Every Laptop Should Have A Knob! - ASUS Zenbook UX5400 & ProArt H5600
ShortCircuit
·ShortCircuit
·2022-05-05
·
3,138 words · ~15 min read
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- All right, today we've got a double unboxing. Not because either of these couldn't be their own video,
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but because I requested too many laptops and we need to get through them.
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So we've got the ASUS ZenBook. It's a 14 incher and it's relatively powerful.
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It's not as powerful as I'd like. And we've also got the ASUS ProArt.
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Probably more powerful than you'd ever want. Let's get into them.
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So first up is the ZenBook. Oh, is there a-
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We do get a laptop case, which is always nice to see.
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Nice and simple. Has some nice little writing on it.
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Seems like it's probably fake leather. Now we have the actual machine.
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Apparently it was best laptop brand winner 2020.
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Sure. And finally the power adaptor.
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So that's 100 watts being delivered over USB Type-C.
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Let's just go all the way right now.
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There we go. Nice aluminum chassis.
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Apparently it's diamond cut. That's all the rage these days.
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Although Samsung showed us, being CNC-machined
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and diamond cut doesn't mean it's a good chassis. It just means it's expensive.
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It feels pretty decent from first touches.
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And first look at it, it looks pretty decent as well.
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Excellent screen-to-body ratio. Very little for bezels.
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Pretty big trackpad. It's kind of a weird shape so we might have some palm rejection issues,
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but we'll find out soon enough. And keyboard seems good at first glance.
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Although, we'll look more at that later. Now for IO, we have micro SD,
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two Thunderbolt ports, headphone, 3.5 millimeter.
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Thank you, ASUS. - ASUS. Repeat once again, ASUS.
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- [Alex] They took that off of one of their last laptops, which was bad.
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Also a full-size HTMI and along on the other side,
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a single USB Type-A port, which is nice to see
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'cause that'll probably be the one that you plug your mouse into.
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That can go off to the side. And our more powerful one here, the StudioBook 16.
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Start off with the power adaptor. I wonder if it's Type-C.
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Nope, it's 240 watts, which means it's definitely not Type-C.
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It also means we have a powerful laptop here.
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Oh, this is a fancy box.
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It's upside down. Let's try that again.
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(David exclaims excitedly) Wow.
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Wow, at first look, this really reminds me of like the Zephyrus G15 or M16.
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Yeah, so here we have the M16 and here we have the StudioBook 16.
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StudioBook actually looks a bit bigger. Wow, does this have a 3x2 display?
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That is massive. If it's OLED as well,
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that's going to be really nice to look at. We also have this knobby chum,
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so it's kind of like a rotary dial and you can also press it in for a button.
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Let's also take a look at the IO before we get into it. So we have two USB Type-C's.
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It doesn't say Thunderolt on it. You also have full-size HDMI, DC-In, full-size USB Type-A,
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and on the other side, full-size SD card reader. Love to see that.
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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
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straight into your laptop. Really like to be able to do that.
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And, oh, full-size Ethernet. Again, really like to see that.
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Should we just go right into it, David? - [David] Heck yeah. - Yeah.
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3:58
Wow, that is a vivid display. Oh, they also have Lightroom already installed.
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Oh darn. It's not a touch screen. That's unfortunate.
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This trackpad's a bit odd because like you can't click it in
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and they do have dedicated mouse buttons, but the problem is that it's quite wide
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and they have three of them so it's kind of hard to hit left click.
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I want to be like right here, but then my finger is on middle click instead of left click.
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If you're one of those people that uses two hands to trackpad, you'd absolutely love this.
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Linus does it. It's gross, I agree. - [David] Chop his hands off.
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- Yeah. You'll probably get used to it and just kind of use it like here.
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For now it's annoying. Shut up. Damn it, there's no touch screen.
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We'll worry about that later. I want to look at the little ones for now.
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This laptop, I was very excited to see until I saw the specs and then I was slightly disappointed.
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Not so much because this isn't powerful. It is a very powerful laptop.
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Just ASUS really set up my expectations
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by creating the Flow X13. And I was hoping that they'd be able to deliver
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a similar level of performance in this guy. But instead, the GPU is an MX450,
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which is just not fast enough. Also the track pad is very interesting.
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Damn it, this one also isn't a touch screen. And how do I use my trackpad?
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Okay. Swipe there, click that.
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Now it's a trackpad. Press up there.
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It's no longer a trackpad. Oh, what? The mouse goes down onto the trackpad.
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- [David] Ew. - [Alex] Which is exactly where I want my mouse to be, ASUS.
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Thank you very much. - [Woman] ASUS. - Why? Who wants that?
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ASUS does have some laptops where you have a screen here and then they have another display here
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that sort of like pops off and then your keyboard's down below.
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And I actually quite like those ones because it sort of gives you like more real estate.
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And if you're doing stuff like video editing, where you can take your timeline, put it down below
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and have your actual video full display up top.
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It's quite a nice way to do your work. But I just don't know how this display
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is ever going to make me like more productive.
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I'm just going to disable it. Once it is just a trackpad, it's actually quite nice to use.
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The tracking's good. The click feels good.
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It's pretty large. I was a bit concerned about my hand hitting it,
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and I still am. 'Cause, like, this is where I would type
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and this palm's really on it, but it doesn't seem to be having issues,
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like it's not really moving around. Good job on the tuning, ASUS.
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- ASUS. (Alex mumbles)
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- Okay, that's like a very respectable keyboard. I give it like an A.
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A lot of thin and lights have really great keyboards these days.
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This one isn't at the top end of that.
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But at the same time, I can't really fault it. One thing I'm not a huge fan of
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is that they have like home, page up, page down, and stuff on the right, as well as pretty generous, like,
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shift, enter, backspace keys, which moves the whole thing over to the left quite a bit.
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And when you combine that with this also quite wide trackpad,
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my right hand is completely over the trackpad and it's kind of easy to click it.
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I could see that getting annoying, but at the same time, you'll probably just figure out how to hold your hands
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and it won't really be an issue. So this is an issue that I've had in the past
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with OLED displays on laptops, and it seems to still be an issue here
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when I get it to full brightness. But when you're displaying something that's white, like,
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you know, just this notepad window, it just looks kind of dirty.
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There's a couple things that can contribute to it.
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So one, I might have a bit of a stigmatism in my left eye
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and apparently, OLEDs and like the sub pixels
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can show up more for people with stigmatisms. Although, it's kind of annoying
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because this isn't a touch display. And for the most part, I only found like the graininess
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and such to be a problem when there was the digitizer over the top.
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I had to talk with a bunch of people from like CalMAN, HTC,
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HP, and Samsung a while ago when I was trying to figure out
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what the problem was with this. There's so little space for all of the circuitry
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to be going to each individual pixel that they can kind of cause interference with each other
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and it's hard to calibrate it, so like white on every single pixel is exactly the same.
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Does look really good. Like, if I get rid of that, this looks incredible.
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Look at that black. It is
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fantastic. Let's take a look at the specs on this thing.
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So we have an Intel i7-1165G7.
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So that does have Tiger Lake graphics and the good ones,
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which is why when we have a GeForce MX450,
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do you really need it? I would say probably not, but Intel's Xe drivers
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have been honestly kind of (beep), so you might be very happy
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to be able to have NVIDIA's drivers, so that like things just work.
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There's also an Intel Wi-Fi 6 card, 1TB of storage,
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and 16GB of RAM. I do believe that the RAM is soldered on,
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which is unfortunate because if you are using this for productivity stuff,
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you might want 32GB in the future. Okay, let's put this guy away for a second
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and take a look at its bigger brother.
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And we're at full brightness. Now, we do have a little bit of sort of like the graininess
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that I was talking about on the other display, but I have to be like here in order to see it.
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4k. 3840x2400.
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Kind of a weird resolution, but it looks really good to my eyes.
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Viewing angles are fantastic as you would expect. And it just looks so good.
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All right, I think it's the exact same piece, which is as on the other one,
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which I can't really fault it except for the trackpad placement.
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So we have numb pad over here,
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which moves the whole keyboard to the left. So once again,
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like my right hand's in the middle of the laptop,
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so I'm kind of doing this weird, like, I don't know, T-Rex arms thing.
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And my right hand is completely over the trackpad.
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Like, I just right clicked there. I thought it was my palm clicking it,
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but it's like way back here, like, the real heel of my hand.
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I don't really know how to solve this. I guess that one thing that they could have done
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is just not have these physical buttons. I know some people really like them and if they were gone,
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it probably would have been a lot easier to just have a trackpad with good palm rejection,
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because, like, you can't reject a click.
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I feel like I'm doing a lot of complaining about things that don't really matter, but it's the kind of thing
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where a bunch of annoying little things can add up to a lot of being very annoyed.
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Let's use this thing properly though. I'm going to go grab a mouse.
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Ryzen 9 5900HX. So that's why we don't have Thunderbolt,
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but eight core, 16 threads, basically the best CPU you can have in a laptop.
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32GB of RAM. Intel Wi-Fi 6 card.
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Like to see that, glad they didn't have a MediaTek one.
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And RTX 3070. So this thing is a frigging beast,
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especially for how thick it is. Look at this.
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I wonder if that will be a problem. Disable the trackpad.
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Goodbye. And as a mobile workstation for video or photo editing,
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this seems like it might be one of the best laptops
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you could get. This knob wheel just isn't working
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in Lightroom right now, sucks. Getting it to work probably isn't hard
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or ASUS is going to fix it very soon.
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And when they do fix it, which I'm sure they will, 'cause it's a core reason why you get this laptop,
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it's going to be an absolute beast.
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This knob, where you can just immediately adjust exposure,
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blacks, whites, shadows, saturation, all of that stuff from just this little wheel.
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It's so good. Like, that's 90% of your photo editing, right there.
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System volume. - [Computer AI] Entire work flows with it. - [Alex] That works. - [Computer AI] Work docs
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are connected to all your work apps and data. - [Alex] That's very nice.
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But how does it do with "Crab Rave"? ("Crab Rave")
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All right. Okay.
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My first impressions of that are that it's very solid,
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but probably not quite as much bass as the XPS, but you can hear all of the bits from like highs, mids,
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lows, they're all there, which is quite impressive in a laptop, really.
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All right, so we're on the ASUS. ("Crab Rave")
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Over to the XPS, the soundstage feels a lot wider.
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That is for sure. ("Crab Rave")
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Oh, it doesn't sound as good now. (Alex laughs)
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That's why we have a comparison laptop.
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("Crab Rave")
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Yeah, there's a lot more happening in the XPS version.
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That sounds like a tinny piece of crap.
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Well, good try, ASUS. - [Woman] ASUS. - It filled me until I listened to them side by side.
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Let's try the other one out. Getting distracted, but I do want to see if this is a fingerprint reader.
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It is. Excellent. So, love to see that.
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Getting into your laptop, just using your fingerprint. ("Crab Rave")
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So this is the little boy.
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Here's the much bigger one. It sounds way fuller.
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- [David] Why? - [Alex] Yeah, how?
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This one has down firing speakers as well instead of up firing ones.
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Why does it sound so much better? All right, let's break out the XPS for a proper comparison.
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("Crab Rave")
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All right.
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All right, I would say that the XPS 15 is like marginally better,
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but this guy sounds really good. This is a fine sounding laptop, especially for its size.
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Like, I don't expect a laptop that's this big to sound better than one that's larger,
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simply because it has more space for subs. So, like, A plus on the speakers on this guy, ASUS.
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I don't know how you screwed it up on the bigger one. Let's just go back to this guy for a second,
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'cause I feel like I didn't really give my full thoughts on it.
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It's very well built. The screen is exceptional,
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as long as you're not only doing productivity tasks. Like, this looks great.
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I do wish that it had a touch screen option, but whatever,
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not everyone wants to touch screen, so if that's you, get this, I guess.
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This is kind of like everything that I was hoping from those Samsung laptops
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where like it has an awesome OLED display and overall just great build quality.
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Like, I think this is quite a good laptop, but ASUS kind of just shot themselves in the foot
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by creating the Flow X13 and having a 3050 in that.
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If it had an RTX 3050 or a 3050 Ti,
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I would probably want to like daily drive this thing, 'cause it's very nice and light, screen's exceptional,
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keyboard's good, trackpad, well, it's a good trackpad
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as long as you don't have the dumb thing on, IO's solid.
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Like, it's a laptop that's really hard to fault
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except for the spec config. And if you just got the version without the MX 450,
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then like, great job. And like, I'm not saying
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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.
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I just wish that they gave it a little bit more beans 'cause I know that they can do it.
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One more problem with the 14 incher here.
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It has a 63 watt hour battery, which is a lot of battery,
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but they say it's good for eight hours, which means it's probably good for six hours,
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which means it's a lot less efficient than the HP Envy 14,
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which I would expect to get like eight to ten hours
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instead of six to eight. As for our big boy here.
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If what you're mainly doing is video editing and photo editing, this thing is sick.
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Like, it's really unfortunate that the knob wasn't working in Lightroom,
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but when you have your hand right here, you have like mouse over there, hand like this,
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and you can easily operate the knob with your thumb. Like, I'm just doing the system brightness right now.
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That feels really good. And I could see it saving you a lot of time
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if what you mainly do is like Lightroom or photo editing
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or video editing, like you're going to use this thing all the time.
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If that's your primary use case, especially with the 3x2 display, I really like this laptop.
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If you aren't primarily using that and you're not going to be like using the knob
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every single day, M16, better trackpad, I like the keyboard a bit more,
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higher refresh rate display. This thing's really, really sick.
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It's probably also less expensive 'cause stuff aimed at creators is dumb expensive.
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But damn, that OLED display. Well, there you go.
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(Alex laughs) Thanks for watching. Hit like, get subscribed, and just have a great day.