Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Review: A True MacBook Pro Rival?

We shouldn’t expect any Windows laptop with a powerful discrete GPU to truly replicate what the MacBook Pro does. Yes, there are more powerful systems out there, but efficiency is just not what those systems are about. Even with the improvements Nvidia has made in Advanced Optimus (automatic switching between discrete GPU when needed), the battery life suffers, especially while running heavier applications. On a local video playback test, the Yoga Pro 9i 16 lasted for around 12 hours. Despite using the same 84-watt-hour battery, this appears to be a slight improvement over last year’s model, though it’s hard to get an apples-to-apples comparison. I do know that its battery life diminishes quickly under heavy load, as it died in just 45 minutes while running a benchmark. You’ll want to be plugged in if you’re doing anything too serious.

Regardless of the task, you’ll get over twice the battery life on an M4 Max MacBook Pro. Not until we get ARM-based systems with powerful integrated graphics that rival the M4 Pro and M4 Max will there be competition for Apple. The closest thing we’ve seen so far is AMD’s unique Ryzen AI Max+ processor, which showed up on the Asus ROG Flow Z13 and used a massive integrated graphics chip to challenge traditional discrete graphics. But we’ve still got a long way to go.

The only other Windows laptop that could be better is the Asus ProArt P16, which I’ve yet to test. It now even comes with an RTX 5070 or 5090 option, which could make it significantly more powerful than the Yoga Pro 9i. However, it’s also a much more expensive laptop, configured with a 4K OLED screen and only higher-end GPUs. The Yoga Pro 9i is also hundreds of dollars cheaper than the Dell 16 Premium when similarly configured.

The Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 gets a lot of things right—plenty enough to make it worth a recommendation as a valid MacBook Pro competitor. Ultimately, it’s the performance, display, and premium quality that make it a worthy content creation machine, and the Yoga Pro 9i succeeds on all those fronts, perhaps better than any other Windows machine I’ve tested.