Lenovo Yoga 900 improves on Yoga Pro 3 by ditching Core M for Skylake, gets full keyboard, starts at $1,199
Mark Walton / Ars Technica UK :
Context & Ripple Effects
The Yoga Pro 3 made a bet: Intel's fanless Core M in exchange for a razor-thin convertible body, at the cost of real keyboard travel and sustained performance. The Yoga 900 reverses that trade — Lenovo moves up to Skylake, restores a full-size keyboard, and holds the entry price at $1,199, effectively conceding that last year's thinness-first formula asked buyers to give up too much.
The move lands mid-cycle in a segment Lenovo was building into a franchise: within a year the line would grow again with the Yoga 910, whose review pegged it against HP's Spectre x360 — evidence the 900's correction set up an annual, competitor-referenced refresh rhythm rather than a one-off redesign.
First-order effects
- Buyers of the $1,199 Yoga 900 get Skylake performance and battery gains over the Core M-based Yoga Pro 3 plus a usable keyboard, per CNET's subsequent review, without paying more than the previous generation's entry point.
Second-order effects
- HP's Spectre x360 and other premium convertibles are pushed onto the same Skylake-refresh treadmill, where each year's Yoga must be judged against a rival on price and ports rather than just thinness.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the Yoga line stratifies into a tiered portfolio — from budget models like the $649 Yoga 720 up to flagships like the Yoga 9i — with Intel's CPU cadence dictating the upgrade clock for the whole convertible category.
The trend: Lenovo is converting the Yoga from a single thinness experiment into an annually refreshed, multi-tier convertible franchise paced by Intel's processor generations.