- All right, today we've got a double unboxing. Not because either of these couldn't be their own video,
but because I requested too many laptops and we need to get through them.
So we've got the ASUS ZenBook. It's a 14 incher and it's relatively powerful.
It's not as powerful as I'd like. And we've also got the ASUS ProArt.
Probably more powerful than you'd ever want. Let's get into them.
So first up is the ZenBook. Oh, is there a-
We do get a laptop case, which is always nice to see.
Nice and simple. Has some nice little writing on it.
Seems like it's probably fake leather. Now we have the actual machine.
Apparently it was best laptop brand winner 2020.
Sure. And finally the power adaptor.
So that's 100 watts being delivered over USB Type-C.
Let's just go all the way right now.
There we go. Nice aluminum chassis.
Apparently it's diamond cut. That's all the rage these days.
Although Samsung showed us, being CNC-machined
and diamond cut doesn't mean it's a good chassis. It just means it's expensive.
It feels pretty decent from first touches.
And first look at it, it looks pretty decent as well.
Excellent screen-to-body ratio. Very little for bezels.
Pretty big trackpad. It's kind of a weird shape so we might have some palm rejection issues,
but we'll find out soon enough. And keyboard seems good at first glance.
Although, we'll look more at that later. Now for IO, we have micro SD,
two Thunderbolt ports, headphone, 3.5 millimeter.
Thank you, ASUS. - ASUS. Repeat once again, ASUS.
- [Alex] They took that off of one of their last laptops, which was bad.
Also a full-size HTMI and along on the other side,
a single USB Type-A port, which is nice to see
'cause that'll probably be the one that you plug your mouse into.
That can go off to the side. And our more powerful one here, the StudioBook 16.
Start off with the power adaptor. I wonder if it's Type-C.
Nope, it's 240 watts, which means it's definitely not Type-C.
It also means we have a powerful laptop here.
Oh, this is a fancy box.
It's upside down. Let's try that again.
(David exclaims excitedly) Wow.
Wow, at first look, this really reminds me of like the Zephyrus G15 or M16.
Yeah, so here we have the M16 and here we have the StudioBook 16.
StudioBook actually looks a bit bigger. Wow, does this have a 3x2 display?
That is massive. If it's OLED as well,
that's going to be really nice to look at. We also have this knobby chum,
so it's kind of like a rotary dial and you can also press it in for a button.
Let's also take a look at the IO before we get into it. So we have two USB Type-C's.
It doesn't say Thunderolt on it. You also have full-size HDMI, DC-In, full-size USB Type-A,
and on the other side, full-size SD card reader. Love to see that.
I really hate it when like the micro ones on this one, you can't just, you know, take your SD card from your camera
straight into your laptop. Really like to be able to do that.
And, oh, full-size Ethernet. Again, really like to see that.
Should we just go right into it, David? - [David] Heck yeah. - Yeah.
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Wow, that is a vivid display. Oh, they also have Lightroom already installed.
Oh darn. It's not a touch screen. That's unfortunate.
This trackpad's a bit odd because like you can't click it in
and they do have dedicated mouse buttons, but the problem is that it's quite wide
and they have three of them so it's kind of hard to hit left click.
I want to be like right here, but then my finger is on middle click instead of left click.
If you're one of those people that uses two hands to trackpad, you'd absolutely love this.
Linus does it. It's gross, I agree. - [David] Chop his hands off.
- Yeah. You'll probably get used to it and just kind of use it like here.
For now it's annoying. Shut up. Damn it, there's no touch screen.
We'll worry about that later. I want to look at the little ones for now.
This laptop, I was very excited to see until I saw the specs and then I was slightly disappointed.
Not so much because this isn't powerful. It is a very powerful laptop.
Just ASUS really set up my expectations
by creating the Flow X13. And I was hoping that they'd be able to deliver
a similar level of performance in this guy. But instead, the GPU is an MX450,
which is just not fast enough. Also the track pad is very interesting.
Damn it, this one also isn't a touch screen. And how do I use my trackpad?
Okay. Swipe there, click that.
Now it's a trackpad. Press up there.
It's no longer a trackpad. Oh, what? The mouse goes down onto the trackpad.
- [David] Ew. - [Alex] Which is exactly where I want my mouse to be, ASUS.
Thank you very much. - [Woman] ASUS. - Why? Who wants that?
ASUS does have some laptops where you have a screen here and then they have another display here
that sort of like pops off and then your keyboard's down below.
And I actually quite like those ones because it sort of gives you like more real estate.
And if you're doing stuff like video editing, where you can take your timeline, put it down below
and have your actual video full display up top.
It's quite a nice way to do your work. But I just don't know how this display
is ever going to make me like more productive.
I'm just going to disable it. Once it is just a trackpad, it's actually quite nice to use.
The tracking's good. The click feels good.
It's pretty large. I was a bit concerned about my hand hitting it,
and I still am. 'Cause, like, this is where I would type
and this palm's really on it, but it doesn't seem to be having issues,
like it's not really moving around. Good job on the tuning, ASUS.
- ASUS. (Alex mumbles)
- Okay, that's like a very respectable keyboard. I give it like an A.
A lot of thin and lights have really great keyboards these days.
This one isn't at the top end of that.
But at the same time, I can't really fault it. One thing I'm not a huge fan of
is that they have like home, page up, page down, and stuff on the right, as well as pretty generous, like,
shift, enter, backspace keys, which moves the whole thing over to the left quite a bit.
And when you combine that with this also quite wide trackpad,
my right hand is completely over the trackpad and it's kind of easy to click it.
I could see that getting annoying, but at the same time, you'll probably just figure out how to hold your hands
and it won't really be an issue. So this is an issue that I've had in the past
with OLED displays on laptops, and it seems to still be an issue here
when I get it to full brightness. But when you're displaying something that's white, like,
you know, just this notepad window, it just looks kind of dirty.
There's a couple things that can contribute to it.
So one, I might have a bit of a stigmatism in my left eye
and apparently, OLEDs and like the sub pixels
can show up more for people with stigmatisms. Although, it's kind of annoying
because this isn't a touch display. And for the most part, I only found like the graininess
and such to be a problem when there was the digitizer over the top.
I had to talk with a bunch of people from like CalMAN, HTC,
HP, and Samsung a while ago when I was trying to figure out
what the problem was with this. There's so little space for all of the circuitry
to be going to each individual pixel that they can kind of cause interference with each other
and it's hard to calibrate it, so like white on every single pixel is exactly the same.
Does look really good. Like, if I get rid of that, this looks incredible.
Look at that black. It is
fantastic. Let's take a look at the specs on this thing.
So we have an Intel i7-1165G7.
So that does have Tiger Lake graphics and the good ones,
which is why when we have a GeForce MX450,
do you really need it? I would say probably not, but Intel's Xe drivers
have been honestly kind of (beep), so you might be very happy
to be able to have NVIDIA's drivers, so that like things just work.
There's also an Intel Wi-Fi 6 card, 1TB of storage,
and 16GB of RAM. I do believe that the RAM is soldered on,
which is unfortunate because if you are using this for productivity stuff,
you might want 32GB in the future. Okay, let's put this guy away for a second
and take a look at its bigger brother.
And we're at full brightness. Now, we do have a little bit of sort of like the graininess
that I was talking about on the other display, but I have to be like here in order to see it.
4k. 3840x2400.
Kind of a weird resolution, but it looks really good to my eyes.
Viewing angles are fantastic as you would expect. And it just looks so good.
All right, I think it's the exact same piece, which is as on the other one,
which I can't really fault it except for the trackpad placement.
So we have numb pad over here,
which moves the whole keyboard to the left. So once again,
like my right hand's in the middle of the laptop,
so I'm kind of doing this weird, like, I don't know, T-Rex arms thing.
And my right hand is completely over the trackpad.
Like, I just right clicked there. I thought it was my palm clicking it,
but it's like way back here, like, the real heel of my hand.
I don't really know how to solve this. I guess that one thing that they could have done
is just not have these physical buttons. I know some people really like them and if they were gone,
it probably would have been a lot easier to just have a trackpad with good palm rejection,
because, like, you can't reject a click.
I feel like I'm doing a lot of complaining about things that don't really matter, but it's the kind of thing
where a bunch of annoying little things can add up to a lot of being very annoyed.
Let's use this thing properly though. I'm going to go grab a mouse.
Ryzen 9 5900HX. So that's why we don't have Thunderbolt,
but eight core, 16 threads, basically the best CPU you can have in a laptop.
32GB of RAM. Intel Wi-Fi 6 card.
Like to see that, glad they didn't have a MediaTek one.
And RTX 3070. So this thing is a frigging beast,
especially for how thick it is. Look at this.
I wonder if that will be a problem. Disable the trackpad.
Goodbye. And as a mobile workstation for video or photo editing,
this seems like it might be one of the best laptops
you could get. This knob wheel just isn't working
in Lightroom right now, sucks. Getting it to work probably isn't hard
or ASUS is going to fix it very soon.
And when they do fix it, which I'm sure they will, 'cause it's a core reason why you get this laptop,
it's going to be an absolute beast.
This knob, where you can just immediately adjust exposure,
blacks, whites, shadows, saturation, all of that stuff from just this little wheel.
It's so good. Like, that's 90% of your photo editing, right there.
System volume. - [Computer AI] Entire work flows with it. - [Alex] That works. - [Computer AI] Work docs
are connected to all your work apps and data. - [Alex] That's very nice.
But how does it do with "Crab Rave"? ("Crab Rave")
All right. Okay.
My first impressions of that are that it's very solid,
but probably not quite as much bass as the XPS, but you can hear all of the bits from like highs, mids,
lows, they're all there, which is quite impressive in a laptop, really.
All right, so we're on the ASUS. ("Crab Rave")
Over to the XPS, the soundstage feels a lot wider.
That is for sure. ("Crab Rave")
Oh, it doesn't sound as good now. (Alex laughs)
That's why we have a comparison laptop.
("Crab Rave")
Yeah, there's a lot more happening in the XPS version.
That sounds like a tinny piece of crap.
Well, good try, ASUS. - [Woman] ASUS. - It filled me until I listened to them side by side.
Let's try the other one out. Getting distracted, but I do want to see if this is a fingerprint reader.
It is. Excellent. So, love to see that.
Getting into your laptop, just using your fingerprint. ("Crab Rave")
So this is the little boy.
Here's the much bigger one. It sounds way fuller.
- [David] Why? - [Alex] Yeah, how?
This one has down firing speakers as well instead of up firing ones.
Why does it sound so much better? All right, let's break out the XPS for a proper comparison.
("Crab Rave")
All right.
All right, I would say that the XPS 15 is like marginally better,
but this guy sounds really good. This is a fine sounding laptop, especially for its size.
Like, I don't expect a laptop that's this big to sound better than one that's larger,
simply because it has more space for subs. So, like, A plus on the speakers on this guy, ASUS.
I don't know how you screwed it up on the bigger one. Let's just go back to this guy for a second,
'cause I feel like I didn't really give my full thoughts on it.
It's very well built. The screen is exceptional,
as long as you're not only doing productivity tasks. Like, this looks great.
I do wish that it had a touch screen option, but whatever,
not everyone wants to touch screen, so if that's you, get this, I guess.
This is kind of like everything that I was hoping from those Samsung laptops
where like it has an awesome OLED display and overall just great build quality.
Like, I think this is quite a good laptop, but ASUS kind of just shot themselves in the foot
by creating the Flow X13 and having a 3050 in that.
If it had an RTX 3050 or a 3050 Ti,
I would probably want to like daily drive this thing, 'cause it's very nice and light, screen's exceptional,
keyboard's good, trackpad, well, it's a good trackpad
as long as you don't have the dumb thing on, IO's solid.
Like, it's a laptop that's really hard to fault
except for the spec config. And if you just got the version without the MX 450,
then like, great job. And like, I'm not saying
this won't be powerful enough for you. It's probably going to be for what you're going to want to use it for.
I just wish that they gave it a little bit more beans 'cause I know that they can do it.
One more problem with the 14 incher here.
It has a 63 watt hour battery, which is a lot of battery,
but they say it's good for eight hours, which means it's probably good for six hours,
which means it's a lot less efficient than the HP Envy 14,
which I would expect to get like eight to ten hours
instead of six to eight. As for our big boy here.
If what you're mainly doing is video editing and photo editing, this thing is sick.
Like, it's really unfortunate that the knob wasn't working in Lightroom,
but when you have your hand right here, you have like mouse over there, hand like this,
and you can easily operate the knob with your thumb. Like, I'm just doing the system brightness right now.
That feels really good. And I could see it saving you a lot of time
if what you mainly do is like Lightroom or photo editing
or video editing, like you're going to use this thing all the time.
If that's your primary use case, especially with the 3x2 display, I really like this laptop.
If you aren't primarily using that and you're not going to be like using the knob
every single day, M16, better trackpad, I like the keyboard a bit more,
higher refresh rate display. This thing's really, really sick.
It's probably also less expensive 'cause stuff aimed at creators is dumb expensive.
But damn, that OLED display. Well, there you go.
(Alex laughs) Thanks for watching. Hit like, get subscribed, and just have a great day.