Gone are the days when we used to carry heavy laptops because only those were powerful enough for intensive tasks. Today’s generation needs a light yet powerful laptop that can be carried everywhere and yet accomplish any task thrown at it. This is when Apple’s MacBook Air was touted to be the best ultrabook on the market but it is not the case anymore. There are a lot of Ultrabooks with Windows OS and equally elegant and powerful as the rival MacBooks.
Asus Zenbook 13 is one such ultrabook which maintains a light and slim profile yet is a beast when it comes to the performance. This is one of the latest Ultrabooks to hit the market and promises to be a compelling choice for the buyers with the features offered.
Asus Zenbook 13 weighs in at 985 grams which makes it a very light laptop and preferable for the users who are on the go always and still need to complete their work. The design is minimalistic with a brushed metal finish which attracts fingerprints and smudges. The laptop is 3.9mm thick and has pretty good options for connectivity. It has 2 USB ports, a type-C port, and an HDMI port. There is also a fingerprint scanner for logging in and other security-related stuff.
The 13.3-inch display produces good colors and Asus has continued on providing quality screens across their laptop lineups. The text looks crisp and editing videos or pictures feels great on the FHD screen of the Zenbook. If only the company had provided a 2K display, it would have been an absolute deal at this price. The back-lit keyboard on the Zenbook is great and has a good feel while typing. Again, Asus has been doing a great job when it comes to the display and keyboards churning out some quality products.
The Zenbook is powered by 8th generation Intel Core i7 processor coupled with 8GB of RAM which makes it a powerful ultrabook. There is 512GB of SSD storage which helps in faster booting of the OS and also offers great read and write operations. We have been using this laptop for a couple of weeks and did not see any issue regarding performance. It could handle any of the day to day tasks thrown at it with ease. There is integrated graphics from Intel which can be used for some casual gaming but not other graphically intensive games. I hope Asus includes some dedicated GPU in the future for these products that can help further in the user tasks or entertainment.
The battery life is around 6-7 hours and it is indeed great for a laptop that is this small and light. Any other intensive applications and the battery life comes down substantially. There is a Harmon Kardon speaker for audio which sounds clear and loud enough but the placement could have been better.
Overall, this laptop is a great alternative for the MacBook Air or in that case any other light, portable and quality laptops. The Zenbook offers good power, battery life and at the same time has a great design to flaunt it when traveling.
