I tested the Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i Gen 11 Aura Edition and it’s almost the perfect MacBook alternative

Lenovo’s Yoga Pro series brings high-performance components into the slim form factor to create an ideal laptop for content creators and creative professionals alike. We did enjoy the previous model for good reason. Lenovo makes incredibly reliable laptops, and the Yoga Pro always promises a great balance of performance, stunning displays, and high-fidelity audio and this year’s Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i Gen 11 Aura Edition doesn’t disappoint in any of those categories.

The real hamstrings for the Yoga Pro 7i are its price point and its sub-par battery life. The newest Yoga Pro 7i is significantly more expensive for its base configuration compared to the previous generation, and it’s hard to justify a price hike of over $600 even with the current hardware shortages and US foreign manufacturing tariffs.

Between that steep entry-level price tag with just under 7 hours of web surfing battery life, can the Yoga Pro 7i Gen 11 Aura Edition still make the cut for our best laptops page?

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Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i Gen 11 Aura Edition: Cheat sheet

• What is it?: The Yoga Pro 7i is a thin and lightweight laptop with a discrete GPU.
• Who is it for?: Creative professionals and content creators who want a powerful, thin Windows laptop.
• What does it cost?: The base configuration of the Yoga Pro 7i Aura Edition starts at a staggering $2,149, while our review configuration with upgraded CPU and GPU costs just $250 extra.
• What do we like?: The Yoga Pro 7i Gen 11 boasts powerful performance designed to handle creative workloads, a gorgeous OLED touchscreen, Lenovo’s industry-leading keyboard, robust audio system, and reliable build quality.
• What don’t we like?: The base configuration is rather expensive for an Intel Core Ultra 7 and RTX 5050 combination, and the battery life could be a bit better.

Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i Gen 11 Aura Edition: Specs

Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i Gen 11 Aura Edition: The Ups

There’s a reason why Lenovo laptops often make it onto our guides, especially the more premium tier laptops like the Yoga and Yoga Pro series. The Yoga Pro 7i Gen 11 is no slouch, offering a minimalist design, satisfying keyboard experience, sturdy build quality, stunning display, robust audio, smooth content creation performance, and even a quality gaming experience.

Minimalist design and a user-forward experience

Lenovo’s streamlined design for its Yoga and IdeaPad laptops may not have a ton of visual interest, but the clean lines, embossed Lenovo logo, and camera hub on the lid are ideal for a more professional environment which fits the Yoga Pro well.

The streamlined design follows through with a clean keyboard deck with front-facing speakers on either side of the lattice keyboard and oversized touchpad. Add in the etched Yoga logo on the right-hand palm rest and you’ve got Lenovo’s answer to the MacBook layout.

But the real highlights of the Yoga Pro’s design are the keyboard and camera and mic hub on the top of the display. Due to that extra bump on the top lid, the Yoga Pro’s webcam and mic array don’t need a display notch, nor do they add a lot of overall bulk to the Yoga’s display bezels, which offers a much better fullscreen experience than the notorious MacBook notch.

The Yoga’s webcam is a 5MP IR camera with a built-in privacy shutter, and thus nothing particularly spectacular to write home about. However, it’s more than enough for any virtual meetings and calls you might need to handle.

As for the keyboard, Lenovo’s been making some of the best laptop keyboards for years and the Yoga Pro 7i Gen 11 Aura Edition is no different. The keyboard switches have plenty of key travel for a comfortable typing experience, combined with a crisp click for a more mechanical, bouncy feel.

Stunning display and powerful audio

Since the Yoga Pro is a creator laptop, it needs a vivid, color accurate display. Lenovo rates the Yoga Pro 7i’s OLED touchscreen at 100% accuracy on the sRGB, DCI-P3, and Adobe RGB color spaces, with a maximum peak brightness of 1100 nits.

Our testing indicated that the Yoga Pro 7i Gen 11 covered 199% of the sRGB and 141% of the DCI-P3 color spaces, making it one of the more accurate displays we’ve tested. As for the brightness, our HDR testing did peak at 999-nits, while the overall average SDR brightness of the Yoga’s OLED panel was 448-nits.

This makes the Yoga Pro an ideal laptop option for photo color correcting, digital design, and video color grading. So it’s an all-around fantastic choice for creative professionals who need color-accurate displays. Paired with a powerful, front-facing 4-speaker audio system with Dolby Atmos tuning, the Yoga Pro 7i is a fantastic choice for video editors and content creators.

Strong creative performance chops

When it comes to general and content creation specific performance, the Yoga Pro 7i’s Intel Core Ultra 9 386H processor and discrete Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 graphics card provide respectable amounts of processing power across a variety of multithreaded uses from video and photo editing to overall productivity.

Compared to last year’s Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i Gen 10, the 11th Gen Yoga Pro 7i packs a more powerful punch on our Geekbench and Handbrake video encoding benchmarks, with multithreaded performance gains of 43%.

The Yoga Pro 7i is also a bit more potent than our favorite 2-in-1 laptop, the Asus Zenbook Duo (2026) on both Geekbench and Handbrake. As for the MacBook Pro 14 M5, the Mac still holds a bit of an edge on Geekbench 6 multicore performance, though the Yoga Pro 7i outpaces the Mac by just a few seconds on our Handbrake benchmark. On the PugetBench Photoshop benchmark, the MacBook Pro M5 still holds down a steady lead, but the Yoga Pro 7i isn’t too far behind.

So if you’re looking for a Windows alternative to the MacBook Pro, the Yoga Pro does put up quite a good fight on the raw performance benchmarks. And that comes through even outside of the synthetic benchmark zone. I blazed through some photo editing and graphic design tasks on the Yoga Pro in Adobe Photoshop, with no major processing bottlenecks even when breaking out the more intensive tools like smart object selection.

Respectable gaming performance

While the Yoga Pro 7i is designed for content creation, it does have an Nvidia gaming graphics card on board. Sure, the Yoga Pro’s RTX 5060 may come with studio drivers installed, but you can swap those out for Nvidia’s gaming drivers if you’d like. And the Yoga is an absolute treat for gaming thanks to its highly accurate OLED display.

Of course, the Yoga Pro 7i will fall a bit behind in comparison to a more dedicated gaming laptop like the MSI Stealth 16 AI+ (2026) I reviewed recently, mostly because the Yoga’s thermal management isn’t designed for sustained, high-intensity gaming. But even then, the Yoga is just a few fps off from the Stealth even on more intense benchmarks like Black Myth: Wukong, Doom: The Dark Ages, and Cyberpunk 2077.

While both RTX 5060 laptops struggled with hitting the 60 fps mark on these benchmarks, particularly at 1600p resolution, the Stealth was about 5ps faster on average than the Yoga.

But if you only plan to play more casual games on the Yoga, or if you don’t mind gaming at lower graphics presets, the Yoga is more than sufficient for some quality gaming. I booted up Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail, and averaged about 100 fps at 1600p on Laptop (High) settings even in high-traffic areas or during large-scale raids.

And if you plan to use the Yoga for gaming content creation, it’ll do well enough for some game capture footage all on its own, particularly if you’re looking at running games at 1080p rather than the Yoga’s max 1600p resolution.

Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i Gen 11 Aura Edition: The Downs

The Yoga Pro 7i’s pitfalls are, unfortunately, difficult to overcome. While all tech hardware has gotten more expensive, the Yoga Pro 7i’s starting configuration comes at a steep price considering how affordable the upgrades are in comparison. Combined with sub-par battery life, it becomes hard to justify the Yoga Pro 7i’s high starting price.

The RAM shortage strikes again

Unfortunately, the Yoga Pro has gotten much more expensive this generation thanks to the AI industry’s stranglehold on the RAM supply chain, which has increased memory and GPU prices across the board. Last year’s Yoga Pro 7i Gen 10 pricing started at $1,400, while this generation’s entry level configuration starts at $2,149. That’s a price increase of almost $750. Granted, the Yoga Pro 7i Gen 10’s starting configuration had just an integrated GPU rather than a discrete Nvidia RTX GPU.

The Yoga Pro 9i Gen 10, which did feature a discrete Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050, started at $1,949. Which was still a pretty hefty retail price, but isn’t as far off from the Yoga Pro 7i Gen 11’s starting price. However, the Yoga Pro 9i did come with an Intel Core Ultra 9 285H processor, which helps justify that steep starting price. The Yoga Pro 7i Gen 11, meanwhile, starts at $2,149 for an Intel Core Ultra 7 356H. It’s hard to completely quantify the CPU cost differential since mobile CPUs are never sold separately from systems and the Yoga Pro 9i Gen 10 didn’t feature an Intel Core Ultra 7 option. But it’s probably closer to a $300 price difference between the two generations when you consider the CPU difference. Not the worst price hike we’ve seen with the RAM shortage, but it is a hard pill to swallow, particularly on the entry-level spec.

However, our review configuration did feature upgrades to the CPU and GPU, bringing the price up to $2,399. Which is just $250 more to upgrade to a 16-core CPU and more powerful RTX 5060 GPU. And that feels far less egregious than the Yoga Pro 7i’s starting configuration price tag.

But if you’re looking for a great content creator laptop and you don’t mind switching between Windows and macOS, the Apple MacBook Pro 14 M5 starts at just $1,699. Granted, Apple’s upgrades do get expensive so if you want to upgrade your RAM, storage, CPU, or GPU configuration it comes at a much higher price than Lenovo’s upgrade cost.

Sub-par battery life

Which leaves battery life as the Yoga’s most major hangup. On our web surfing battery test, the Yoga Pro 7i Gen 11 lasted just 6 hours and 56 minutes on average. My own anecdotal testing got me about 6 hours of web surfing, writing, and photo editing before I needed to find an outlet for the Yoga.

While laptops with discrete GPUs often take a hit to battery life, the Yoga Pro combines an RTX 5060 with an OLED display leaving it with two major issues when it comes to battery efficiency. If you plan to always use the Yoga near a power outlet, or just need it for quick short bursts of inspiration, its battery life isn’t too abysmal.

But if you need a great creator laptop that can last a long time on a single charge, you may just be better off with the MacBook Pro or even the Asus Zenbook Duo.

Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i Gen 11 Aura Edition: Verdict

The Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i Gen 11 Aura Edition is nearly a complete package as far as content creator laptops go. It’s got powerful CPU and GPU performance, a stunning OLED touchscreen, sturdy build quality, an industry-leading keyboard, and powerful built-in audio. If you’re looking for a Windows alternative to the MacBook Pro, the Yoga Pro is a solid competitor. And unlike the MacBook, it can run any game in your Steam library.

But if you need a cheaper entry level configuration, or if you need a laptop that lasts for over a full work day on a single charge, the MacBook Pro, Asus Zenbook Duo, or even the previous generation Yoga Pro 9i would be a better choice.