Lenovo's Yoga 9 is flexible at home, but stretches the friendship at work With working from home and bring your own device both now established practices in many workplaces, The Register's Desktop Tourism series decided it was time to take a consumer machine for a trip. We chose the eighth-gen Lenovo Yoga 9i – a machine boasting an Intel Core i7-1360P that includes Iris XE graphics, plus 16GB of …
I agree. In the same way why would an employer even contemplate allowing employees' personal ,potentially malware laden, devices to connect to the corporate network.
I've seen some pretty dire empoyer provided devices, loaded so full of corporate security/tracking/authentication crap that the poor things are on their knees, laptops with screen resolutions from decades ago hence I can see why some employees might be tempted to use their own devices. Personally I wouldn't.
Employer provides the tools and if the tools are insufficient that is up to the employer to resolve.
Also more importantly these days, The employer has full control of their kit so the employee is less likely to be on hook for issues. As for allowing employer (some level of) control of personal device(s), as i suspect is often case with BYOD, not going to happen on my kit.
I thought BYOD was just a holding FLA whilst we were waiting for the industry to smack us round the head with another TLA. Are we still "doing" BYOD? Didn't Crypto, then AI push it from our masters' list of things to bother us with? Short of hoping my users don't mind receiving MFA texts on their own phones, I've never even contemplated this nonsense - and neither would any of them.
Err.
1. SMS is the _least_ secure MFA option (by a substantial margin). Use a TOTP generator instead.
2. There are certainly a substantial number of people in my office who won't install a a custom app to act as a MFA token on their own phones. I don't _know_ whether they would accept texts - but I wouldn't want to bet on it!
The Lenovo’s website has a picture which clearly shows it has 3 USB ports.
I wonder whether on these portables the assumption is WiFi streaming will be used. But then is Wifi 6 (2x2 802.11ax) sufficient for 4k streams (aside I note Lenovo don’t give a max display resolution etc.)
Also why include a wired USB hub, better to include a Bluetooth/WiFi enabled smart plug that a user could plug into the back of their monitor and seamlessly wireless stream to the paired device.
I note it only supports Bluetooth 5.0 and not 5.2 with its low energy power control support.
Once again a basic 729 webcam and microphone set up are real limitations and show just how much this has been cut down to reach an enhanced(?) margin at a price point. But if I were to payout $1700 on a personal device, I would be giving the Mac Books a look over…
"is Wifi 6 (2x2 802.11ax) sufficient for 4k streams"
Yes, very much so if the rest of the network can handle it. In many cases, slow speeds on WiFi has more to do with congested networks behind the access point than the wireless part, though if your building is obstructing signals or your access points are ancient, this can change. However, I must disagree with this point:
"Also why include a wired USB hub, better to include a Bluetooth/WiFi enabled smart plug that a user could plug into the back of their monitor and seamlessly wireless stream to the paired device."
There will always be more room for debugging a WiFi connection than a cable. It's useful at times, but in many cases, the cable is the fast solution and works better for the user who doesn't need infinite mobility and would prefer a quick setup.
Some further searching reveals back in 2016 Lenovo released the Thinkpad WiGig Dock and equipped some systems - mainly the X1 models, with the Intel WiGig 802.11ad wireless card.
There seems to be little written about WiGig and Other than the support pages for the Dock the Lenovo website doesn’t mention WiGig and the current Yoga X1 doesn’t mention 802.11ad or support for 60 GHz WiFi.
>Also if you travel and do presentations with your laptop, you can't guarantee every venue will have a WiFi
That was one of my considerations for a built-in wireless HDMI/SVGA solution, which only required me to attach a dongle (previously paired to my device) to the venues cable, rather than physically tether my ultra portable to the venues cable.
At home it would be a quick solution to enable the device (in your lap) to stream to a dumb TV via the HDMI/SVGA port thereby being treated as a monitor rather than screencasting by players that check for such things.
If you buy this machine for personal use, you'll part with around $1,700 and bring home a pretty, slick, and pleasing machine that won't particularly delight and probably won't disappoint. I do worry that its silvered edges will scratch.
How much?!
For $1700 it would bloody need to delight and not disappoint in any way. While reading the review (before reaching the above revelation) I was thinking it might be in the 600-700 region, which would still be more than I would be willing to pay after reading the review.
(yes yes, alright with i7 and 16GB perhaps 700-800, but still ~1k overpriced (IMHO of course))
EDIT: I suppose if the $1700 is AUD and not USD then its not that far off. still rattling sound, when the soundbar is clearly a selling point, is unacceptable.
1/2 off topic, cause my daughter's got a previous variant, apparently changes are, as usual with lenovo, minimal:
1. soundbar - it offers SUPERB sound reproduction. Sure, it might be 'just ok', on a broader scale but it beats ALL other laptops out there and there's nothing even getting close (don't know about new macbooks though)
Now, to the usual suspects:
2. keyboard: shit. No, wait, it's much worse than that, we're entering day and age when 'key travel' is approaching 0.00 mm.
3 port layout: shit.
4 number of ports, ports selection: shit (aka 'industry standard in this day and age).
5. repairability / upgradability, shit
6. camera: shit (see above)
7. operating system, well, W11, what else do you expect?
8. The screen is good, though probably eats battery.
9. The pen is good/bad (complaints about how thin and hard to hold is, go back to around 2014)
10. and it's got this fugly boot logo that the bright folks at lenovo decided wouldn't be worth letting "consumers" play with and replace with something else.
All in all, it's the same 'new!' (old) model they change MARGINALLY every year, because that's the fad, YOU'VE GOT TO come up with a 'new!' each year, otherwise the world is gonna collapse! I don't see why you'd want to use it for work, unless your job's to 'consume content' and / or they didn't give you a lappy at work. That said, if you consider 'real' convertible alternative, e.g. lenovo x1 yoga, etc, well, too bad, cause they've been shit for at least the last... four - five gens. In fact, looking at current x1 yoga and this consumer yoga, they seem to be getting more and more alike, i.e. pretty toys.
"1. soundbar - it offers SUPERB sound reproduction. Sure, it might be 'just ok', on a broader scale but it beats ALL other laptops out there and there's nothing even getting close (don't know about new macbooks though)"
I'll just add a comment re the soundbar and the articles author stating "more moving parts" are not a good thing in a 360 hinge. The only extra "moving" parts are the wires through the hinge to the speakers, just as with the video/camera cable and maybe the WiFi cables (I didn't look all that closely), but there are no extra mechanical moving parts than in any laptop hinge area, let alone the fully foldable ones.
Personally, having repaired many, many business grade Lenovos and looked at a few consumer grade ones, I don't think I'd touch a consumer grade one at all. But that quite possibly refers to most brands these days.
Why are these computers being chosen for the reviews? They don't appear to check any of the boxes for the reviewers or those who comment later. The reviewer tends to be a bit more willing to praise something, but this review can be summarized as "I didn't like the sound feature, the keyboard, the ports, or the battery, now you could buy it if you want".
I don't mind the reviews in general, but it might be an idea to review devices that are more likely to interest somebody, such as ones that make a point of one of the things that people care about. Articles talking about the subjective experience of devices built for good keyboards, repairability, lots of ports, or even just cost-efficient models. As this one stands, the selling feature is a sound system that I've never seen anyone ask for.
My suggestion is that, if they're going to review computers, and they're not going to review a ton of them, to have a specific focus. Reviewing computers that are likely to appeal to the readership. If they review one of those and don't like it, they should say so. Nothing is guaranteed to be popular, but there are some things that people ask for in a laptop, and a review of a laptop that meets that requirement helps people decide whether it lives up to the expectation, whereas reviewing something that nobody expressed interest in doesn't really do anything.
There are hundreds of laptops out there. A review of a generic laptop tends not to provide much information that isn't already in the spec sheet. This is why targeting the reviews at something out of the usual, especially if the specific choices had some basis, would be more likely to interest readers. Basically, try to answer the question I asked: "Why did we review this one?" If the answer is "it had a long battery life", "its keyboard was supposed to be great", "it is easy to repair", or even "it has good Linux driver support", all things people have expressed interest in, then that's a valid reason whether you ended up having a positive or negative opinion. As far as I can tell, the only answer to that question is "we were able to get one to review", and nobody in the comments has expressed any interest in the model afterward.
I have the previous model in this family, the C940. It's been a good little machine, two USB-C and one USB-A which is pretty typical for this and better than the comperable Dell with only C. Display is good, touchscreen is excellent, sound is the best I've ever had in a laptop. The only issues I've had is the keyboard is... meh, the battery life is also not so great, and the thermal throttling if you pushed it could be a bit flaky. The battery only lasted two years but that was an easy DIY repair. Looks like I'll have to step up to the Thinkpad version going forward as this sounds like they're giving you less for more money.
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