Ben Madilynn
Lenovo has been at the forefront of experimental laptop design for years, with systems that feature extra displays, original interfaces, and even folding display panels. But where most companies make these innovative changes as one-off proof-of-concept models, Lenovo iterates and refines, turning cool concepts into fun and sometimes successful product lines. Case in point: The 2024 Lenovo Yoga Book 9i (model 13IMU9, starting at $1,782 and $1,999.99 as tested) is a twin-display machine that ditches the traditional keyboard and touchpad for a second 13-inch OLED touch screen down south. It’s the second year Lenovo has made a version of this two-screen system, bringing back the dazzling 13-inch OLED displays and sleek physical design and beefing it up with new processors, faster memory, and improved haptics. The result? An even better hands-on experience from a 2-in-1 device that keeps up with more ordinary creator laptops on speeds and feeds.
Configurations & Design: Double the OLEDs, Double the Fun
The company’s dual-screen design is the first thing you’ll see with the Yoga Book 9i (2024). Lenovo has made one of the best dual-screen laptops on the market by pairing two OLED panels and connecting them with an elegant 2-in-1 hinge. The Yoga Book sidesteps the problems of folding screens, such as warping, long-term wear and tear on the OLED panel, and novel hinge designs that aren’t guaranteed to hold up over time. Instead, Lenovo uses a sturdy 2-in-1 hinge that lets the laptop open fully, lay flat, or even fold around to serve as a tablet.
Let’s map out the configurations before ogling at OLEDs. This year’s Yoga Book 9i models all have the same Intel Core Ultra 7 155U processor backed by integrated graphics and 16GB of soldered-on LPDDR5X memory. Every configuration also has the same gorgeous OLED panels. The only difference between the $1,782 starting model and the $1,999.99 version as tested is solid-state storage: 512GB to start versus the 1TB in the model tested here.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Each OLED screen is a 13-inch panel with 2.8K (2,880-by-1,800-pixel) resolution, touch and pen support, and a glossy anti-fingerprint glass surface that is remarkably comfortable, whether you are swiping with fingers or scribbling with a pen. Thanks to the original design, you can open the whole works to 180 degrees and use the full two screens as a dual-monitor system on the go.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The Yoga Book’s design uses an all-aluminum chassis that is thin and light—weighing 2.95 pounds and measuring 0.63 inch thick when closed—giving you some of the best portability a laptop can provide and way more screen real estate than any standard laptop. The aluminum is tinted a deep blue, called Tidal Teal, and the rounded edges of the chassis are comfortable to hold. The hinge connecting the two halves has an integrated soundbar, providing superb sound quality no matter which mode you have the laptop opened to.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
These delicate touches on the device are matched by excellent accessories: a Bluetooth keyboard that magnetically secures to the laptop, a matching Bluetooth mouse, a pen for written inputs, and a folding magnetic stand that doubles as a keyboard case. Separate peripherals are always a bit of a pain compared with a single integrated unit, but Lenovo’s attention to detail in making these devices pack up together makes them a bit easier to bring along. You even get a loop for carrying the included pen. And, just as important, you won’t pay extra for these essentials.
Using the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i: Some Minor Dual-Screen Downers
Lenovo’s design means you’ll be doing without some laptop basics. The Bluetooth keyboard has no backlight, and you’ll need to be careful not to close it in the laptop when you’re done using it since the extra bulk will damage both the keyboard and the display. Neither the laptop nor the keyboard has a touchpad, relying on the two touch screens and an included mouse for clicking. You can use a virtual on-screen touchpad on the bottom display while in laptop mode, but it’s more awkward than it’s worth.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The port selection is also pretty minimal, with three Thunderbolt 4/USB-C ports. These connections support charging, external displays, and port adapters if you need HDMI, but you’ll need to plan ahead. You’ll also find no audio jack. Instead, the system uses Bluetooth for connecting to most peripherals (including headphones, keyboard, and mouse) and Wi-Fi 6E for networking.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Testing the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i: A Quirky But Competitive Laptop
Two types of all-screen laptops are available: dual-screen models and folding-screen designs. For this comparison, we have some of each: models with folding screens, like the HP Spectre Foldable PC and the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold 16, or two-screen options, like the Asus Zenbook Duo (UX8406) or the 2023 Lenovo Yoga Book 9i. They may all have similar overall designs, but among the different hardware options, they all include various combinations of capable processing and integrated graphics.
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
We run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL’s PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.
Our other three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
Finally, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s famous image editor to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
Productivity is where the Yoga Book 9i (2024) fared best, easily surpassing the 4,000-point baseline for standard tools—like Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—and pulling ahead of most competitors. Only the Asus Zenbook Duo (UX8406) performed better.
In fact, that was the pattern across most of our processor-focused tests. The Yoga Book held that second-place spot across Cinebench and Geekbench and had the second-fastest time in HandBrake. The only place it faltered was in Photoshop, falling behind most of the competition, even compared with last year’s model.
Graphics Tests
We test the graphics inside all laptops and desktops with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).
To further measure GPUs, we also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.
We initially saw similar distribution in graphics tests, where the Yoga Book 9i (2024) pulled ahead of the HP Spectre Foldable PC and the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold 16. But, again, the Asus Zenbook Duo (UX8406) led by a large margin. Interestingly enough, in tests where the Zenbook didn’t run the test, the Yoga Book actually fell in the rankings again, taking third place in our GFXBench graphics tests.
Since these systems use integrated graphics, they’ll be pretty similar in practice. They aren’t well suited to graphics-heavy applications like gaming. Still, they’ll be ideal for streaming movies, working on PowerPoint presentations, and crunching other light content creation tasks like photo edits and digital drafting.
Battery and Display Tests
We test each laptop and tablet’s battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
Doubling up on screens has a predictable effect on battery life, and that’s just as true for the Yoga Book 9i (2024), which lasted barely more than 7 hours in our battery test. And that’s in laptop mode, with most of the bottom screen darkened, covered by a keyboard. Compared with the competition, that’s a little short: The Asus Zenbook and the HP SPectre Foldable doubled that. Dual-screen use is even harder on battery life, dropping to 3 hours and 22 minutes with both OLED panels illuminated. Again, this is short, even for a dual-screen system.
But the screens themselves are superb. The Yoga Book 9i easily covered 100% of the sRGB gamut and 99% of DCI-P3, alongside the best displays on the market. But the competition is especially fierce in this form factor, where the screens are everything: 100% scores are pretty standard, and last year’s Yoga Book had 100s across the board.
Brightness was also a close match, with the Asus Zenbook Duo and last year’s Yoga Book producing nearly identical results. The real winner was the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold 16, the only one to meet or exceed the 400-nit brightness that most OLED screens promise. But these laptops will all look similar in actual use, with the fundamental differences stemming from the structural differences between two-screen designs and foldable panels.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Verdict: A Multitasker That’s Almost Ready for the Mainstream
The Lenovo Yoga Book 9i (2024) shows that while dual-screen designs are still outside the mainstream, the right design does a lot to move it from gimmick to “gimme, gimme!” The twin OLED panels look excellent, the device feels comfortable, and the performance is potent enough to make this your daily driver. Sure, it has some quirks, like a bundle of accessories you’ll need to tote along, a digital-only touchpad, and a spartan selection of ports. Still, anyone buying a dual- or folding-screen laptop will face similar challenges.
If you’re in the market for one of these all-screen devices, you could do much worse than the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i (2024). The two-screen setup avoids the pitfalls of foldables, and while the battery life isn’t lengthy, that was a given with two high-res displays. For now, the Asus Zenbook Duo (UX8406) remains our Editors’ Choice award holder purely on performance, but Asus had better watch out: Lenovo’s coming for that top spot.
Lenovo Yoga Book 9i (2024)
Pros
The Bottom Line Lenovo’s Yoga Book 9i impresses with its dual-screen OLED design and speedy performance, even if this twin-screened innovator won’t suit everyone. This laptop is worth considering for early adopters who can embrace its quirks for the sake of cutting-edge design.
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About Brian Westover
Lead Analyst, Hardware
