This laptop was ALMOST great! - MSI Summit E13 Flip Evo
ShortCircuit
·ShortCircuit
·2022-05-05
·
2,369 words · ~11 min read
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- When brands go outside of their comfort zone, one of two things happens.
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Either it's amazing and everybody loves it,
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or they didn't quite understand what they were making and it's bad.
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Which brings us to this here today. MSI has made a professional laptop instead of a gaming one
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and from the looks of it, it seems really good.
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But when we touch it, it might not be. We'll see.
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Opening here up here. This is the MSI Summit E13 Flip Evo.
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It's a long name, but hopefully it's a good laptop.
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For a charger, we have... Okay, nice little power brick. Type-C connection.
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A total of 65 watts. That's actually pretty good.
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We also get MSI's Flip Pen? Is that what it's called? Just the MSI Pen.
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I would be slightly concerned about this, but as far as I can tell they just took Microsoft's pen
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and put an MSI logo on it, which honestly is about the best thing they could've done
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because Microsoft makes great pens. So when you want to charge it, it's just a Type-C cable.
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Right in... Ooh. There.
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Oh. Couple more tips. And I think we're good here. On to the main show.
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Now, the first thing that we get here is a nice little sleeve for it to go into.
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This is something that HP really likes to do with their laptops.
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And I'm not saying MSI ripped off HP,
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but it seems like everything that they did is ripping off HP. (laughs)
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It doesn't smell very good. You know when you get a new foam mattress
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and it just stinks up your whole apartment for week or two?
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Similar vibes. But on to the main show.
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Do-do-do. Oh, it's a nice box.
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This one smells nice, at least.
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See, they double-bagged it here.
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As I was saying, it looks a lot like they ripped off HP.
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The design of this is, um... Spectre-like.
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They don't quite have the 45-degree angles here,
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but aside from that, it looks like an HP Spectre.
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Not that that's really a bad thing. HP's a pretty good company to rip off in this situation.
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Oh! There's another HP feature. So right here, a little switch for your webcam.
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I/O, though, it looks pretty good. So on this side, just Type-C and a MicroSD card reader.
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They said that you can expand your storage with this, but I don't know who's going to do that
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on a laptop like this. Over on this side you get two Thunderbolt,
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I believe it's Thunderbolt 4's. And a full-size Type-A, which is always nice to see.
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I like that. Oh, and also a headphone combo port right there.
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Quick guide. Oh, it's one of these ones. I like these.
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Feels like I'm taking out a map and gonna go on a big road trip.
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Yep, I think I could've figured all of that out on my own.
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Is it time to open it up? - [Jono] Yep. - Nope. It's time for our sponsor, Volta.
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Here we go.
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(laughs) I love this. They're just like, "Golden Ratio, 16:10."
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It's not the fact that every single professional device has been moving to 16:10 or 3:2, it's the golden ratio.
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I need to read you the marketing notes. It's absolutely incredible. "Mathematics code in aesthetics.
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Designed under the golden rule of proportion, the new logo of the new MSI Summit E13 Flip Evo
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utilizes the Golden Ratio to determine aesthetics and mathematics and geometry
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and also precisely placed in the most prominent position."
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Yes. Thank you, MSI.
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That said, I do really like 16:10 displays. 16:10 is awesome because, for one,
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it just gives you more vertical screen space, which is nice for websites...
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Basically anything productivity-related. (Alex laughs)
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Okay. They really like the golden ratio.
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Can we do some golden ratio memes right here of all the things that you can put golden ratios on?
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So let's get right into the specs here. So for a processor you get the i7-1185G7.
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Also 32 gigs of RAM. Wi-Fi 6E, which is actually sick.
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That's pretty cool that they included that. And also Iris Xe graphics.
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So what's fun about this is that the i7 that they have in here
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is turned up to 28 watts, which means that it might be able to compete
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with a much cheaper AMD processor.
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Yeah. It's four cores. Before I talk too much more about this,
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we need a bit of context. This thing starts at $1,600 U.S.
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and the one that we have here today is 1,800, which means...
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It's more expensive than XPS 13, it's more expensive than a Spectre 13 2-in-1,
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it's way more expensive than an Envy or a MacBook Air, M1, MacBook Pro M1...
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Yeah, it basically has to be the best thin-and-light ever at that price.
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And yeah... I don't know if you can see this here, Brandon, but...
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The chassis is pretty good stiffness, but I would say it's comparable to HP's Envy lineup,
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which come in at $700 less than this.
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One complaint that I have right off the bat is that the screen is way too floppy.
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So whenever I've been picking it up here, it really wants to just do that.
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You don't normally do that with a laptop. Normally it doesn't go around quite that fast.
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And when I'm typing, it looks like it's moving a bit.
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But not too bad.
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This keyboard's not good. Yeah. So the spacebar is the biggest offender
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that I've found so far. The stabilization on it is just trash.
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Also, the feel of the keys is not quite the same on our model.
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K feels way different than J.
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And L also feels different. It's gotta be the creme de la creme, and this just is not.
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As for the screen... Jono, you said that this is 100% SRGB?
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- [Jono] Yeah. - That's not great. A laptop of this size at this price and this class
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I would expect to have full Adobe RGB coverage or DCI-P3
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and come with color accuracy. That said, it is a good display.
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It goes up to 500 nits and it's fine.
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I would strongly recommend... Aw, but the hinge is not quite strong enough.
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Then again, we try with the 2-in-1 in this here for a second.
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Let's see.
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This pen seems fine. I don't want to say anything bad about it because I'm not totally sure
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how well OneNote responds to pens. I feel like I could get used to this.
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The tracking seems fine.
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And if I was a student and I wanted to take notes,
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this would be perfectly good. It's probably good enough for art, but I don't make art,
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so I can't really comment on it. This keyboard's maybe a B. I'm downgrading it.
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As for the trackpad, it's pretty good, but I do wish that there was more of it.
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So it seems like it wouldn't be very difficult.
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MSI has a lot of space up in here
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and some space here and also space here, and it should be used for the trackpad.
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I'm guessing that this is just a design that they already had laying around
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and that they were able to just slap in this laptop, but I really wish that had made something unique for this,
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so that they could've got something bigger
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that comes all the way up here. Oh, I see what they did.
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So MSI's trade-off here was that they made it very thin,
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but they aren't able to get the USB Type-A underneath the keyboard and maintain this thickness.
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So you can see here, that comes in, and that's why they have this big raised spot up.
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Yeah, I think that I would be willing to give up a USB Type-A for a larger trackpad
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because that's the kinda thing... Dongles are annoying,
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but not being able to interact with your laptop very well
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is way more annoying. What else do we have to do? Oh!
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Apparently their webcam's good. Let's take a look at that.
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I would say that that is fine.
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But let's have a little bit of a comparison here. So the XPS 15 has what I would consider a bad webcam.
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Ooh. What was that? This is having quite bad exposure issues.
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Yeah, we are under studio lighting right now, so it is very possible that this
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just is too much light for this camera. Okay, so now I'm recording on the XPS 15 as well,
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which I would say has a terrible camera.
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Yeah, the XPS 15 is bad,
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but it also is kind of more consistently bad,
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if that makes sense. The MSI is having really bad exposure issues,
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which might be fine if you're just in an office environment. But then again, on the XPS,
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this whole side of my face is blown out. This is definitely a bad camera.
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This one's maybe good in certain situations, but it doesn't look great right now.
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Okay, so here we have a nice little screen quality comparison.
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Let's hit Play. (upbeat music)
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So this is what you would expect on an $1,800 thin-and-light.
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It should have the same-quality screen, but it really does not.
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These speakers actually aren't bad. As far as what I expect out of a 13-inch laptop,
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they aren't exceptional, but at the same time, they're not doing anything bad.
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I don't hear any distortion or bad highs.
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(music becomes crisper)
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Yeah. This one's way better,
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but I don't expect a 13-inch to be able to beat out a 15-inch.
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Perfectly acceptable speakers. The screen...
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Especially when this is going right up against Dell's new XPS 13 OLED in price,
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it's not good enough, it's just not a good-enough screen.
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What do we even say about this, Jono? I feel bad 'cause I'm just kinda tearing it apart,
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but at the same time it's expensive and fine. So the one thing this laptop does do exceptionally well
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is the battery life. So it has a 70-watt hour battery
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and in a laptop like this, MSI claims 20 hours,
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and I believe them. I think that you can probably very easily
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get 17 to 20 hours of battery life out of this thing.
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That said, the LG Gram exists,
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and it's what, like $600 less for their 13-inch, Jono?
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- [Jono] I think so, yeah. - Let's take it apart and see if we can upgrade anything. I'm guessing you can't, I don't expect that you can,
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but at the same time, it's always fun to see inside of a laptop.
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All right. So the bottom panel that we have here is just plastic.
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Totally fine, but HP's Envy lineup uses metal.
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So yeah. As for the chassis itself, though, it is all CNC machined.
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You can see how they came in here with a tool.
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That's not a cheap part, and...
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I don't think that they got their money's worth out of it. Pretty flexy. It's not too bad, but it's not great.
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As for cooling, this doesn't look very big compared to, you know,
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all of the massive gaming laptops that we have.
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But for a laptop like this, a four-core mobile CPU, this is loads.
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So we have two heat pipes that come over here. There's quite a bit of surface area of the fins.
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And two cute little fans. Apparently they've done quite a bit of tuning on these,
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so in balanced mode it stays below 35 decibels.
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When I was using it, I didn't hear the fans at all, so good job there, MSI.
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As for upgradability...
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Not a whole lot. So you do have a removable SSD here,
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but you can't put a second one in. I think your options are 512 or 1 terabyte,
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so you don't necessarily want to throw that in the garbage. (babbles) Maybe.
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So I'd give this a... What would you call it? An Ultrabook pass for upgradability.
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You can get at the battery. You can get at the storage. That's kind of all that we expect.
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I don't know, I feel like I've been a bit hard on this laptop.
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But at the same time, MSI did a lot of things right here.
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And nothing's actually wrong with it, aside from the price.
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So this laptop right here, if it was priced at $1,200,
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I would be like, "Yeah, go, get it right now."
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Priced at $1,600 to $1,800, I just can't.
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It's very comparable in quality to HP's Envy lineup,
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and that's just coming close to $1,000 less.
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And you can get ones with eGPUs for $600 less.
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So if MSI does drop the price, you should pick it up. Or maybe they should make an i5 version
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and then, also, you should pick it up. But either way, that's the end of the video,
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so have a fantastic day, get subscribed, hit like, and so long.