Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition review: Intel excellence inside, middling outside

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition has a 15.3-inch screen, an Intel Core Ultra 7 256V processor, 16 GB or 32 GB of RAM , a 1TB SSD , excellent speakers, a great keyboard, a mediocre trackpad, and a whole lot of branding.

It's the first laptop we’ve tested with Intel ’s new Lunar Lake processor architecture.

The $ 1,300 laptop falls short in a few too many areas to make it an easy recommendation.

The Yoga Slim 7i has four fewer cores than the Snapdragon chips and half of what the Core Ultra 9 18H is working with.

The Core 7 Ultra 256V isn’t as fast in our benchmarks as the higher-end Snapdragon X Elite 80-100 or Ryzen AI 9370HX.

While the screen is good, the 7i ’s keyboard, speakers, and port selection are fantastic.

The trackpad is oddly short and wide compared to those found on the Microsoft Surface 7 .

The Yoga Slim 7i shows you can get good performance and battery life from a Lunar Lake laptop.

The downsides are not deal-breakers, but they’d be more forgivable on a cheaper machine.

Lunar Lake could very well be a stopgap measure for x86 on our long, inevitable march to Arm-based everything.