- When our friends at ASUS reached out
and wanted to sponsor a video on a mystery laptop,
I figured let's do this old school.
I'm not gonna yell at the camera.
I'm not gonna jump up and down.
I may end up on the table at some point,
but if it's so, it's gonna be very organic
and authentic to the story.
I'm gonna go in completely blind to see what the deal is
and show you my reviewing chops
to see if I know what I'm talking about.
All right, ASUS, show me your incredible within.
That's such a bad slogan (laughs).
"Incredible within."
- The power within.
- My first impression,
I think they're going for like eco-friendly.
Look, even, like, the tape that holds it together
is like paper tape.
There's no plastic or anything
that I've seen whatsoever so far.
So it is a Zenbook,
and we have accessories.
So we have a laptop sleeve.
We have the box for the laptop itself.
- [Ken] Why are you talking so low?
- I just wanna be calm and reasonable.
- [Ken] Incredible comes from within,
but your voice certainly doesn't sound like it.
- Okay, don't get me upset, Ken.
Oh. (laughs)
What kind of laptop do you have?
You'll never guess.
The Zenbook S 13. Oh, how convenient.
All the specs I need.
I'm not gonna look at that
'cause that's cheating.
This bag is made from plant fibers and is 100% recyclable.
Oh, I'm sorry, I'm not gonna yell.
I'm not gonna yell.
It's like a matte finish.
This is gonna be a really bad way of describing it.
Almost like a stone kind of texture to it,
but you've got these, like, sort of silver lines
that kind of split it all up.
That is so nice.
Also, this is, like, stupid thin.
Like, I don't know what it actually weighs,
but it is so small.
And we've got ports.
We've got two, I assume, Thunderbolt ports.
We've got a full-size HDMI.
And we've got even a USB-A and the headphone jack.
Let's see what this laptop is all about,
'cause I am absolutely loving that material on the outside.
- [Alex] It's called plasma ceramic aluminum.
- Plasma ceramic aluminum?
- [Alex] It's a unique manufacturing process.
They use only water and electricity,
no chemicals at all. - Oh, neat.
There's a huge amount of emissions
and chemicals and stuff
that go into creating these devices,
so if there's ways to make really unique looking finishes
and without having to use anything
more than water and electricity, I'm out here for it.
That looks legitimately really cool.
I've been helpfully gifted a pair of digital calipers.
It is just over 10 millimeters,
so that is an incredibly thin device.
Let's see what this weighs.
Slightly above one kilogram.
- [Ken] I can't hear you.
- I'm not always like this, Ken!
Sometimes I can have a reasonable and calm conversation
about technology that I'm really passionate about.
- [Joanna] Well, now you've done it.
You've yelled in the video.
- Actually, yeah, I did. - Poop.
- So a bunch of stuff I'm seeing here.
First of all, I like this color scheme.
So we've got that sort of two tone.
It's kinda like the gray
with the darker gray for the keyboard.
I like that.
That track pad is absolutely massive
for what I assume is a 13-ish display.
So it's actually not like a completely
laminated piece of glass.
So the screen itself is actually slightly inset,
so if you look really closely here
you can see there's actually a little bit of a bezel.
I actually like that.
A lot of laptops these days
have a single sheet of glass here,
which looks nice,
but the problem is that you get kinda, like, grime
and whatnot on the keyboard,
you'll oftentimes have, like, keyboard,
like, imprints on your display.
We also have a bunch of stuff up top here.
So I see a webcam.
Actually, no, there's two little cameras there,
and it looks like maybe, like, an IR light or something.
So I assume that's for Windows Hello,
and two microphones.
No, three microphones?
Yeah, so there's a bunch of stuff
going on on the top of the display.
First impressions are solid.
Also it's definitely got the ErgoLift hinge.
So you can see, when it's flat, it's quite thin,
but when I actually go to open it up,
it really kicks it up to the point
where you've got significant airflow
that's gonna be going on on the bottom of this laptop.
Oh, okay, that's OLED.
That is an OLED.
Yeah, I think it's an OLED.
Pretty sure it's an OLED.
Okay, is it a touchscreen?
Negative, Ghost Rider.
Okay, look, everyone knows there's really one way
to find out if it's a touchscreen,
and it's to touch it.
The smart move would be to evaluate this
and then open it up at the end
in case I had ran into problems.
I'm instead going to open it up right now.
For a laptop that's putting a lot of emphasis
on the eco sustainability angle
of, you know, using lots of recycled materials and whatnot,
if you really wanna be eco-friendly,
you should make it upgradable,
so it's not e-waste when something breaks.
All right, let's see what's inside the S 13, battery.
Wow, that's a battery with a laptop attached.
Okay, I got it.
So this is a 63-watt-hour battery,
which is very reasonable,
especially for a 13-inch laptop.
And you can see that they did a lot
of engineering to fit this in.
So if you're looking at it
just from first impressions,
this is the motherboard.
So you've got yourself dual fans
and a couple of heat pipes on the Intel CPU.
The RAM is soldered down,
which is unfortunate,
but is pretty much par for the course
for any of these ultra thin laptops
over the last couple of years.
But there's actually a lot of stuff going on
with the cooling solution.
So they've got themselves two heat pipes.
So one goes here, one goes here,
and you've got yourself a little heat sink
and these various tiny fans.
But based on the design,
especially how many blades they have,
these are probably gonna move a fair bit of air.
And if you look at the other side of the laptop here,
you see that this is where they're gonna be intaking,
and I assume they're just gonna exhaust out the top here.
So I bet you that while this won't be, you know,
a powerful gaming or editing laptop,
even though it's so thin,
especially because the ErgoLift hinge
is gonna give this a little bit of extra airflow,
I'm gonna take a guess that the performance
is gonna be pretty solid.
Compared to a lot of very thin and light laptops,
which are basically just not even worth opening,
because there's nothing you could ever do,
it does look like you could at the very least
upgrade an SSD,
and quite easily upgrade or swap out your battery
and whatnot down the line.
Just would've been nice to have some upgradable RAM too
to give you a little extra performance.
All right, we've got the S 13 put back together.
Let's evaluate.
The first thing I do with every device
that I get my hands on, Task Manager time.
Okay, so this is a Core i7-1355U.
So that is two Performance cores and eight Efficiency cores.
So as a U-series processor,
this is not made for, like, super heavy work,
but you've got the really fast single threads
of those two Performance cores,
which on this boost to five gigahertz-ish,
if I'm right.
And also you've got the Efficiency cores,
which is what you're gonna be using the vast
majority of the time,
but you, as the user, this is completely seamless.
It's got 32 gigs at 5,200 megahertz RAM, very fast,
and we've got ourselves a one-terabyte Samsung SSD.
These are all very good specs.
And also, of course, the Iris Xe Graphics.
So it is a 2880 by 1800 display.
That's nice, and, in fact,
it also has adaptive color.
So I'm assuming that one of these sensors up top here
is an ambient light sensor,
which is nice.
Typically the way it works with OLEDs
is that they have some pros and cons.
So the pros are that they have excellent color accuracy,
pretty much perfect contrast,
and certainly with this, it's very high resolution,
but the downsides often
are that you don't have a massive amount of brightness.
550 nits, that's actually plenty bright.
All of my thoughts so far
are based around the idea
that this is a fairly premium priced laptop.
What does this actually cost?
'Cause that's gonna determine a lot.
I'm gonna guess $1,300.
So this is the Zenbook S 13 OLED.
Oh, which version is this?
Does it say?
What have we got here?
The UX5304V.
1399!
Okay, but let's actually see though,
what do you get for that 1399?
'Cause that's gonna be a big question here.
I have been blocked.
I got blocked from the ASUS site.
I'm too suspicious.
What did I do that was suspicious?
♪ Don't be suspicious ♪
♪ Don't be suspicious ♪ ♪ Don't be suspicious ♪
- [Narrator] Is that Austin Evans?
- [Jean-Ralphio] Go!
- There are definitely some nice features that I'm noticing.
So the touchpad is really quite nice. It's large.
It also has a really nice click,
which it doesn't...
It's still, like, the diving board,
so it clicks a lot more on the bottom than the top.
But there's a really nice sort of travel to it
and you hear the click.
(touchpad clicking)
Yeah, so I will say initial impressions
are quite nice on the keyboard.
It's not loud,
which I think for a device like this,
I would prefer it to be a little quiet anyway.
Considering how thin the device is,
there's a surprising amount of key travel.
Like, usually I expect a super thin
and light device like this to have a pretty shallow click.
But I mean that's...
I don't know, I'm not no LTT Lab,
but I mean, that's a pretty decent amount
of key travel there.
Let's press the ASUS button.
So we've got Battery Care Mode,
which limits the battery to 80%.
That's great, especially if you're someone
who spends a lot of time with your laptop plugged in
or plugged into, like, a dock or whatever the case is.
Your battery staying a hundred percent
for long periods of time is not a good thing.
So the fact that you can limit to 80% is great.
We've got fan profiles,
which is Whisper, Standard, and Performance.
"Dynamically maximizes cooling performance
for demanding tasks."
Okay, but it does not work
when you are running on the battery,
which, fair enough.
AI noise canceling microphone.
Ah-ha! We finally found the AI part of the video.
So this does have AI noise cancellation.
Well, you know I gotta try that, right?
Pure first impression. I'm gonna hit the record button
We'll see what it sounds like.
So obviously right now you'll listen to the microphone
on the camera,
but if I hit the big red button,
now you are hearing me through the microphones
on the S 13.
So this is using the AI Omnidirectional Mode.
Although while I'm recording
I'm gonna try change it to the Unidirectional Mode.
I don't know if that's made any difference,
but this is what it sounds like in the unidirectional mode.
The unidirectional mode sounds a lot better.
So essentially the difference is that the AI processing,
it will try to, like, listen to everything around the room,
or it will focus more on you.
I would definitely recommend turning that on.
Okay, we have a bunch of sound modes.
So we have Dynamic for Atmos,
Game, Movie, Music.
Let's do dynamic.
(upbeat music)
Wait, that's actually not bad.
I mean, it's not super rich,
but it's a thin small laptop.
But, like, the highs are actually really quite clear.
I'll say, speakers are actually pretty decent.
Okay, so this is using the ASUS AiSense camera.
I'm gonna list you the things that I have as options here.
Lighting Optimization, Background Blurring,
Gaze correction to automatically detect your eyes
and make it look like you're staring at the display.
Motion Tracking and Appearance Filter
to smooth out your skin.
All right, so this is an example of what the webcam
on the S 13 looks like.
For a webcam on a laptop,
not a lot to complain about.
So when you look at a laptop like this,
I think it's clear to me that ASUS
have gone for a couple of main focuses.
So the eco-friendly side is certainly a big one.
The fact that it is fairly repairable,
especially considering how thin and light it is.
You got yourself a very solid keyboard,
excellent track pad, good performance, a huge battery,
and, importantly, you've got some great port selection
on a device which is incredibly thin and really quite light.
If you want a device
that seems like it will really last long term
and has an incredibly nice finish
that really does stand out, I've gotta say,
I am pleasantly surprised by the Zenbook S 13.
And if you'd like to know any more about it,
definitely be sure to go check it out.
Link in the description.
Huge thank you to ASUS for sponsoring this video.
If you'll excuse me,
I'm gonna go back to yelling now.
I wanna go jump on the table,
flop like a fish.
♪ Flop on the deck and flop like a fish ♪
♪ SpongeBob ♪
- And scream about expensive mystery tech,
'cause that's where I'm most comfortable.
Subscribe for Austin's Quiet Tips.
Wait, no, no, no, no, no.
No one wants that. No one wants that.
(upbeat music)