Yoga Slim 7i Ultra vs MacBook Air: Better Than Air?

[00:01] favorite laptop, Lenovo's Yoga Slim 7i Ultra. This thing is so special and so sleek, it's shockingly light, has a beautiful screen, an amazing keyboard, and very long battery life. This is great for someone like me who wants a

[00:16] super portable laptop for basic tasks like browsing the web, writing, using are actually two variants of this laptop. The one we have with the base Intel Core Ultra Series 3 chip, and then there is a more powerful one with an X

[00:30] at the beginning. That one offers performance similar to Apple's M5, which is definitely good enough for most coders and even people or gaming. In my experience, the X chips are even

[00:43] make some minor changes to our videos. Our base unit here goes for $1,600, which actually isn't unreasonable for how much you're getting. Even though it has a slower processor, Josh and I both feel that it is a much better laptop for

[00:56] light users than the MacBook Air, which is rare that we strongly agree on something. Regardless, we would always recommend you try to get it on sale. You can use our website bestlaptop.deals to track prices and set a notification for

[01:08] when the price drops. Our only real gripe about it is that the X version isn't available everywhere right now, but we will be showing you how similar laptops perform that have that chip, so you know what to expect. The chassis of

[01:20] this laptop looks really good, but it's even more enjoyable to hold. When we got it because it has this special coating. You may or may not know that Lenovo uses a soft-touch coating on most of their keyboards. On this laptop, they've

[01:34] covered the whole thing in that smooth, luxurious texture. It just feels so incredibly premium because of it. On top of that, it's super lightweight, under a kilo, which is crazy. It's lighter than many 13-in laptops, even though it's got

[01:48] a larger 14-in display. The Slim 7i Ultra still has excellent build quality, though, with minimal flex on the keyboard deck and lid. doesn't flop back when bumped around and it opens with one hand easily due to the

[02:01] lip. We have ours in the sea shell color here, which is a sort of creamy, slightly off-white. I like that it's off-white, but Josh would prefer it to be a more true white like Lenovo's Legion 7i. In some regions, it's

[02:14] supposed to be available in mystic violet or cosmic blue. If our Slim 7X in the blue is anything to go by, it's less of a standout, but it does mean you wouldn't run into the issue of a white backlight shining through white keys.

[02:26] which on our model. We tried putting it on auto brightness so the backlight turns off in a lighter room like my office, but it didn't seem to work very well. So, you have to manually change it, which is annoying. There's also some

[02:39] again makes it hard to see which key is which when it's turned on. On the bright side, excuse the pun, that's the only con we have with the keyboard. It has an ample 1.5 mm of key travel,

[02:52] It's also clicky enough to feel responsive when you're typing, but it's standard and there's plenty of room between the keys, so I didn't experience any typos or mispresses when using it. The up and down arrow keys are a bit

[03:05] actually agree with that choice for once. Since they align with the bottom of the keyboard, it keeps this laptop's clean, cohesive aesthetic. The trackpad is another thing we like a lot on this laptop. First of all, it's a very

[03:18] which we're glad to see is becoming more common in premium Lenovo laptops. In my experience typing, I never had any palm rejection issues as the trackpad isn't naturally rest on it. Josh and Seth both said palm rejection

[03:33] relevant as they experience those issues more often. The display on this laptop looks fantastic. It's a 14-in 2880 by 1800 OLED panel with up to 120 Hz refresh rate over 500 nits of brightness and great color accuracy. I also didn't

[03:48] detect any screen door effect or PWM flickering, which makes this display get a nearly perfect score on our website. We rate it on things like high pixel density, which this one has, making small text very crisp and easy to read.

[04:01] The only knit we have with this screen is that it is quite glossy. That means that in brighter environments like outdoors, even at full brightness, you might still get some pesky reflections. Now, I know I've been glazing this

[04:13] thing, but it does have limited ports, which may bother some folks. On the positive, there is a charging capable Thunderbolt 4 port on both sides, which the MacBook Air and Surface 13 I

[04:26] mentioned earlier, which only support charging on one side. On the negative, the Slim 7i Ultra doesn't even have a headphone mic combo jack. It's also lacking a USB-A port, which many people still use for mice, and an HDMI 2.1 port

[04:39] I used it with a dock, so the limited ports worked out fine for me. I'll link my dock down below. Josh also pointed out that many people are now using Bluetooth headphones exclusively, so again, this may be fine depending on

[04:52] things we think most people will care about, the battery life on this laptop is really solid. It has a very large battery considering its size and weight, the prior generation of this laptop with Intel's older Series 2V chips. This is

[05:07] particularly impressive as that one has a much lower resolution screen. Lower run because there are fewer pixels to power, at least for OLEDs. The new Slim 7i Ultra also lasts longer than both of the MacBooks you can find

[05:20] out by two laptops that also have lower power chips. You'll notice the XPS 14 but that one has a lower resolution screen. The one with the more powerful X chip lasts the same as our non-X Slim 7i Ultra.

[05:35] Dell has some great battery life optimizations on these new XPS's. Compared to most laptops though, the Slim 7i Ultra still does very well. As far as performance on battery, our unit doesn't lose any performance, but our

[05:48] first place. Before we dive into how these chips perform, I just want to go over how this one was for my daily use. My normal day is just script writing and browser tabs, three Excel sheets, and two PowerPoints open at the same time.

[06:04] doing all of that hooked up to my external monitor, I don't remember this laptop ever getting warm or making any noise Even in its best performance mode, which is wild, by the way. That mode on other

[06:18] laptops usually has at least a little fan noise, but I heard nothing even when I put my ear up to it. I can't comment on whether this will remain the case for the higher-end X CPUs, but we're going to try to get one of those in. So, get

[06:31] subscribed for that. Now, as far as actual performance results go, this eight-core chip is very basic. The X chips that will be available in this laptop have 16 CPU cores instead with a much stronger integrated GPU. We're

[06:44] X chips on our graphs, so you can get a sense of how well they perform. The Slim 7i Ultra supposedly feeds its X chip 40 watts sustained, which is higher than the 25 watts that the XPS 14 feeds its same processor, but similar to the

[06:59] Prestige and Swift's power draw. Let's start with Geekbench, which tests a variety of common performance tasks. Those X chips and the MacBooks pull ahead. The Macs are way ahead in terms of single-core speeds.

[07:11] processor when it's maxed out, the spread of laptops is similar. Laptops with Intel's X chips and Apple's M5 chips are ahead by quite a bit here. It's also disappointing that the chip in our Ultra doesn't do that much better

[07:24] than last year's Series 2 Lunar Lake CPU that it's replacing. in our power draw graph from our 10-minute Cinebench run that the Ultra is definitely capable of feeding its processor enough wattage for a better X

[07:39] chip to perform decently well in this chassis. During intensive tasks like this 10-minute stress test, the Slim 7i Ultra stayed well within the threshold of what we consider cool to the touch. Anything under 40 is great. As far as

[07:52] fan noise goes, it gets a bit noisy for these tasks, but even at its highest, it isn't as obtrusive as your normal performance laptop. The Swift fan noise on this graph is closer to what we would expect in one of those.

[08:04] Under 50 is generally considered acceptable during hardcore tasks like these. As I said earlier, it is a nearly silent laptop in most other scenarios. chips and the reason we recommend them

[08:17] performance. This means you can play some modern games at lower resolutions on medium settings or even do some entry-level creator tasks. Here's a graphics benchmark Steel Nomad Light, which is native on both macOS and

[08:31] Windows, just to get a sense of how much better those higher-end iGPUs are. They will be labeled as Arc B390 on this graph, and you'll notice they both land at the top. The reason is that Intel's X chips have 12 GPU cores instead of the

[08:46] four GPU cores in the lower-end Intel graphics like we have in our Slim 7i This lines up with the graph as the Swift does about three times better than One interesting thing is if we compare it to the Slim 7i from last year with

[09:00] Lunar Lake, the chip that this is meant to replace, that one's graphics are to say here is if you're looking at a laptop with this chip, check out last buying. You could save a lot of money that way and not lose out on any

[09:15] performance. The main differences are going to be other updates to the laptop itself. Like this Slim 7i Ultra has a better screen than that one. We think the speakers are pretty good on this laptop. Two of them are facing upwards,

[09:27] which helps a lot with volume, and the bass sounded decent. Not XPS or MacBook you're going to get other than that. Take a listen. Take a listen. >> [music]

[09:57] Slim 7i Ultra looks and sounds. It does have IR for Windows Hello, and I feel that it looks pretty good, but we are in studio lighting. Here's how the webcam my office. I think it looks a little blurrier, but it still looks decent. As

[10:11] I've said a few times, this laptop is pretty great, but upgradeability and maintenance are two of its weakest points. Opening the laptop required a non-traditional 6-point, aka star bit, which not everyone has access to. There

[10:23] were eight screws, two of which were different lengths, and while the fact edge is a boon in terms of it feeling high quality, it makes it much harder to If you want some more bad news, though, there's not much you can do back here

[10:37] there's not much you can do back here anyways. The short 2242 SSD slot is not plate above it, which is attached to part of the cooling solution. We decided not to take ours off, since we planned

[10:49] risk breaking anything. We also thought this was relevant to let folks know, because we saw in some other reviews that the units Lenovo sent out did not have a metal plate there. We have a unit purchased directly from

[11:02] Lenovo, so we believe this is what most consumers will see, at least in the US. >> Surprise, it's me, Josh. Sierra's at a conference, and I wanted to make sure we covered Linux. So, we did try to boot up Linux. Unfortunately, it failed on a

[11:14] critical service error. This was with Fedora 43. This is probably the last time we're actually going to test Fedora 43, as 44 is, I believe, out next week, also going to be exploring beside on the gaming laptops and creator ones. Now, I

[11:28] do want to say big thanks to our patron members who are supporting us and YouTube members. There's a Linux backing tier there. You guys are really allowing great. And if you want to help us and

[11:40] down below to that. On that note, back to you, Sierra. >> If it isn't abundantly clear by now, I really like this laptop. For light It's cheaper and will likely offer

[11:52] For people like me who sometimes do creative work like reviewing our videos, publishing, and photo editing, the X chip is going to offer plenty of performance, making this the perfect laptop, at least for what I do.

[12:06] the X chip variant is going to be a great option for coders looking for a premium laptop with maximum portability, and I agree. So, instead of giving you a solid price target for how much this thing should

[12:18] cost, because prices are fluctuating rapidly right now, we are instead going to say that we think the Ultra 7 model we have is probably worth around $400 more than the MacBook Air. The more powerful X chip ones could be

[12:31] about $200 more than the base MacBook Pro 14, depending on how much memory you're getting in it. And then we think that would be fair. But, if all of these laptops are too rich for your blood, last year's Ultra 7 chips perform just

[12:44] as well as the base Series 3 chips for CPU tasks and better in graphics. Those definitely worth considering. I'll put a link to a list of Lunar Lake laptops on thanks for watching and I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your day.