The Port Layout of Lenovo's Yoga Series: A Step Ahead by 2024 Standards

When it comes to port layout, Lenovo's Yoga series has been making waves with its generous offerings. Unlike some laptops that struggle to fit even one USB port, the Yoga series boasts a single USBA and a Thunderbolt 4-enabled USB-C port on every single model, including the Yoga 9i and Pro 7i. Some models like the Yoga 7i and Pro 9i come with a USB-C port that supports 3.2 Gen 2 speeds, although it's essential to note that one of these ports is also used for charging, effectively reducing the available ports.

I want to emphasize this point again until I'm blue in the face: Thunderbolt 4 Port is critical for anyone who wants to use a high-bandwidth dock on today's laptops. Using them in a quasi-desktop scenario, as I am currently doing, requires this port. Secondary ports are a mixed bag, with some laptops offering HDMI 2.1 output while others do not.

One notable exception in the Yoga series is the Yoga 9i 2-in-1, which does not have a full-size HDMI 2.1 output due to its slim design. On the other hand, some models come equipped with SD card readers, although most do not. The specs of these laptops can be overwhelming, often consisting of alphabet soup that doesn't reveal much about their performance capabilities.

However, Lenovo has taken a significant step forward by simplifying this aspect of laptop design. Across the entire lineup, all laptops get at least 16 GB of memory, which is no longer a common occurrence in today's market. Additionally, they come with access to 512 GB or 1 TB Gen 4 SSDs.

While these specs are promising, things become more complicated when it comes to CPUs and GPUs. The Pro series targets creators and offers the highest level CPU in the lineup – the Core i9-185h – whereas other models max out at the Core i7-1155H. These laptops also happen to be the only Yoga laptops with a discrete GPU option.

The Slim 7 Series can be thought of as a thinner, lighter, and more affordable version of the Pro 7 without the possibility of a discrete GPU. For most people, Intel's integrated ARC graphics will suffice for thin-and-light laptops, which not only provides better battery life but also reduces power consumption.

One segment that stands out is the Yoga 2-in-1 series, which focuses on portability and extended battery life. The Yoga 7i 2-in-1 gets access to Intel's ultra-low-power U-series processors, making it an excellent choice for those who prioritize mobility.

Performance Comparison: A True Apple-to-Apple Comparison

One of the most exciting aspects of testing multiple laptops within the same series is the ability to compare their performance using the exact same processor and integrated graphics. This allows us to see which laptops can push their processors to its limits, without any unnecessary power constraints. The Lenovo Pro 9i, with its larger footprint and bigger internal heat sinks, gets better results due to the ability to feed more juice into it without overheating.

However, thinner and smaller laptops like the Slim 7i and Yoga 9i 2-in-1 have their power cut back by just a bit. Once the integrated graphics are factored in, the performance delta becomes tighter, indicating that most laptops are maximizing the power available to these components.

It's worth noting that when the discrete card is added for the Pro 9i or Pro 7i, performance would look very different. Nevertheless, the performance comparison between one Yoga laptop and another, provided they're using the exact same processor, becomes increasingly negligible.

Performance Comparison Results: A New Era for Laptop Buying

The results of this performance comparison prove that Lenovo is not hamstringing their most affordable models. By providing similar specifications across the board, Lenovo has taken a significant step forward in making laptops more accessible to a wider range of consumers.

This development marks a new era for laptop buying, as buyers are no longer forced to choose between form and function or sacrifice performance for affordability. With the Pro series offering top-tier processors, integrated graphics that can handle demanding tasks, and generous port layouts, Lenovo has set a high standard for laptops in this category.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Lenovo's Yoga series is pushing the boundaries of laptop design by providing generous port layouts, simplified specs, and improved performance capabilities. As the market continues to evolve, it will be exciting to see how these innovations trickle down to more affordable models.

By emphasizing portability, battery life, and overall user experience, Lenovo has positioned itself as a leader in the laptop market. Whether you're a creator or an avid gamer, the Yoga series offers something for everyone.

The performance comparison results show that when using the same processor and integrated graphics, one Yoga laptop is not drastically different from another. This level of consistency promises a more streamlined user experience, making it easier for buyers to make informed decisions.

Ultimately, Lenovo's commitment to innovation and user-centric design has set a new standard for laptops in this category. As we move forward into an era where form meets function seamlessly, the Yoga series will undoubtedly remain at the forefront of this shift.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enokay so this video hits really close to my heart because in my opinion right now buying a new laptop absolutely sucks that's because as the owner of a sixth generation ThinkPad X1 Carbon with an eighth gen Intel CPU I've been looking to upgrade this buy another laptop for myself and it's absolutely ridiculous what's happening out there you have 11th 12th 13th gen CPUs being sold right alongside brand new laptops on the flip side of that coin you have so many different specs being thrown at your face so what I wanted to do is I wanted to create a couple of buying guides now this one is sponsored by Lenova we are going to be covering their entire new yoga Series so what I've got in front of me right here is four of the most popular ones that they're going to be releasing there's a couple of others that I don't have I'm going to talk about those as well so first of all there's the pro 9i which we've already covered the 9i 2 in1 the pro 7 Series and the slim 7 series The Yoga book isn't here since it's in a whole other category of its own the only one I'm missing is the yoga 7i 2in1 which didn't arrive in time for this video but I'll still refer to it a few times and it isn't hard to see where some buyer confusion would enter into this equation too since other than the bigger 16-in Pro 9i all of these look pretty much the same to most people they're all 14-in laptops with their decks and Lids made out of Al aluminum and are available in lunar gray or tidal teal with only two exceptions though the 9i 2 in one's second option is this beautiful Cosmic blue while a slim 7 Series only comes in Gray and of course as with all things pricing is probably going to factor into these buying decisions too and unfortunately and this is a real pain point for me in any laptop video that we've done actually nailing down the price of any of these devices is a total pain and that's because of discounts Regional differences and all these other things that will factor into the final price that you end up paying so what I'm going to do here is take an approximate price range for all these basically your starting at price and what you could basically configure them up to and convert those numbers that I've got from basically across the globe for different configurations into US dollars anyways while there is naturally some overlap in the yoga series pricing you can start to see Lenovo strategy here the pro 9i and pro 7 Series are meant to complement one another and while there's going to be a little bit of overlap here and there they're obviously not meant to be cross shopped then the slim 7 Series hits that much more affordable pricing category the same goes for the twoin ones they might both be convertible laptops but they're priced very very differently from one another so all of these are basically considered thin and light laptops except maybe that Pro 9i since it's a 16-in form factor but it's still very very thin what I really wanted to do here is I wanted to take these out of the office and bring them into the their natural habitat so the reality with these thin and lights is they're not going to be hooked up to your monitor all day most of the time they're going to find themselves in a place like this in a coffee shop in a class basically away from charger so what you should be looking for is portability battery life and visibility of that panel but that portability aspect is probably the most important because you're going to be lugging these things around in a backpack and that's because all the yogas even the 16in pro 9i are less than 5 lb and under 20 mm thick the real standout though is the yoga 9i 2in1 which by comparison to the others is Razor thin basically though there's a direct correlation between each yoga's thickness and the amount of performance Lenovo wants it to get and the nice thing for people who want to save some money is that the least expensive laptop here is also the most portable and of course Chargers factor into that portability equation too because if you are going on any longdistance Journey like we typically do you still have to plug in your laptop regardless so Lenova has kept things very very compact for that as well first of all there's a 65 wat charger that you could just literally put in your pants pocket no matter where you go for the Slims and the twoin ones then for the pro 7i you basically have your 100 W charger which is a little bit larger but still extremely Compact and light the pro series also comes with discrete GPU options so those get 140 W Chargers finally for the big boy the pro 9i because it comes with up to an RTX 470 there is still a extremely slim 170 wat charger the only difference with this one is that you do not have USB compatibility like you have with all the other ones well all the other ones use USBC this has a custom charging port okay so you're all charged up everything's good to go but the last thing that you want when you arrive in a coffee shop or anywhere for that matter is playing Hunger Games with a bunch of other people in here not today because I mean thank you very much Cafe Nora for allowing us to use the whole space but you need to make sure that you have the best battery life when you just don't have access to power and look Lenovo feels your pain so they've moved the entire yoga series to 65 wat hour and higher capacity batteries the twoin ones also get a bit of an extra bump since they're laser targeted towards being truly mobile devices before anything else whereas others sprinkle in a bit more performance into their port ility factor that leads to every single one of these laptops getting over 8 hours of battery life in our standard light load test which is more than enough to get you through a full day's work meanwhile the twoin ones and slim 7i get to 11 hours and even beyond that point anyways hit them with a higher stress load and those numbers get drastically cut into the sub 2hour range but my guess is there aren't a lot of people running high level rendering tasks at a coffee shop or maybe I'm wrong but another thing you have to take into account especially in a space like this or if you tend to travel in brightly lit airports well that's your screen quality and especially the brightness and when it comes to yoga series well what happens is your screen quality is directly tied to the price of the laptop at the very least you're getting a 350 nit IPS screen while some get a brighter OLED as their base panel and it goes upwards from there to the pro 9i mini LED with its insane 200 nits of peak brightness and 100% DCI P3 color space but the other thing that we have to talk about is the webcams because in this generation Lenovo has stepped things up in a big way for certain models so what we've done here is we've set up four of the laptops around me there are four mics talking to me all at the same time so we get about the same lighting conditions on all of them so the sensors that we have on them are for the 9i series The 2in1 and the 9i pro is a 1440p sensor then moving on we have the pro 7i and the slim 7i that get a 1080p fhd sensor now here's here's the interesting thing even though we have two pairs of sensors to me at least every single one of these pictures looks very very different when it comes to microphones there's two options one of them is a four array microphone on some of these devices and the other one is a two array microphone there's a very very big difference in both audio quality and noise cancellation because there's actually a lot of noise coming around two items which are shared throughout all of these webcams is full IR support so you get Windows hello not only that is that there is a kill switch on every single one of these which Lenova has been known for since the think pads were invented so here you go so for me the most important points of a laptop are the elements that you can experience and touch and feel so those quality of life things like the keyboard and trackpad and for me luckily Lenovo keeps on taking influence from their ThinkPad X1 Carbon series and sort of distilling it down into the yoga series for the keyboard at least now that keyboard it is almost identical from one laptop to another when it comes to touch and feel now the key travel on most of these is 1.5 mm so you have plenty of travel distance and they don't feel dead as a door nail like you get with a lot of other thin and lights the big thing that is different is of course the full-size keyboard on on the pro 9i so now that we've established all the elements of portability for this new yoga series let's head back to the office so we can plug them in and discuss how they behave in more of a productivity environment okay so this is a little bit of a window into my reality here at the office what I need is my laptop plugged into a monitor I want my villo keyboard and I want my mouse also plugged in and yes I'm using a doc right now but what I want on a typical basis is ports and lots of ports so this trend right now in the laptop Market to eliminate a bunch of ports and only include a couple USB ports that it it's just infuriating me but luckily Lenovo is thinking a little bit differently so the yoga series actually has a pretty generous Port layout at least by 2024 standards every single one of them gets at least a single usba and a thunderbolt 4 enabled USBC Port some like the 29 eyes and the pro 7i also have a USBC with 3.2 gen two speeds and you'll need to take into account that one of those USB C's also needs to be used for charging so you are losing one and I'm going to say this again until I'm blue in the face and ibra said it too in all of his laptop reviews the Thunderbolt 4 Port is critical for anybody who wants to use a high bandwidth dock on today's laptops to use them in a quasi desktop scenario like I'm using right here secondary ports well they're a a little bit more of a mixed bag with the 9i 2 in1 being the only yoga without a full-size HDMI 2.1 output due to its slim design meanwhile some come with SD card readers While most don't and the specs for these look I I know that typically it's a bunch of alphabet soup and we're not really getting away from that with the processors or the gpus but Lenovo has really simplified that too right off the Jump there's some major commonality right across the entire lineup they all get at least 16 gigs of memory so no Cut Rate 8 GB setups here and access to 512 GB or 1 TB Gen 4 ssds just watch out though that 1 tbte option can represent a huge price jump on some models things do get a little bit more complicated though when it comes to the CPUs and gpus that are included in the yoga Series so I wanted to break that down by product segment since the pro series targets creators they get access to the highest level CPU in the lineup so the core Ultra 9 185h whereas the others max out at the Ultra 71 55h these also happen to be the only yoga laptops with a discrete GPU option there's also the slim 7 Series but you can think of that as a thinner lighter and more affordable version of the pro 7 though without the possibility of a discrete GPU and for most people out there Intel's integrated art Graphics will be more than enough for thin and light laptop and it'll also probably Grant you a lot more battery life in the long run too the two and ones are pretty much in a category all on their own since the focus here is on portability and extended battery life and to achieve that the yoga 7 2in1 gets access to Intel's ultra low power U series processors I also wanted to do a little bit of a performance comparison across the entire yoga lineup and what we have here is something pretty exciting for me at least this is the first time that we have been able to test multiple laptops of the same series with the exact same processor and integrated Graphics so what we are going to see here is a true Apple to Apple's comparison so let's add a single laptop here the pro 9i and show its performance range basically the lowest point on these graphs will be the result in the laptop's lowest power setting whereas the upper point will be their best result in the highest performance mode so let's add all the other laptops with its larger footprint and bigger internal heat sinks Lenovo can afford to feed more juice into the pro 9i without it overheating so it gets better results meanwhile thinner smaller laptops like the slim 7i and 9i 2 in1 have have their power cut back by just a bit again we don't have the yoga 7i 2in1 but expect its performance to be very similar to The Slim 7i when it's equipped with the ultra 755h once the integrated Graphics are factored into things the performance Delta actually tightens up a bit that's because most of these end up maximizing the power available to the integrated arc graphics Engine add the discrete card for the Pro 9i or Pro 7i and I'm sure things would look very different though so when it comes to Performance there's really not that much to distinguish One Yoga laptop from another provided they're using the exact same processor and that's big news because it proves that Lenovo isn't really hamstringing they're most affordable models so anyways I guess that brings us to the end of this video and I hope that you enjoyed more buyer focused content like this I'm definitely going to be doing more of these guides because like I said at the beginning of this video the whole laptop buying experience is really starting to get me pissed off off but anyways I'm Mike with har Canuck and I will see you in the next one have a great dayokay so this video hits really close to my heart because in my opinion right now buying a new laptop absolutely sucks that's because as the owner of a sixth generation ThinkPad X1 Carbon with an eighth gen Intel CPU I've been looking to upgrade this buy another laptop for myself and it's absolutely ridiculous what's happening out there you have 11th 12th 13th gen CPUs being sold right alongside brand new laptops on the flip side of that coin you have so many different specs being thrown at your face so what I wanted to do is I wanted to create a couple of buying guides now this one is sponsored by Lenova we are going to be covering their entire new yoga Series so what I've got in front of me right here is four of the most popular ones that they're going to be releasing there's a couple of others that I don't have I'm going to talk about those as well so first of all there's the pro 9i which we've already covered the 9i 2 in1 the pro 7 Series and the slim 7 series The Yoga book isn't here since it's in a whole other category of its own the only one I'm missing is the yoga 7i 2in1 which didn't arrive in time for this video but I'll still refer to it a few times and it isn't hard to see where some buyer confusion would enter into this equation too since other than the bigger 16-in Pro 9i all of these look pretty much the same to most people they're all 14-in laptops with their decks and Lids made out of Al aluminum and are available in lunar gray or tidal teal with only two exceptions though the 9i 2 in one's second option is this beautiful Cosmic blue while a slim 7 Series only comes in Gray and of course as with all things pricing is probably going to factor into these buying decisions too and unfortunately and this is a real pain point for me in any laptop video that we've done actually nailing down the price of any of these devices is a total pain and that's because of discounts Regional differences and all these other things that will factor into the final price that you end up paying so what I'm going to do here is take an approximate price range for all these basically your starting at price and what you could basically configure them up to and convert those numbers that I've got from basically across the globe for different configurations into US dollars anyways while there is naturally some overlap in the yoga series pricing you can start to see Lenovo strategy here the pro 9i and pro 7 Series are meant to complement one another and while there's going to be a little bit of overlap here and there they're obviously not meant to be cross shopped then the slim 7 Series hits that much more affordable pricing category the same goes for the twoin ones they might both be convertible laptops but they're priced very very differently from one another so all of these are basically considered thin and light laptops except maybe that Pro 9i since it's a 16-in form factor but it's still very very thin what I really wanted to do here is I wanted to take these out of the office and bring them into the their natural habitat so the reality with these thin and lights is they're not going to be hooked up to your monitor all day most of the time they're going to find themselves in a place like this in a coffee shop in a class basically away from charger so what you should be looking for is portability battery life and visibility of that panel but that portability aspect is probably the most important because you're going to be lugging these things around in a backpack and that's because all the yogas even the 16in pro 9i are less than 5 lb and under 20 mm thick the real standout though is the yoga 9i 2in1 which by comparison to the others is Razor thin basically though there's a direct correlation between each yoga's thickness and the amount of performance Lenovo wants it to get and the nice thing for people who want to save some money is that the least expensive laptop here is also the most portable and of course Chargers factor into that portability equation too because if you are going on any longdistance Journey like we typically do you still have to plug in your laptop regardless so Lenova has kept things very very compact for that as well first of all there's a 65 wat charger that you could just literally put in your pants pocket no matter where you go for the Slims and the twoin ones then for the pro 7i you basically have your 100 W charger which is a little bit larger but still extremely Compact and light the pro series also comes with discrete GPU options so those get 140 W Chargers finally for the big boy the pro 9i because it comes with up to an RTX 470 there is still a extremely slim 170 wat charger the only difference with this one is that you do not have USB compatibility like you have with all the other ones well all the other ones use USBC this has a custom charging port okay so you're all charged up everything's good to go but the last thing that you want when you arrive in a coffee shop or anywhere for that matter is playing Hunger Games with a bunch of other people in here not today because I mean thank you very much Cafe Nora for allowing us to use the whole space but you need to make sure that you have the best battery life when you just don't have access to power and look Lenovo feels your pain so they've moved the entire yoga series to 65 wat hour and higher capacity batteries the twoin ones also get a bit of an extra bump since they're laser targeted towards being truly mobile devices before anything else whereas others sprinkle in a bit more performance into their port ility factor that leads to every single one of these laptops getting over 8 hours of battery life in our standard light load test which is more than enough to get you through a full day's work meanwhile the twoin ones and slim 7i get to 11 hours and even beyond that point anyways hit them with a higher stress load and those numbers get drastically cut into the sub 2hour range but my guess is there aren't a lot of people running high level rendering tasks at a coffee shop or maybe I'm wrong but another thing you have to take into account especially in a space like this or if you tend to travel in brightly lit airports well that's your screen quality and especially the brightness and when it comes to yoga series well what happens is your screen quality is directly tied to the price of the laptop at the very least you're getting a 350 nit IPS screen while some get a brighter OLED as their base panel and it goes upwards from there to the pro 9i mini LED with its insane 200 nits of peak brightness and 100% DCI P3 color space but the other thing that we have to talk about is the webcams because in this generation Lenovo has stepped things up in a big way for certain models so what we've done here is we've set up four of the laptops around me there are four mics talking to me all at the same time so we get about the same lighting conditions on all of them so the sensors that we have on them are for the 9i series The 2in1 and the 9i pro is a 1440p sensor then moving on we have the pro 7i and the slim 7i that get a 1080p fhd sensor now here's here's the interesting thing even though we have two pairs of sensors to me at least every single one of these pictures looks very very different when it comes to microphones there's two options one of them is a four array microphone on some of these devices and the other one is a two array microphone there's a very very big difference in both audio quality and noise cancellation because there's actually a lot of noise coming around two items which are shared throughout all of these webcams is full IR support so you get Windows hello not only that is that there is a kill switch on every single one of these which Lenova has been known for since the think pads were invented so here you go so for me the most important points of a laptop are the elements that you can experience and touch and feel so those quality of life things like the keyboard and trackpad and for me luckily Lenovo keeps on taking influence from their ThinkPad X1 Carbon series and sort of distilling it down into the yoga series for the keyboard at least now that keyboard it is almost identical from one laptop to another when it comes to touch and feel now the key travel on most of these is 1.5 mm so you have plenty of travel distance and they don't feel dead as a door nail like you get with a lot of other thin and lights the big thing that is different is of course the full-size keyboard on on the pro 9i so now that we've established all the elements of portability for this new yoga series let's head back to the office so we can plug them in and discuss how they behave in more of a productivity environment okay so this is a little bit of a window into my reality here at the office what I need is my laptop plugged into a monitor I want my villo keyboard and I want my mouse also plugged in and yes I'm using a doc right now but what I want on a typical basis is ports and lots of ports so this trend right now in the laptop Market to eliminate a bunch of ports and only include a couple USB ports that it it's just infuriating me but luckily Lenovo is thinking a little bit differently so the yoga series actually has a pretty generous Port layout at least by 2024 standards every single one of them gets at least a single usba and a thunderbolt 4 enabled USBC Port some like the 29 eyes and the pro 7i also have a USBC with 3.2 gen two speeds and you'll need to take into account that one of those USB C's also needs to be used for charging so you are losing one and I'm going to say this again until I'm blue in the face and ibra said it too in all of his laptop reviews the Thunderbolt 4 Port is critical for anybody who wants to use a high bandwidth dock on today's laptops to use them in a quasi desktop scenario like I'm using right here secondary ports well they're a a little bit more of a mixed bag with the 9i 2 in1 being the only yoga without a full-size HDMI 2.1 output due to its slim design meanwhile some come with SD card readers While most don't and the specs for these look I I know that typically it's a bunch of alphabet soup and we're not really getting away from that with the processors or the gpus but Lenovo has really simplified that too right off the Jump there's some major commonality right across the entire lineup they all get at least 16 gigs of memory so no Cut Rate 8 GB setups here and access to 512 GB or 1 TB Gen 4 ssds just watch out though that 1 tbte option can represent a huge price jump on some models things do get a little bit more complicated though when it comes to the CPUs and gpus that are included in the yoga Series so I wanted to break that down by product segment since the pro series targets creators they get access to the highest level CPU in the lineup so the core Ultra 9 185h whereas the others max out at the Ultra 71 55h these also happen to be the only yoga laptops with a discrete GPU option there's also the slim 7 Series but you can think of that as a thinner lighter and more affordable version of the pro 7 though without the possibility of a discrete GPU and for most people out there Intel's integrated art Graphics will be more than enough for thin and light laptop and it'll also probably Grant you a lot more battery life in the long run too the two and ones are pretty much in a category all on their own since the focus here is on portability and extended battery life and to achieve that the yoga 7 2in1 gets access to Intel's ultra low power U series processors I also wanted to do a little bit of a performance comparison across the entire yoga lineup and what we have here is something pretty exciting for me at least this is the first time that we have been able to test multiple laptops of the same series with the exact same processor and integrated Graphics so what we are going to see here is a true Apple to Apple's comparison so let's add a single laptop here the pro 9i and show its performance range basically the lowest point on these graphs will be the result in the laptop's lowest power setting whereas the upper point will be their best result in the highest performance mode so let's add all the other laptops with its larger footprint and bigger internal heat sinks Lenovo can afford to feed more juice into the pro 9i without it overheating so it gets better results meanwhile thinner smaller laptops like the slim 7i and 9i 2 in1 have have their power cut back by just a bit again we don't have the yoga 7i 2in1 but expect its performance to be very similar to The Slim 7i when it's equipped with the ultra 755h once the integrated Graphics are factored into things the performance Delta actually tightens up a bit that's because most of these end up maximizing the power available to the integrated arc graphics Engine add the discrete card for the Pro 9i or Pro 7i and I'm sure things would look very different though so when it comes to Performance there's really not that much to distinguish One Yoga laptop from another provided they're using the exact same processor and that's big news because it proves that Lenovo isn't really hamstringing they're most affordable models so anyways I guess that brings us to the end of this video and I hope that you enjoyed more buyer focused content like this I'm definitely going to be doing more of these guides because like I said at the beginning of this video the whole laptop buying experience is really starting to get me pissed off off but anyways I'm Mike with har Canuck and I will see you in the next one have a great day\n"