The topic I reviewed the Lenovo Yoga 7 Slim Ultra and it almost made me enjoy Windows again is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
It takes a lot for a Windows laptop to stand out. I’ve been a Mac user for many years, going between my ultra-thin M2 MacBook Air, or my brawny M3 Max MacBook Pro, where I can count on outstanding hardware married to exceptional battery life and performance thanks to Apple silicon. But this notebook is special because it’s one of the lightest in the world.
Lenovo’s line of Aura notebooks represent a collaboration with Intel, first with Lunar Lake chips, but now with Panther Lake chips like is found on their Yoga 7 Slim Ultra, which I spent several weeks reviewing.
By far the most striking thing about this laptop, as mentioned, is how incredibly light it is, at just 2.15lbs (975grams) which was achieved by using a combination of magnesium alloy and plastic, and by utilizing a specialized cooling system. Other weight-savings were achieved by using a solid state trackpad with haptic click vibration, and by utilizing a thin OLED panel.
But these extreme weight-saving measures come at a price that will become clear in this review — specifically, performance and build quality are not up to par with what you can get for the same money with other notebooks. But if you’re looking for a laptop that offers a feather-light and super thin body with battery life that can get you through an entire day, this notebook deserves your attention.
Lenovo kindly loaned us the Lenovo Yoga 7 Slim Ultra for this review. It has not seen this review before publishing or had a say in the content.
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The Yoga Slim 7i Ultra Aura Edition in the configuration we have, with its 1TB M.2 PCIe Gen4 SSD and 32 GB LPDDR5X RAM is available for $1629.99 (though this laptop has been known to go on sale around Prime day). Available upgrades include a 2TB SSD which adds $190. For color choices, you get Seashell, Cosmic Blue, Mystic Violet. Our review unit was seashell, which is an off-white that picks up dirt a bit too easily, so I’d suggest a darker color.
In terms of hardware, the 7 Slim Ultra is a solid notebook that is coated with a soft-touch matte coating that makes it feel premium to the touch, but overall the notebook feels plasticy and a bit cheap with a significant amount of keyboard flex. It’s wedge-shaped and goes from 15.2mm to 13.9mm thick, making it slim but not the thinnest notebook (the MacBook Air is 11.3mm thick).
It’s challenging to convey just how light this laptop is. It’s currently one of the lightest in the world, at just 2.15lb, or 975grams. This is lighter than any laptop from Apple, and is so effortless that you can lift the entire laptop, while open, from the corner with just your thumb and index finger. It’s shockingly light.
You get three USB-C thunderbolt 4 ports: two on the left and one on the right. At this price, I wish it had an HDMI port and SD slot or even a headphone jack, it’s also lacking any USB-A ports. On the right side is the power button and a dedicated camera-disable button, which is a nice touch.
The display is a beautiful, but extremely reflective, 14″ 2.8K OLED 2880×1800 panel with up to 500 nits of brightness (1100 nits HDR peak brightness) and 120Hz refresh. Unfortunately, this level of brightness was not nearly enough to overcome the very strong glare of the display, making it almost impossible to use outdoors. You can’t use this laptop with pen input, nor would you want to, since the screen doesn’t fold flat, but it is a touchscreen with solid responsiveness.
The trackpad is medium-sized and features a soft-touch coating and haptic vibration mechanism that simulates a click. It’s overall a nice trackpad that is precise, but I wish it was bigger to make multi-finger gestures easier. The backlit keyboard offers concave smile-shaped keys that offer 1.5mm of travel, which will satisfy people that don’t like short key travel; despite the thin nature of this notebook, the keyboard doesn’t feel like a typical laptop keyboard with short travel.
The quad Dolby Atmos speakers are a bright point, offering loud and clear audio that had a surprising amount of bass and treble. The speakers aren’t as good as those on my 16″ MacBook Pro, but they punch above their weight.
The camera is a 5MP sensor that is good but not great. In low light, the camera gets a bit noisy. But I’m happy to see a hardware camera kill switch on the right side, I wish more laptops had this.
Even compared to similar offerings from Apple and LG, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Ultra is the lightest in this comparison. Because you might not fully appreciate just how light 2.15lbs (975g) is, here’s a list of things that this laptop is lighter than: a hardcover Harry Potter book, a quart of milk, and a 13″ iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard.
The Slim 7 Ultra is powered by an Intel Core Ultra 7 355 Panther Lake CPU, which has an 8-core SOC with 4 high-power 2.3-4.7GHz cores and 4 low-power 1.7-3.5GHz cores. It’s an X86 chip that underperforms its peers, perhaps because of its small size and weight, which doesn’t allow for adequate cooling in my opinion. In fact, with minimal workloads, the Slim 7’s fans spin up to try to cool the processor, which undoubtedly means that the Core Ultra 7 355 is quickly reaching its thermal envelope and is having to clock down to maintain temperature.
It’s worth noting how far behind the Lenovo Slim 7 is compared to the ARM-based Snapdragon X2 Elite (like the one found in the Zenbook A16) or in the Zenbook A14 (which we reviewed a previous version of). These ARM-based processors are clearly ideal for notebooks, where ARM’s efficiency means higher sustained clock speeds before throttling down to avoid heat.
Graphics on the Lenovo are integrated Intel Arc Graphics with 4 cores. I came away unimpressed with the graphical performance of this laptop overall. I’m not a gamer, but running Counter Strike 2 on default settings, I was unable to get frame rates beyond 40-50, with a lot of lag and loud CPU fans spinning up. That said, I was able to connect the Slim 7 Ultra to a 4K external monitor and run both the inbuilt display with the external monitor with no problem.
The unit has 32GB of LPDDR5X memory, which keeps up well with multitasking, allowing me to run dozens of Chrome tabs without breaking a sweat.
The Yoga Slim 7 Ultra has a 75Wh battery, which is a decent size for a laptop of this weight, but since we’re talking about an X86 chip, don’t expect the power-sipping efficiency of similar notebooks that have an ARM chip. Also, since the CPU doesn’t have the best cooling, requiring the CPU fan to spin up often as the processor generates more heat than I was expecting, there’s a hit to battery life. I found that while running multiple productivity apps, including several instances of Chrome with dozens of tabs open, the Slim 7 Ultra could get me through about a half day, around 5 hours, before needing to plug in. This is relatively weak in comparison to Apple-based laptops or other Windows laptops with ARM processors that offer a full 8+ hours of battery life.
For recharging, the included 65watt charger is able to charge the notebook quickly from 0-100% in just under 90 minutes. That’s really good.
If you’re set on getting a thin and light Windows laptop, you have better options. To name a couple, we really liked the Acer Swift Edge 14 — and while it’s not as light at the Slim 7 Ultra, it’s close. But if you want my strongest recommendation, I’d have you consider the 2026 version of the ASUS Zenbook 14, which has the speedy ARM-based Snapdragon X2 Elite 18 core CPU in a package that weighs just tad more than this Lenovo and has much better battery life.
But me? I’m sticking to Mac, but I will say that if this laptop had better performance, more ports, was less money and had a less reflective screen, the weight factor could compel me to buy one of these for personal use, but I wouldn’t switch from my MacBook Pro. Overall, I find Windows much less satisfying to use than MacOS and so only if the notebook’s hardware was extremely compelling would I switch — this comes close, but not close enough.
Unless weight is a primary consideration, you can do better than this. That’s the bottom line.
The Lenovo Slim 7 Ultra Aura Edition is a very thin and light Windows 11 PC powered by the Intel Core 7 355 CPU and has 1TB PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe with 32GB LPDDR5X. It weighs just 2.15lb (0.97kg) making it one of the lightest notebooks ever within this class.