- It's kind of funny how there's differences
between what reviewers say and what people actually get.
So like, lots of reviewers will be like,
"Oh, hey, go out and get the XPS 13.
"It's fricking awesome."
And then, in the real world,
I see absolute loads of ZenBooks.
Because really they're a good, you know.
Well, everyone just says they got them on sale.
That's why you buy a ZenBook, because it's on sale.
ASUS hopes probably to change that, maybe they don't.
I don't know, I see lots of them in the wild,
so maybe they have a good thing going.
But either way, we've got a brand new one here
and I wanna check it out.
It seems pretty legit.
Let's see here.
Oh, wow.
Did you see that?
The whole thing pops up when you open it up.
It's kinda fancy.
Oh, wow.
There's so much going on in this box.
Like, do we have something back here?
Oh geez.
Oh, it comes with a little like case.
Your laptop's gonna get way less scratch
when you throw it in bags or stuff.
(paper rustling)
It feels kind of cheap though, but whatever.
This is a bad sign.
So included, first of all,
we have USB-A to ethernet.
I actually really like to see this.
The thing that concerns me though
is we have a USB Type-C to headphone jack.
Is there not one on here?
There's no way.
There's no way guys, right?
They wouldn't just can a headphone jack, would they?
- [Man] They certainly would.
- They certainly would.
Yeah, I'm pretty concerned now.
Let's see.
What do we have for power?
65 Watts.
Okay, so that's not too bad.
Apparently you can charge, I think 60% of the battery
in 50 minutes using this thing.
Nope, nothing else.
Here we go.
The main show.
It's light, wow.
Two and a half pounds, which is what like 1.3ish kilograms.
It feels really good.
Like just,
like this.
I believe the whole thing is CNC machined aluminum.
So it's not surprising that it feels good.
Let's actually open it up.
(upbeat music)
I really like the,
I guess you could call it machining marks.
I don't exactly know what it is.
But the little texture that's on the back panel here
just looks really nice.
But the big question.
Oh my God, they did it.
No headphone jack!
What are they thinking?
It would have been tight.
But also like, what the hell?
Come on.
I just wanna be able to plug actual headphones in,
especially since ASUS is kind of known for having good Dax.
Oh yeah, I guess I can tell you what they actually included.
So we do have a full-size HDMI, two USB Type-Cs.
Thunderbolt?
Yeah, they're both Thunderbolt.
And then on the other side, we have a full-size Type-A
and a micro SD card reader.
It's kind of annoying that they don't have Type-C
on both sides for charging,
but it's a pretty small complaint.
No headphone though.
What the heck?
I just got my fingerprints all over the back of this thing
and you can hardly tell.
Let's start it up.
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Here we go.
(upbeat music)
The bezels here are really thin.
But the first thing that I noticed is that they're plastic.
How expensive is this thing?
Is this a budget oriented device?
Okay, as the plastic bezels suggested,
this is not the most expensive laptop on the market.
So for $1,100, you get an i7-1165G7, 16 gigs of RAM,
I believe whole one terabyte hard drive or SSD, I mean.
Yeah, and the 67 watt-hour battery.
So those specs for that price
with like you know, aluminum and stuff,
it's actually pretty compelling
as long as like, you know,
the rest of it, sort of falls in line.
Wow. Just every time that I pick it up,
I'm surprised by how light it is.
Like that would probably be the selling point
for me personally, with this thing.
Apparently we got a full blown calculator slash num pad
on our track pad here.
That's kinda weird,
but if it works well, that's awesome, I guess.
That was way more satisfying than I thought it would be.
Let's start it up.
Oh, come on ASUS.
So I realized this is probably a pre-production model.
But like windows isn't activated.
I wanna change the desktop background
because it looks like they have just kind of like
a compressed wallpaper here.
So I can't really tell how good the screen is.
But I can't change it
because they didn't activate the damn thing.
What, no.
I don't want Linux wallpapers, I want Linus.
There we go.
Oh, God.
- [Man] Yeah.
- My thoughts on the screen, just after you know,
this little bit of beauty got put on it, it's pretty good.
So you have three options for the display
that you get from this.
There's a 300 nit, 1080P,
400 nit, 1080P
and I believe a 4K.
You want to go for the 400 nit
because it's also the one that consumes
the least amount of power, surprisingly.
So you got 400 nits and at 150 nits,
it only consumes one watt.
So that means that if, you know you can
knock the brightness down a couple of notches,
she goes for a long time.
According to ASUS, this will last for 21 hours.
I don't believe them.
I think they're full of crap.
But you're still probably gonna be able to get like 15 hours
or something like that out of it, which is pretty awesome.
Oh, also lttstore.com.
It's in boxers, they're nice.
Actually, David, can you get in close on the track pad here?
Some kind of weirdness.
I'm kind of sticking to it.
I'm not a fan to kind of like sticking.
I have noticed this before in ASUS laptops
and it's kind of gross, the solution.
You just wanna really get your finger grease read into it,
like get your hands kinda sweaty.
Yup.
Moves good now.
Just need that hand lube.
That's pretty gross.
(laughs)
All right, on the subject of the track pad.
How does this work?
Okay, so you hold down for one second on the top right.
This comes up.
And apparently it's able to tell the difference
between me wanting to, you know, touch numbers
and just using the track pad.
So let's see here, how good is it.
(upbeat music)
Wow, that's actually quite impressive.
It seems to be pretty good at noticing when like
I want a number and when I don't.
It is kind of not perfect, like there are times
when I was tapping kind of close to the top
where it couldn't quite tell.
But I imagine if you use it for a couple hours,
you could easily figure out how to have it work every time.
What's maybe the most interesting to me though,
is that the switches on here, like the key switches
have 1.4 millimeters of actuation.
So the Dell XPS 13 has one.
I think the XPS 15 has 1.3.
HP is also around 1.3, 1.2, somewhere around there.
So this is for a thin and light,
I believe the longest key travel
you can get on a laptop right now.
So let's see how it actually does.
One thing that Dell and HP just miss on
is the light piping in their keyboards.
They just must not have enough experience
like, you know, RGB and things out like ASUS does
for the, what's it called?
Their Republic of Gamers.
That's just blinked to the nines.
And they've clearly, you know,
taken that knowledge and put it into this.
And it just looks fantastic.
That said, though, the keyboard itself,
gets a resounding fine from me.
So if you look closely here, there is a bit of deck flex,
sort of around the key area.
You're obviously not gonna be pushing this hard,
but I can notice it just a tiny bit
when I'm actually typing.
That said, what really appeals to me with this
is that it's long enough.
You have the 14 inch screen
and you have just tiny bit of bezels top and bottom.
And for me personally,
I can comfortably rest my hands on it.
So if you have slightly larger hands
and like you know just can't use a 13 inch laptop,
this guy right here might be what you need
if you want a thin and light.
Then again, you could also just get the Surface Laptop.
I didn't check, is this touchscreen?
Oh, no.
Oh, geez.
Is this really?
I'm gonna just double check.
It doesn't oh, it doesn't even an option for a touchscreen.
What are you doing?
Oh, that's,
for me personally, in a thin and light,
I find I constantly use the touchscreen.
Like, you know, you're just like walking around with it
and you'll be like, poop, poop, poop.
Or maybe you're like kind of in an awkward position,
like you're on the couch or laying like this right here.
And it's way easier to just go like that
instead of getting in here.
(smacks)
Put a touchscreen on it guys.
What was I even saying?
I was talking about something else before I realized that.
Oh, the Tiger Lake processor.
Okay so, the i7-1165G7.
That's a really stupid name, but anyway.
You are at least going to be able
to play video games on this.
Like not full blown these amazing
details video games, but at the same time,
1080p medium in modern ish games,
not a problem.
Which is pretty freaking awesome.
You couldn't do that before.
Now you can.
Although you don't get a touchscreen.
One area though
that ASUS has the potential to clawback though,
is in upgradability.
If you know, there's some decent stuff on the inside here.
For you, maybe that matters more
than having like soldered RAM.
The ability to upgrade it later is pretty awesome.
(clicks)
This has been tough.
I think I permanently bent the back piece of aluminum here,
trying to get in.
If you don't have an iFixit key just don't open this.
You will destroy it.
Like I thought that under these feet there were screws,
but there isn't.
I pulled one of them off and there's nothing under them.
Oh, those bastards.
So there are screws under the back feet,
no screws under the front feet.
We know that now.
Probably would have made this a lot easier.
Okay, we did it.
It looks like it's still straight, so that's good.
So we get loads of battery.
That's kind of like, I think the main selling point of this.
You get, screw off fly (beep).
You do get loads of battery though.
I do think that the 67 watt-hour battery
is kind of the main selling point of this thing.
That's way more than like the Surface Laptop or the XPS 15.
I think it's pretty similar to the Spectre.
No upgrading the RAM though.
Certainly not doing that.
There's also a 13 inch version of this.
And it looks like, so they haven't used
any of the space that turning into a 14 inch afforded them.
So we have just these huge gaps here.
There's a gap there.
It keeps a space down here.
It's not really a problem
because you still get an absolutely massive battery.
But I do kind of wish that they'd taken advantage of it
a tiny bit more.
So overall,
buy when it's on sale.
That's about it.
There's no headphone jack, that's (beep)
That fly!
No touchscreen.
Okay, keyboard.
Buy it when it's 900 or $800.
That's about where I'm at.
I am really excited to see ASUS ZenBook Pro coming out soon
with a three by two display.
That could legitimately be like daily driver contention.
Anyway, get subscribed for when we do get the ZenBook Pro
with the three by two display.
And, really excited about that.
And, just have a fantastic day.
So.