- Hey guys, this is Austin.
This might be the nicest piece
of laptop hardware that you can buy.
Oh, what?
Oh that's cool.
As you open the box it like presents the laptop to you.
I mean, no one ever needs to do that,
you're only gonna open the box once, but that's pretty dope.
What's cool about this, is has Asus' new Ergolift hinge.
So when I open it from the bottom,
it actually elevates the entire laptop up.
That's, that's actually something kinda different.
Now this means that there are
some interesting quirks with the design.
So if you take a look at the right side,
in addition to having 2 full Thunderbolt 3 ports
you're going to find a headphone jack.
Pretty standard, except that
when you actually open up the laptop,
the headphone jack is attached to the screen,
as opposed to the body of the laptop.
Kinda trippy but it totally works.
As you would expect for a premium laptop,
it is going to be entirely made out of aluminum.
So I feel like this blue looks pretty nice,
especially with the copper accents.
What I really like is the red model of the Zenbook S.
I mean it's a little flashy, but, yeah.
Before we get too far into it though,
I actually wanna see what else comes in the box.
So we have a power adaptor.
This guy is going to be using USB-C,
although I assume it they will
probably work with other generic adapters.
You also get a USB-C to USB-A adapter.
As well as USB-C to HDMI a nice touch to include in the box.
You can also put the laptop inside
the carrying case that it comes with.
So it might not be super premium or anything
but it should help to keep this
from getting all scratched up in your bag.
So after spending some time with the Zenbook S
one of the things that is still jumping out to me
is just how solidly it is constructed.
So it is going to be about 13mm thick,
which is on the very very thin side.
However there's basically no flex to it at all.
I mean even something like the screen,
I mean you can really torque it
and it's not going to go anywhere.
And the same thing goes for the body.
I mean, this is not something we do with most laptops,
but I'm putting some serious torque on it,
it is staying very very solid.
It's nice to see in something that's going to be
just this thin, or thick,
depending on your marketing term of choice.
The keyboard is also terrific.
Not only are the key caps nice and large,
and it actually kinda looks a little
like a MacBook from the outside.
But you're going to be getting a decent amount of travel,
and importantly, because you do have that Ergolift hinge,
the entire keyboard is going to be slightly tilted up.
This is not something that's very common in well,
pretty much any other laptop.
But I really appreciate how it
just gives a little bit less strain to your wrists.
The trackpad is a little bit on the small side,
but it's going to be totally fine.
And you're also going to find a fingerprint sensor,
for Windows Hello support.
What's nice is that you're going to be getting
two full Thunderbolt 3 ports on the right side,
which are of course going to be able to support,
not only an external GPU,
but all of the different adaptors that can go off of that.
But there is going to be another USB-C port
on the left side of the laptop.
All of which can be used to charge, USB, video out,
it's a nice set up, even though
it would definitely be nice to have a USB-A port.
The main issue here is that while the laptop
is literally just too thin to fit any kind of bigger ports.
So.
- There's really a lot to like with a form factor like this.
- What there's not a lot to like
is with the speakers of the Zenbook S.
And that is a terrible transition but I'm gonna roll with it.
On the bottom of the laptop
you're going to find two speakers.
They sound okay.
But first of all, they're not going to be all that loud,
and second of all, any time that they're going to be facing
on the bottom of the laptop, it just means that
it's just sort of hitting the underside,
and kinda echoing out.
They're just not that great.
Thankfully Asus did opt to put the webcam
on the top of the display,
you know like where it actually belongs.
Now it's only going to be 720p,
but it looks and sounds alright
most importantly though, you're not looking
up my nose right now, so thumbs up for that.
The Zenbook S is rocking a 13.3 inch display,
with either a 1080p or a full 4K resolution.
Both are going to be touch enabled,
and the main difference is, that while the 4K panel
is going to hurt your battery life, as well as performance,
I have it here and it looks really really nice.
Not only is it going to be very color accurate,
but it also gets pretty bright
with a full 350 Nits of brightness.
Something that is very helpful when you take this outside
and can still see the screen.
Performance is not only solid,
but it's exactly what you'd expect
for an Ultrabook of this generation.
So inside you can choose between either a Core i5 or Core i7
both of them are going to be 8th Gen.
In this case, I've got the i7-8550U.
Now the actual benchmarks are, well, not exactly surprising
considering it's exactly the same performance
as basically every other ultrabook
we've taken a look at over the past year.
Totally solid and a big step up over the last generation.
If you opt for the 256 Gig SSD, which is the base model,
it is going to be a SATA based drive.
However if you go for the 512 gig version,
which is what I have here,
not only is it going to be a much faster M2 drive,
but you also get the option of going all the way up
to a full one terabyte of capacity.
This guy has a choice of either 8
or 16GB of DDR4 memory.
My 16 gig RAM option, does have dual channel memory,
which is helpful for the graphics performance.
What isn't helpful for the graphics performance
are the thermals.
Now it's not going to be that bad,
but considering that you do have this Ergolift design
which in theory, should help the airflow
and kinda cool things down,
it does run a little bit on the warmer side.
Inside this guy is rocking a 50 Wh battery.
Now it's not going to be that big, it's a little bit smaller
than something like the LG gram
and with the 4K panel, it means that
you're only going to be getting
around six to seven hours of fairly regular battery life.
But the screen is so nice, that I'm actually
kind of willing to give up a little bit of battery
in exchange for a nice, sharp, crisp panel.
If you stack the base model
up to similarly spec'd competitors, which is the XPS 13
it is going to be a little bit more expensive,
however once you start adding options such as the 4k display,
extra RAM, as well as a 512GB SSD,
it actually tops out at around $1500,
still a little bit on the pricey side,
but it's actually not a bad value.
My big takeaway is that it's hard to beat this design.
Seriously, props to Asus
for actually doing something different.
There are so many great ultrabooks out there
at that 1000-ish dollar price point,
that the Zenbook S with it's Ergolift
actually does legimately stand out.