the screen bezels are nice and narrow, making it a perfect match for the price. Color schemes are available, all in gray-themed variations, but one has a white lid that goes a bit beyond aesthetic mediocrity.
Lenovo certainly spares no construction materials. The lid is made of carbon fiber and the base is made of magnesium-aluminum alloy. This is clearly a winning combination, as the Slim 7i is a very robust device despite weighing just 984g and being just 14.8mm thick.
The design is also buffed with a MIL-STD-810H cloth, a harbinger of general survivability. It’s been a while since Lenovo stopped using the Yoga brand specifically for his 2-in-1 models, and the Slim 7i Carbon’s lid can only be pushed back 180 degrees. However, it is nice to be able to open the lid up to 90 degrees with one finger without tipping over.
However, the laptop’s skinnier side is less hosted: two USB-C ports (one Thunderbolt 4, the other USB 3.2 Gen 2×2), a webcam isolation switch, and a power button. Both of these USB-C ports support USB PowerDelivery 3.0, so both can be used for charging. As I said above, it’s a small selection, and Lenovo doesn’t bundle anything in the way of expansion docks or audio adapters.
Surprisingly for ultraportables, laptop base panels are relatively easy to remove, but there’s not much you can do once they’re installed. The RAM is soldered in, has no spare slots, and only occupies the 1TB 2280 PCIe SSD M.2 storage slot. At least the hard drive, wireless card, and battery are easily accessible in case you need to replace them.
Rounding out the internal component ray is the always-reliable Intel AX211 wireless card, which supports 6GHz Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.1, and the 1TB SSD mounted on my review machine is a nippy Samsung PM9A1 PCIe 4 affair. was.
Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Carbon review: keyboard, touchpad and webcam
There’s no getting away from the fact that the keyboard is fairly shallow – key travel is only 1mm, but otherwise pretty good. /Suitable for ultraportables with right cursor and return key.
You’ll also find bespoke function keystrokes such as Fn+Q to toggle operating power modes, FN+R to toggle display refresh rate, and Fn+M to disable touchpad. User-programmable smart keys can be set to perform actions with one or two presses, making procedures even more convenient. Naturally, there is also a two-level keyboard backlight.
The 105 x 70mm glass-covered touchpad is large enough for a 13.3-inch machine and works well, but the bottom click action is a little too deep and noisy for my taste.
The webcam is a fairly basic 720p feature that seems out of place on a laptop as expensive as the Slim 7i Carbon. Colors and contrast during video chat are pleasing, but the overall picture is still dull and grainy. The image quality is so poor that it detracts from various features of Lenovo’s Smart Appearance webcam app. Using a crisp, clear virtual background further degrades the facial image quality.
The camera at least supports Windows Hello’s infrared facial recognition (important because there’s no fingerprint reader here). There’s also a physical toggle on the right side of the chassis that allows you to quickly turn it on and off. For example, you can pause video playback or lock Windows when you look away or move away.
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Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Carbon: Display and Audio
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Carbon’s display (13.3-inch, 2,560 x 1,600 IPS unit) has many advantages. The maximum luminance level I measured is 373cd/m2, which is fine without exceptions, but the color performance is flawless with 96.8% sRGB gamut coverage. The contrast ratio is over a decent 1,276:1, and color accuracy isn’t a problem either. In testing, it returned a Delta E color variance of exactly 1 for the sRGB gamut. This is very good.
Of course, that doesn’t mean this laptop is marketed to serious creative work. It’s in the mid-’60s, and well below the corresponding numbers of a MacBook Air or ZenBook 13, which can amass nearly 100% of DCI-P3.
Perhaps more interestingly, the display also has a variable refresh rate, allowing you to bounce between 60Hz and 90Hz with the tap of a key. If you prefer smoother animations, you can choose the latter or revert to 60Hz to save battery life. There’s also an ambient light sensor to keep the display’s brightness in sync with its surroundings, and despite the glossy finish, the screen proved effective at reducing reflections.
The Harman branded Dolby Atmos stereo speakers also sound pretty good, offering more than acceptable volume with a registration of 74.7 dB(A) from a pink noise source measured at a distance of 1 m. The sound is very easy on the ears, punchy even at maximum volume, with great bass presence and no distortion. When I saw the final episode of Obi-Wan Kenobi on Slim 7, the feeling of space and openness was palpable. The music, dialogue, and sound effects were all nicely balanced during the climactic lightsaber duel.
Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Carbon: Performance and battery life
Thanks to a Core i7-1260P processor and 16GB of quad-channel LPDDR5 RAM, the Slim 7 Carbon offers a pretty decent description when it comes to performance.
It scored 208 points in Expert Review’s standard 4K multimedia processing test. Built around the same processor, the Dell XPS 13 Plus and Huawei machines in this chart outperformed, but in our review, the Dell has 32GB of memory and the MateBook X Pro has aggressive performance. modes and a very efficient cooling system.
Some of the difference is due to the fact that during long runs, Yoga suffers from thermal throttling, performance drops by about 15%, and fan noise. Yoga came close to the Dell and Huawei packs in our short GeekBench 5 test.
Lenovo has measurements of other Intel machines when it comes to battery life lasting 9 hours and 17 minutes in our standard video rundown test despite the relatively small 50Wh battery. by more than 20 minutes, but the best in this test was the M2 MacBook Air, pushing it to the 17-hour mark.
When it comes to data transfer speeds for the laptop’s storage drives, Lenovo also gives very good ratings, roughly on par with the Dell XPS 13 Plus, and severely embarrassing the other three machines I compared. . Sequential read and write speeds of 4,828MB/s and 2,551MB/s (the latter even beats Dell’s) are impressive for a machine of this type.
Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Carbon review: Verdict
The new Yoga Slim 7i Carbon is very well made, very light and compact, with a quality touchscreen display and decent battery life. Many argue that limiting the physical connector to his two USB-C ports is a bit silly, but if other manufacturers are doing the same, it’s hard to criticize Lenovo. Unfair.
After all, the 7th generation of the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Carbon has more features than its competitors and lacks singularity, making for a slightly more rounded package. If only it came with a better webcam and a USB-C dock.
