Lenovo Slim Pro 9i (16″ Intel) First Impressions

It’s been an incredible year for 16-inch laptops targeting creators, and Lenovo’s latest entry, the Slim Pro 9i seems like a terrific example, with its premium build quality, terrific looks, powerful innards, and mini-LED display (my first). I’ll find out for sure during the review period, but here are some first impressions.

But first a question: what, exactly, is a Slim Pro 9i? I’m familiar with most of Lenovo’s top-level portable PC brands—ThinkPad (premium business-class), Legion (gaming), Yoga (2-in-1), and IdeaPad (prosumer sweet-spot—but Slim is a new one to me. Looking at Lenovo’s website, I see that Slim is commingled with Yoga, there are separate Slim and Slim Pro models, and that the Slim Pro lineup targets creators and includes an exclusive “proprietary customer performance tuning solution” called Lenovo X Power.

So that’s interesting. But there’s more: the Slim Pro models are also powered by custom Intel chipsets that are 24 percent smaller than usual, which is what enables these PCs to be so thin, er, slim. Of course, slim is relative on a 16-inch portable PC: looking at the specs, I can see that the Slim Pro 9i (in 16-inch form, there’s a 14-inch version as well) is 0.71 inches thick and starts at 4.9 pounds. That didn’t seem all that impressive at first—the HP ZBook Firefly G10 16-Inch I recently reviewed is 0.78-inches thick and weighs much less at 3.88 pounds, for example—but there’s some serious hardware inside of this PC, including an Intel H-series processor and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 dedicated laptop GPU. So this configuration is, indeed, pretty impressive.

Since we’re starting with the internals, let’s get more specific. The review unit is powered by a 45-watt 13th Gen Intel Core i9-13900H processor with 14 cores (6 Performant, 8 Efficient), 32 GB of fast LPDDR5X RAM, and 1 TB of PCIe Gen 4 M.2 SSD storage, and the NVIDIA GPU has 8 GB of dedicated GDDR6 VRAM. Power comes from a 75-watt-hour battery that can be rapid-charged by its proprietary 170-watt power supply with its proprietary charging port. Battery life won’t be good: Lenovo claims up to 6 hours using a productivity-based benchmark, so I’m guessing that the real-world results will be closer to 4. We shall see.

There’s a 6-speaker solution with Dolby Atmos on-board for immersive sound. And A 5 MP Windows Hello-compatible webcam with a physical shutter switch (on the side of the PC, interestingly) and a quad-array microphone for your hybrid work needs.

Connectivity looks modern, with dual-band Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.1.

The expansion looks terrific. You get the Lenovo charging port, a USB-A Gen 3.2 Gen 1 port, a full-sized HDMI 2.0 port, one Thunderbolt 4/USB4 Type-C port (with DisplayPort and Power Delivery 3.0), and a headphone/mic combo jack on the left.

And then a second USB-A Gen 3.2 Gen 1 port and, rare these days, a full-sized SD card reader on the right. Oddly, the power button is also on the right, even though this isn’t a 2-in-1. Curious.

And since we have returned to the outside of the PC, let’s address that screen. The Slim Pro 9i’s massive 16-inch display is what Lenovo calls a PureSight Pro MiniLED panel with a 3.2K resolution (3200 x 2000), an ideal 16:10 aspect ratio, 675 nits of brightness, and a very fast 165 Hz refresh rate (though the toggle in Windows 11 Settings supports only 60 and 165 Hz choices). This bright and colorful display boasts 100 percent compatibility with the Adobe RGB, P3, and sRGB color spaces, Dolby Vision HDR capabilities, TÜV Low Blue Light Certification+, and Eyesafe Certification. Oh, and it has multitouch support too, which I will likely avoid completely. It is surrounded by very small bezels on all sides, and the corners are rounded to match the Windows 11 design aesthetic.

But what is mini-LED? Since this is my first experience with it, and based on its glossy, bright, and colorful output, I assumed it was the next generation of OLED. But not quite: instead, mini-LED simply indicates that it uses size-reduced LED diodes, which can result in a thinner form factor. So it is, in some ways, to the display panel what the size-reduced Intel chipset is to the bottom half of the PC. But from a technical perspective, mini-LED offers better brightness while OLED displays can turn individual pixels off, which leads to those incredible, inky blacks.

From a look and feel perspective, the Slim Pro shares the premium build quality and basic looks of Lenovo’s other premium brands, and there is absolutely no flex at all in the body, even in the middle of the keyboard. It shares the now-familiar Lenovo “bump” at the webcam area at the top of the display, a sort of reverse notch, and the classy Lenovo logo work on the wrist rest and outer display lid.

The Storm Grey color (dark gray) is quite nice, and I like the contrasting lighter gray color on the exterior of the display lid.

The backlit keyboard is nicely done, though it is of course marred by that typo-inducing numeric keypad on the right.

The keys are scalloped as per Lenovo’s other premium PC keyboards and offer a nice 1.5 mm of key travel with a terrific key feel (that Lenovo says is also grease resistant). The Ctrl key is in the right place (in the lower right where God intended), and there are dedicated microphone mute and user-programmable keys.

The touchpad is, my God, enormous, and while I have already needed to turn off three- and four-finger gestures, it seems accurate in early use with solid-sounding clicks.

The software loadout is mostly inoffensive, though Lenovo’s Vantage-based services advertising is annoying. McAfee is onboard, blech, but there are only four Lenovo utilities and no obvious crap. Windows 11 Pro is included.

All in all, it looks pretty terrific. More soon.