Category
🤖
TechTranscript
00:00Hey, how's it going? Dave 2D here. When I did my video about the MacBook Air, I talked
00:08about how if you were on the market for a thin and light ultrabook, for like a premium
00:12well-built one, the Windows laptops just had better options, right? Better value right
00:16now at the end of 2018. And this right here is probably the best example of a well-valued
00:21premium ultrabook. This is the new ZenBook from Asus. It comes in a 13, 14, and a 15-inch
00:27screen. This particular model is a 14-inch screen, and I think it's probably the best
00:30kind of form factor and best of the bunch. So because this thing has such thin bezels,
00:36this device has a very small footprint for a 14-inch screen, because usually a device
00:41with this kind of footprint would have slightly thicker bezels and the screen would be a 13-inch
00:45screen, but thin bezels, 14-inch screen. So this screen is a 1080p panel. It's not super
00:50high-res, but it's very crisp. Colors are good, brightness is good, and despite having
00:54such thin bezels, the webcam is still up top, so you get a normal-looking image. Another
00:58thing I like about this laptop is the keyboard. So when you open the lid, the keyboard on
01:04the back of it tilts up a few millimeters. They call it Ergolift, and it's something
01:07that I like, but it's a very slight tilt. I think it's only like 2 or 3 degrees. If
01:12you don't like tilted keyboards for whatever reason, then you may not like it, but it also
01:15helps with thermals, which I'll get into later, but I personally like this typing experience.
01:19Keyboard layout is also nice, and it's a keyboard I think most people will enjoy quite quickly.
01:23So this trackpad, it uses Windows Precision, it's a great trackpad, glass surface, but
01:28it also has this feature where when you click the top right corner, this keypad lights up.
01:33Now, Asus is showing off this feature in a lot of the marketing materials, and it's cool,
01:37like it looks really cool, but functionally, I don't know if it's quite there yet. So the
01:41biggest issue I have with it is speed, because if you're going to use a traditional keypad
01:45like this, you're going to use it because you want to input your numbers quicker, and
01:48because it uses touch input, you can only go so fast before it occasionally misses some
01:52buttons that you're pressing, and I actually found it faster to just use the numbers at
01:56the top of the keyboard instead of this keypad. I mean, it looks really cool, and the idea
02:00is neat, and maybe with software they can tweak a few things, but in its current state,
02:04it feels a little gimmicky to me. Not to say that the whole product is a gimmick, but just
02:09that one feature is not as cool as I thought it would be.
02:12It has a decent selection of ports. The one I would say was missing is Thunderbolt 3,
02:17so it has a USB-C port, but it just doesn't support Thunderbolt 3, and in addition to
02:21not supporting Thunderbolt 3, it also doesn't support charging via USB-C, and I feel like
02:26on a device like this, it really would have been awesome if it supported USB-C charging.
02:31The one they include is a barrel plug, but even if you have a compatible adapter that
02:35would charge USB-C devices, like laptops and stuff, it doesn't work on this port.
02:40On the inside, we're looking at soldered-on RAM and a Wi-Fi card, but you can replace
02:44the NVMe if you want. The CPU that they're using in here is actually the new Whiskey
02:48Lake 8th Gen CPU, so this is a little bit better than the Kaby Lake ones. It's just
02:52a little bit faster clock speed. That's like the big difference between this and Kaby Lake,
02:56so this goes to 4.6 GHz on boost. The battery is a 50 Watt-hours. I'm not sure what they're
03:01advertising, but I got 8, a little bit over 8 hours with a screen at 250 nits on a regular
03:06Wi-Fi test. Speakers, these are great speakers. A lot of the Zenbooks have surprisingly good
03:10sounding speakers. They're never in a great position, like they're always on the bottom
03:14of the laptops, but they sound good.
03:16The performance on the Zenbook is pretty good. It's running a four-core CPU, but it's also
03:19running an MX150, a 2 gigabyte video card that's decent for light gaming. You're not
03:25going to get amazing frame rates with it, but it's better than a lot of Ultrabooks that
03:28are just using the integrated Intel graphics. Thermally, it's also a good performer. It
03:32doesn't get super hot, doesn't get too loud. It fits the Ultrabook genre quite well. You
03:36can bring this to work, to school, no one's going to complain about noise or anything
03:39like that. The build quality on this machine is good, but it's not as good as a MacBook.
03:44I still feel like the MacBooks have some of the best-looking and best-finished laptops
03:48on the market, but this is quite good. It's not a unibody construction, it's clearly panels,
03:52but it is well-built. Now, this is a device that starts at $1,000, and for that money,
03:57I feel like you're getting a lot of really good stuff. It's great performance, well-built,
04:02it's got that keypad thing if you're interested in that. I think that it's hard to find this
04:06kind of value with this kind of build quality anywhere else. And if you look at the MacBook
04:11Air, not that I'm trying to trash that product or anything, but if you're kind of like, you
04:14know, should I get a MacBook Air or something else, this is a very good alternative. Just
04:18don't be drawn into that keypad because, I mean, it looks cool, but it's not that cool.
04:23Okay, hope you guys enjoyed this video. Thumbs if you liked it, subs if you loved it. See
04:26you guys next time.