It looks perfectly normal, but watch this.
There's a little kickstand under here.
Then, okay, I can take the keyboard off and boom!
Second display!
That's right guys, Asus sponsored this video
and brought CES 2024 here to our studio
to show off the brand new ZenBook Duo
that considering the dual screen laptops
we've seen in the past,
has had a shocking amount of thought put into it.
I guess it kind of makes sense though.
This is far from Asus' first run at this concept.
First, they put a screen in a track pad,
which was of questionable utility.
Then they moved the keyboard down and put a screen above it,
which was pretty sweet for video editors
and only video editors.
Then last year, they released the ZenBook 17 Fold,
which was pretty cool,
but had an eye-watering $3,500 reserved purely for those
with more money than brains.
Well, that's where the new ZenBook Duo comes in.
By issuing sci-fi screen technology
and instead going for a simple hinge,
Asus was able to fold the starting price in half,
putting this thing in reach of middle managers
rather than just those in the C-suite.
And Asus actually identified this need
when their own marketing department asked for it.
This is what I'm talking about.
Laptops have gotten so powerful that many companies
just don't bother issuing desktops anymore.
And this is the weapon of choice
for many staffers at Asus,
and actually here for that matter.
It's pretty solid.
You drag your reference materials up here,
work on your presentation down here,
but then, shoot, it's time to run to a meeting
and well, I hope you didn't need your second screen.
Meanwhile, with the Duo,
you can pack the whole thing up
and take it with you in exactly that amount of time,
arrive at the meeting, set up your battle station,
and God willing, get some actual work done
while other people talk about stuff
that has nothing to do with your KPIs.
For the panels on these machines,
you get either dual full HD OLEDs on the base model
or on the premium ones,
you can get dual 3K OLEDs running at 120 hertz,
and Asus advertises four different operating modes
for the machine, laptop mode, desktop mode,
sharing mode, or dual screen mode, though.
I suspect most people are primarily gonna be switching
between laptop and dual screen modes,
which worked surprisingly well,
especially given that this is pre-production hardware,
like just, look at this, boom, laptop mode, let's go.
That's pretty darn seamless.
One mode I was hoping for that we didn't get
is battleship mode,
which I guess you'd normally call tent mode
on a flip laptop.
Yeah, that's as far as it goes.
Asus said that they decided against it
because a hinge that goes more than 180 degrees
that also is large enough to accommodate the keyboard
in the middle would have been expensive,
and very heavy.
As it is, without the keyboard,
the ZenBook Duo comes in at just 1.35 kilos,
and with the keyboard, 1.65 kilos,
with most of that weight being the displays themselves,
which doesn't really surprise me.
Like, this thing feels flipping dense.
To help counteract some of that,
the entire chassis is made out of magnesium alloy.
Side note, by the way,
if you're wondering about the durability of the hinge,
Asus says that with the keyboard removed,
you can put up to 25 kilograms on top of a closed shell
before things start to go bad.
Oh yeah, that's...
Ooh, that would be really important to know.
Should I be doing this on the pre-production one?
Sure.
You can sit on it.
On that note, another advantage of the approach
Asus took with this device is durability.
Foldables, super cool,
and I'm on the record kind of loving them,
but they can't use Gorilla Glass,
and in a device that's gonna have stuff
on top of the screen all the time by design,
there's a lot to be said for using a scratch resistant glass
but the real special sauce here isn't the displays.
It's actually the keyboard.
Asus told us that it was incredibly difficult
to develop a keyboard controller
that's able to seamlessly handle
going between a wired connection
through these pogo pins down here and a Bluetooth one.
And then when you attach the keyboard,
it uses 14 magnets that ensure proper alignment
with the pogo pins.
And boom, now it's using a wired connection.
The other big challenge was building something this thin
that still manages to feel pretty decent.
Oop, that's 14 magnets for you.
It really does feel pretty decent, doesn't it?
It's kind of like if you didn't have a keyboard at all
and there was just a keyboard embedded
in the surface of the table in front of you.
It's a pretty cool 1.4 millimeters of travel,
which how much of the entire thickness
of this thing is that?
We can check.
Yeah, we should check.
I love that Alex keeps a pair of calipers in his backpack.
Three and a half, four millimeters thick,
something like that.
So then that's about a third of it is key travel.
Wow.
And we haven't even talked about the possibility
of still using a third monitor
and then just moving this
to wherever's most ergonomic for you.
Now you got three displays.
The overall concept of this machine
is similar to a folding one
that I've been daily driving recently.
Seamlessly switching between,
I've just got to type a couple of emails mode
and productivity monster mode.
But something that I have sorely missed on my machine
is decent IO.
And this, this is a big improvement.
I've got a USB-A, dual Thunderbolt ports, HDMI,
and a three and a half millimeter audio jack.
I mean, it's not the same as a gaming PC,
but it is more than enough for the typical road warrior.
These are Thunderbolt 4 too, which I guess makes sense.
This is running on the latest Core Ultra 9 185H processor,
has up to 32 gigs of LPDDR5X memory
at a wild 7467 mega transfers per second.
This is thanks to how close the RAM is to the CPU.
Something Asus worked on with Intel last year.
It's got one SSD slot, which is technically upgradeable,
but is underneath the main board.
So accessing it won't be for the faint of heart.
Only those in possession
of the upcoming precision screwdriver from lttstore.com.
And it has a 75 watt hour battery.
That's a lot considering its size
and they're expecting it to be enough
for 13 and a half hours on one screen,
10 hours on two screens, though that isn't final.
In designing the cooling solution,
Asus said the difficult part
wasn't keeping the processor cool.
They've done that hundreds of times at this point.
The hard part was keeping the screen cool
because OLED really doesn't like high heat.
So they had to put a heat spreader behind the OLED panel,
maintain a slim air gap between the CPU and the display
and put a graphite sheet on the bottom cover
to ensure the display is always under 45 degrees.
Another way to manage heat is running the displays dimmer.
And Asus' solution to that is surprisingly flexible.
Screen expert allows you to not only adjust the displays,
but decouple them.
If you've got a background noise
when show running on one of them,
and you wanna save some battery on that screen,
but wanna see what you're doing on the other one.
You can share a flipped image between them.
You can lock in rotation.
There's a bunch of other cool stuff in screen expert,
but my personal favorite is the task groups.
Task groups allow you to position all of your applications
exactly how you want across both displays,
and then just click to open them all at once
to the exact locations you want.
I don't know about you guys, but I hate arriving at work
to find my computer, restarted overnight,
and all my windows are messed up,
and I just have to move them all around.
Hey, this is the solution.
I mean, if you don't feel like using power toys,
which is also a solution to that.
Which brings us to the end of the really cool stuff
about this laptop and the beginning of the stuff
that I reluctantly talk about
because Asus really wants us to.
Like the virtual keyboard.
Oh, it's supposed to be six, right?
Six fingers, yeah.
Nice.
Oh, did it.
Nice.
It works really well.
Really good feature.
There it is.
Everything else about this machine is really cool
and appears to solve real world problems.
This is horrible, but I mean, I don't know.
Okay, what?
If I forgot my keyboard and every other keyboard
was consumed by the great keyboard fire.
Yeah.
Maybe.
Pricing is expected to start at around 1500 US dollars
and depending on your region, it could come with a pen.
Oh, we have those.
We have those.
We have them?
Oh, okay.
Wow.
Thanks, Alex.
Pen.
Wow.
Carrying case.
Backpack.
Neat, and you might get them or you might not.
If you guys enjoyed this video,
maybe check out our other Asus CES coverage
where we looked at their updated gaming machines.
Okay, they look pretty sick.