Lenovo’s Yoga Mini i is a cute, circular mini PC that lights up to greet you

Lenovo’s Yoga Mini i is Lenovo’s answer to one of the hottest categories around: the mini PC. And yes, it’s round, with a light bar that’s as productive as it is fun.

Lenovo claims that this devices takes up a liter of volume. It does not, according to a rather indignant product manager that insisted that the total volume might be closer to 0.85 liters instead. In any event, the Yoga Mini i will ship in June for an estimated starting price of $699.

Mini PCs have begun to surge in popularity, partly because they can offer a substantial amount of computing horsepower in very little space. They’ve become the territory of ambitious Taiwanese and smaller Chinese vendors, but Lenovo, traditionally at or near the top of the PC vendor list, is determined to make its mark.

How? Though a nifty little light bar that runs underneath this mini PC. Naturally, you can configure the color within a Windows application, and you can tell the Mini i to light the bar or flash it in a variety of scenarios: when it detects your presence, when something happens (like an email), or any number of other configurable situations.

Mark Hachman / Foundry

The Lenovo Yoga Mini I uses Wi-Fi sensing, a technology that Intel debuted in the Core Ultra 200, or “Lunar Lake.” Imagine sitting by a still, foggy pond, whose surface begins to ripple and splash as something moves through it. Wi-Fi sensing can’t tell the Mini i who’s there, but it can wake up the device. The mini PC has an integrated fingerprint sensor to identify and authenticate the user.

Lenovo’s demo showcase proclaimed its close alliance with Intel, and no wonder: the Mini i includes the core Ultra X7 358H inside of it, one of the “Panther Lake” chip variants due for a more formal unveiling here at CES 2026.

Mark Hachman / Foundry

The Lenovo Yoga Mini i weighs just 1.32 lb, and Lenovo feels that it’s small enough to be moved from room, or even into a backpack. I don’t agree; disconnecting all those cords and cables will be a pain. It’s 5.12 inches in diameter, and just under 2 inches thick.

On the outside, there’s a Thunderbolt 4 port, two 10Gbps USB-C ports (one designed to accept power), an HDMI 2.1 interface, and a 5Gbps USB-A port, too. An Ethernet jack accepts up to 2.5Gbps inputs.

Mark Hachman / Foundry

Lenovo is still saying that the Mini i can include up to 32GB of LPDDR5x memory and up to a 2TB PCIe SSD, apparently banking on what the company says is a stockpile of memory and storage components to help offset sharp price increases. We also don’t know the minimum specification. But $699 is a pretty diminutive price for this mini PC.