Intel is Back, at Least for Now The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition is a sleek 15-inch laptop designed for productivity, featuring an AI coprocessor. This laptop is part of a growing market and includes many standard features: long battery life, a good display, a comfortable keyboard, quality speakers, and a few minor flaws. What stands out most about the Yoga Slim 7i is its new Intel Lunar Lake processor. Intel needs to prove itself, especially since Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips have shown that Arm processors can compete with Intel's Meteor Lake CPUs in performance while offering better battery life. Additionally, AMD’s Ryzen AI chips have also entered the market with strong performance and decent battery life. Lunar Lake represents Intel's opportunity to remain competitive in the thin-and-light laptop category. The good news is that Lunar Lake performs well. However, for a laptop priced at $1,300, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i has some shortcomings that make it hard to recommend without reservations. Pros and Cons of the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition • Pros: • Great battery life and standby time • Excellent keyboard with good key travel • Large, bright 120Hz display that looks nice for an LCD • Good overall performance and design • Quality speakers • USB-C ports on both sides • Cons: • Poor trackpad • Unwanted software that tries to charge extra • Stiff hinge that requires two hands to open • Average webcam quality • Awkward placement of the power button and webcam switch The Yoga Slim 7i features a sharp 15.3-inch screen, an Intel Core Ultra 7 256V processor, options for 16GB or 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD. It also has excellent speakers and a great keyboard, but the trackpad is only average. The "Aura Edition" label indicates it has a Lunar Lake chip, which mainly includes some AI software. It also comes with a dedicated neural processing unit (NPU) capable of performing at least 40 trillion operations per second. This places the Yoga Slim 7i in competition with other laptops that feature Snapdragon processors and AMD’s Ryzen AI chips. Whether you need the NPU for AI work or just want a fast laptop with good battery life, Lunar Lake shows improvements over Intel’s previous Meteor Lake chips in single-core performance and power efficiency. This means you can enjoy better battery life without switching to Windows on Arm. In everyday use, the Yoga Slim 7i feels fast and usually shows no lag. The only slight delays I noticed were when switching between multiple Chrome tabs across four virtual desktops. The x86 architecture still has its strengths. In single-core benchmarks, the Lunar Lake Core 7 Ultra 256V in the Yoga Slim 7i is slightly faster than the Core Ultra 9 185H (Meteor Lake) chip and about 5 percent quicker than the Snapdragon X Elite 78-100 in Lenovo’s similar Yoga Slim 7x. However, it is almost 10 percent slower than the faster Snapdragon X Elite 80-100 found in the Surface Laptop 7 or the AMD Ryzen AI 9 370 HX in the Asus Zenbook S 16. In multicore tests, the Lunar Lake chip lagged further behind—between 18 and 27 percent slower in Geekbench and 25 to 38 percent in Cinebench. Lunar Lake has fewer cores than the Snapdragon chips and half as many as the Core Ultra 9 18H, so it’s expected that multicore performance would be lower, but the difference isn’t as large as one might think given the core count.