Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 review: Greatness at every turn

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At a glance

Expert’s Rating

Pros

• Absolutely stunning display
• Ripping CPU performance
• RTX 5050 has huge advantage over iGPU
• Potent, six-speaker audio system
• Largely silent operation

Cons

• Mics need noise cancelling
• Front edge of laptop can dig into wrists

Our Verdict

If you want a laptop that exudes greatness everywhere you look, the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition is it. From brilliant performance in its class and respectable battery life to a brilliant display and solid design, this machine makes the price tag seem reasonable.

Price When Reviewed

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Best Pricing Today

Price When Reviewed

$1,949

Best Prices Today: Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition

$1949.99

Usually, when I think of a high-end laptop, I think of one that has pulled out all of the stops, going far too exotic on build materials, cramming too much hardware in too thin a machine, and winding up with an exorbitant price tag that perfectly illustrates the concept of diminishing returns. At first glance, the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition looks like it might just be that kind of machine.

With a high-power CPU, a discrete GPU, and two display options that both are geared up to dazzle, the Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition certainly has the hardware, but it’s packed into a modest aluminum frame that’s not overly ambitious in its thinness. And with a $1,949 price tag for the potent configuration tested here, it feels like Lenovo struck the right balance, delivering solid quality everywhere it counts to make for a very respectable machine for folks who need a machine that can do a bit of everything and do it well. 

Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition: Specs and features

• Model number: 83L00009US
• CPU: Intel Core Ultra 9 285H
• Memory: 32GB LPDDR5x-8400
• Graphics/GPU: Nvidia RTX 5050 8GB (100-watt TGP)
• Display: 16-inch 2.8K OLED, 120Hz, DisplayHDR True Black 1000, Touch
• Storage: 1TB PCIe Gen4 SSD
• Webcam: 5MP + IR
• Connectivity: 2x Thunderbolt 4 / USB4 with 65-100W Power Delivery and DisplayPort 2.1, 2x USB-A 5Gbps, 1x HDMI 2.1, 1x SDcard reader, 1x 3.5mm combo audio
• Networking: Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4
• Biometrics: Windows Hello fingerprint, facial recognition
• Battery capacity: 84 watt-hours
• Dimensions: 14.28 x 9.99 x 0.75 inches
• Weight: 4.52 pounds
• MSRP: $1,949 as-tested ($1,869 base)

At the time of testing, the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition was available in just a few configurations. All of them shared the same Intel Core Ultra 9 285H CPU, 32GB of memory, and 1TB of storage. The type of display and GPU were the only different points.

Lenovo provides the option between a 2880×1800 OLED display paired with an RTX 5050 for $1,999 and a 3200×2000 Tandem OLED paired with an RTX 5060 for $2,299, though at the time of writing, those prices were discounted to $1,899 and $1,949 respectively. Best Buy also had the former configuration available for $1,949. 

In addition to its preconfigured models, Lenovo offers a custom configuration tool. This starts at $1,869 for the same configuration as the base model above. But you can upgrade to 64GB of memory, an RTX 5070, and the 3.2K Tandem OLED display for $560 more. Or you can stick with the base specs and just upgrade to the Tandem OLED for $150 extra. 

Lenovo’s full technical specifications for the product suggest quite a few more configurations to come, including touch and non-touch display options and an Intel Core Ultra 7 255H.

Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition: Design and build quality

IDG / Mark Knapp

The Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition is simple and elegant, but a little bland as a result. Lenovo has done a nice job rounding corners all over the place for a smoother look and feel, though the edges of the keyboard deck could still be a little more rounded for comfort. That said, it’s still a big gray slab, and nothing about it being an “Aura Edition” gives it anything more than an aura of plainness. 

The construction is good. Just about everywhere you look — aside from the keycaps — is smooth aluminum or glass, including the display and its bezels. There’s some flex here and there, but it’s very slight. The display hinge moves smoothly, and is easy to open with one hand thanks to the weight of the base and a little lip at the top of the screen for this purpose and to give more space to the webcam and IR sensor. The hinge does wiggle for a second or two after moving the display or shifting the laptop around, but it holds firm while I’m typing. 

The base sits on three rubber feet, a long one at the back and two small ones at the front. These are taller than is typical on productivity laptops, and this helps create an extra large channel underneath the laptop for airflow into the large grille underneath. Most of this grille is filled in, with sections at either side actually serving as intakes for the two fans. 

Lenovo has squeezed in six speakers in total with two tweeters and four woofers. You’ll find speakers on either side of the keyboard and on the edges underneath the laptop. 

Ports are all packed reasonably close together on either side of the laptop, including a dedicated power plug. The right edge also includes a privacy shutter switch that deactivates the camera — nice to see and easier to avoid accidentally swiping every time I open the laptop, though a little less reassuring than a shutter that actually covers up the camera sensor.

The Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition’s power button is also on the right edge of the laptop, where it’s a little too easy to accidentally press any time I shift the laptop around on a desk or table. 

With all the Lenovo has jammed into this 16-inch laptop, it’s little surprise that it’s over four pounds, but at just 4.52 pounds, it’s not unreasonably heavy. The laptop has a tapered design, seeing it sit at about 0.7 inches thick near the front and 0.75 inches thick near the back, though the rubber feet add almost 0.2 inches to that. At 14.28 inches wide and 9.99 inches long, it’s still fairly modest in size for a 16-inch laptop.

Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition: Keyboard, trackpad

IDG / Mark Knapp

The Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition has a pretty good keyboard on it. It’s a little bland to look at with its drab gray keycaps, but that doesn’t hurt its usability. Thanks to the slight dish to each keycap, good stabilization, and a short, poppy travel, I was able to quickly get up to a 118-word-per-minute typing speed with 98 percent accuracy in Monkeytype.

Comfort while typing is an issue though. The laptop’s depth makes the keyboard quite a reach up the keyboard deck even for me (I’m 6’3”), and this leaves my wrists pressing into the front lip of the laptop, which isn’t very comfortable. It also can take some adjusting, as the keyboard is off-center to make room for a full number pad, albeit with keys slightly narrower than standard. 

The keyboard has bright backlighting that can even be seen in the daytime with ambient lighting. It effectively illuminates the keycap legends. It has two levels, and a third option lets it turn on automatically. It’s a bit too aggressive, though, turning on even in a room plenty bright for seeing the keys. 

The trackpad here is substantial. It’s both wide and tall, providing a huge surface to mouse around on and perform multi-finger gestures. Its glass surface is also wonderfully smooth. It has a shallow travel to perform physical clicks with a nice soft feel.

Like the keyboard, it’s off-center, shifted to the left slightly to be centered under the keyboard alphanumerics. For left-handed users, this may be ideal. But for righties, it might not be. I often find this alignment has me largely using the right side of the trackpad, so when I go for a physical click, it ends up being a right click instead of the left click. If you tap to click, it won’t be a problem though.

Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition: Display, audio

IDG / Mark Knapp

The Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition has an absolutely excellent display, and this configuration of the system has the lower-end display option. The upper-tier’s tandem OLED display should only improve on its quality. The only quality to knock is that the screen is glossy, which leaves it subject to glare when set to low brightness levels. Beyond that, it’s brilliant.

It’s perfectly sharp for a display its size, and its variable refresh rate keeps visuals smooth at up to 120Hz while also providing energy savings by dropping as low as 30Hz. The display offers 100 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 color space and provides a reasonable degree of accuracy, hitting an average dE1976 of 0.95 and a max of 2.4 — a bit of calibration would likely have it ready for professional color work. In SDR, the display was able to reach a peak brightness of 486.1 nits for a full white screen, and with its OLED panel, it can achieve perfect blacks for infinite contrast.

Turning on HDR, the display’s capabilities leap up even higher. I measured the fullscreen white peak brightness at 606 nits, and when displaying a 10 percent window of white, it achieved 1040 nits. The display is even a responsive touchscreen. 

With its set of two tweeters and four woofers, the Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition puts out impressive sound for a laptop. Most impressive is the clean, low-end it provides, giving musical bass lines a nice heft. Meanwhile, the upper registers get a clean presentation, albeit a little bit lacking in brilliance. There’s even some surprising stereo imaging.

When listening to music with the laptop at a comfortable distance for typing, I was caught off guard by how sounds actually seemed to be coming from my sides and not just from the laptop right in front of me. At full volume, the speakers can distort a little, but they sound reasonably loud even at 50 percent volume. 

Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition: Webcam, microphone, biometrics

IDG / Mark Knapp

The webcam on the Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition is excellent. It can exhibit a little noise in the video, but otherwise has a very sharp image with natural lighting that looks great. Though Lenovo doesn’t have a physical shutter to cover the lens, it does provide a hardware switch on the side of the laptop to disable the camera. The webcam also provides Windows Hello facial recognition, which has worked quickly throughout my testing. You won’t find fingerprint scanning though.

The mics aren’t quite as impressive. On one hand, they pick up my voice clearly without any weird compression artifacts. But on the other hand, they’re not doing much to eliminate background noise, picking up things like a nearby fan and my hands clapping — noises I’ve seen some laptops completely eliminate while still picking up my voice well. 

Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition: Connectivity

IDG / Mark Knapp

The Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition provides respectable connectivity, both wired and wireless. You’ll find two USB-C ports on the left edge offering Thunderbolt 4/USB4 capabilities and up to 100W power delivery to charge the laptop if you forget the standard charger (a 170W unit with Lenovo’s charging plug). The ports also support DisplayPort 2.1, but you can rely on the HDMI 2.1 port for video output as well. The left side is rounded out by a 3.5mm audio jack.

On the right side, you’ll find a pair of 5Gbps USB-A ports and a full-size SD card reader. It would have been nice to see 10Gbps ports or at least to get the USB-C ports split between the two sides. 

For wireless connections, the Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition offers Wi-Fi 7, and it’s proven both fast and reliable in my testing, never showing signs of lag or being slow to re-establish a connection when booting up the machine. Bluetooth 5.4 is also supported, and it has worked consistently while listening to audio on Bluetooth headphones.

Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition: Performance

The Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition is built like many other productivity laptops in the 16-inch class. This sees it face off against models like the Acer Swift 16 AI, the HP OmniBook X Flip 16, the Dell Inspiron 16 Plus, and the Dell 16 Plus, which all offered as-tested prices hundreds of dollars below the Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition.

But, even as the Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition competes on size and weight with these other systems (save for the particularly thin and light Acer Swift 16 AI), it goes a little heavier in performance with a more robust CPU selection and a discrete GPU, an inclusion only the Dell Inspiron 16 Plus made at its as-tested price.

The Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition offers excellent performance thanks to its combination of a high-end CPU in the Core Ultra 9 285H — a 16-core beast — with plenty of memory, fast storage, and its discrete GPU. The RTX 5050 inside gives it a strong edge in content creation, where it outpaced all of these other systems, including the RTX 4060-powered Dell Inspiron 16 Plus. 

Cinebench helps us see just how much of an edge Lenovo’s choice of CPU gives the Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition. In Cinebench R23, the Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition simply obliterates the performance offered by the Intel Core Ultra 7 256V and Intel Core Ultra 7 258V, more than doubling their results. It even cruises ahead of the Dell Inspiron 16 Plus.

This is a level of performance that can put the Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition in league with heavy-duty gaming laptops, like the Lenovo Legion 5i 15IRX10 running on an Intel Core i7-14700HX. The CPU’s single-core performance is also exceptional, giving it all the performance it needs to feel responsive and power through heavy workloads. 

That performance is showcased well in our Handbrake encoding test. This is effectively an extension of our CPU test, as it tasks the system with a long multi-core workload encoding a large video file. This not only requires a powerful CPU to perform well but also solid cooling to prevent heat from building up and slowing the system down as the test stretches on.

Here, we see the Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition do a great job, keeping its encoding time at under 11 minutes. That’s not only well underneath the encoding times of these other machines, some of which almost ran for 30 minutes, but it even slips underneath the encoding time of the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370-powered Razer Blade 16 (2025). 

Though the Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition might have already successfully set itself apart from its competition on CPU performance alone, its discrete GPU helps take it to another level still. Intel Arc graphics work wonders for lightweight productivity machines, but even lower-tier discrete GPUs provide a world of difference. That’s true of the RTX 4060 in the Dell Inspiron 16 Plus and even more so for the RTX 5050 in the Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition.

That discrete GPU soared ahead of the competition in 3DMark’s Time Spy benchmark, a rather demanding graphical test. Despite its thinner design and largely quiet operation, the Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition actually managed to offer performance that lines up with many RTX 4060-powered gaming laptops.  

Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition: Battery life

With as much performance as the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition was happy to put down, it’s unsurprising that it falls a bit behind its rivals where battery life is concerned. The Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition still managed a commendable runtime of almost 14 hours, but most of the other machines pushed closer to 17 or 18 hours, except the Dell 16 Plus, which also had a small 63Wh battery. 

While that’s not as impressive as these other machines, it’s not a bad showing, particularly for a machine with a discrete GPU and higher-power CPU. It’s striking a nice balance with performance that borders on gaming laptop while maintaining battery life more in line with productivity machines. Its offline video playback performance also carried over well into real-world use, where I was easily able to get through a full workday on battery power (albeit without tapping into the dGPU). 

Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition: Conclusion

The Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition is a great machine. It comes at a price, but the premium isn’t so unreasonable when factoring in all that it brings to the table. Not only do you get exceptional performance from the internals, but you get them in a well-built package with plenty of extras to get excited about. The speakers and display combine for a great entertainment experience. The chassis is elegant and feels solid. And even with such high-power hardware, the Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 10 Aura Edition is happy to run on battery power for an entire workday. If you need a machine that largely excels in every respect, you’ve just found it.