LENOVO YOGA Book 9 13IRU8

Design

The Lenovo Yoga Book 9 13IRU8 is a surprise even before you open it. Its shell is a beautiful shade of blue that Lenovo calls “Tidal Teal,” and it even pierced the heart of this reviewer, who buys 99% of his tech in gray or black. It’s a really beautiful shade that wowed everyone I showed it to. See? There’s room for color in laptops after all. The bezels around the screens are quite thin, though the “top” screen does have a thicker one to fit the webcam. Unlike foldable like the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold and Asus Zen book 17 Fold, however, these are two separate screens, made distinct with a hinge (which doubles as a sound bar) in between.

Processor

The LENOVO YOGA Book 9 13IRU8 is equipped with the Intel Core i7-1355U is a high-end mobile CPU for thin and light laptops based on the Alder Lake architecture (Raptor Lake-U / RPL-U series). It was announced in early 2023 and offers 2  performance cores (P-cores, Golden Cove architecture) and 8 efficient cores (E-cores, Gracemont architecture). The P-cores support Hyper-Threading leading to 12 supported threads when combined with the E-cores. The clock rate ranges from 1.7 to 5 GHz on the performance cluster and 1.2 to 3.7 GHz on the efficient cluster. The performance of the E-cores should be similar to old Skylake cores (compare to the Core i7-6700HQ). All cores can use up to 12 MB L3 cache. The CPU supports “Essentials” vPro management features. Compared to the P-series (28W) or H-series (45W), the 15W TDP may limit the sustained performance.

Display

There are two screens, each of the 13.3-inch, 2880 x 1800 OLED screens are beautiful. They really look great, together and on their own. The top screen covered 136.7% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, while the bottom hit 136.5% (to my eyes, they look identical). The regular Yoga 9i beat those at 142.1%, with the Zen Book Fold OLED coming in third and the non-OLED MacBook Air falling behind.

Accessories

Perhaps the most complicated part of the Yoga Book 9i is getting used to its wide variety of input methods. Sure, there’s two touch screens, but there’s a keyboard and mouse in the box, as well as virtual inputs and an included stylus. Your options will depend heavily on which of the many postures you use your Yoga Book in. I spent most of my time with the Yoga Book 9i on my desk with the screens in a vertical orientation, using the Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Neither is anything fancy; the mouse, the Lenovo 600 Bluetooth Silent Mouse, is a simple, plastic device powered by a AA battery and can pair to two computers at once, which is nice. The keyboard is color-matched with the Yoga Book and charges with the included USB-C adapter that comes with the laptop.