Gorgeous OLED display and great build quality
5/5
The new Zenbook looks absolutely amazing even before you lift the lid - which you can do easily with one hand. It has Asus' new "ceramic aluminium" finish which looks like smoothish stone and feels really good, oddly "warmer" that you'd expect from metal. The interior surface has the matching finish - it's sort of silky, like a silk paint as opposed to gloss or matte. This darker grey does show fingerprints but it's not as bad at the blue finish on the regular Zenbooks - and it's easy to give it a quick wipe with a microfibre cloth if it starts to bug you. The newly designed grill above the keyboard looks really good - almost "industrial" looking.
The keyboard is terrific - the backlighting is vastly improved on the last gen Zenbooks with less spilling of light around the keys and the characters are far more clearly lit. I really love this keyboard too - travel is slightly less than last gen ones because the whole laptop is even thinner but there's still a positive feel to the keys and they really are almost silent, apart from the spacebar which is extremely quiet and only seems "loud" by comparison with the other keys (and only then if you're like me and tend to slap the outer edged of the space bar).
I swapped the NVMe drive out straight away and that's now much easier than previous Zenbooks - no more screws hidden under rubber feet that then never properly stick back in place. The innards if this are extremely neat - the drive and the battery are the only user-replaceable components and unless you need a bigger drive than the (actually pretty good) one included, you'll never need to open it up. The new design also means there's a single "full width" rubber foot at the back and it's taller too so there's a bit more clearance underneath when placed on a desk.
The other big change from previous Zenbooks is that this now has two fans and they vent to the back of the laptop. The previous zenbooks would get far too hot as they only had a single fan that vented to the side - they were notorious for overheating and having the CPU throttle when performing even fairly basic tasks. This one has run cool and with pretty much no noticeable fan noise so far - a massive improvement.
This model comes with the new Intel Ultra 7 258V, ATC graphics and 32gb RAM, with that RAM now being part of the CPU structure. I won't review the CPU or graphics but I recommend that you do plenty of homework before buying as there's some VERY significant differences to the way the Ultra's work that may mean a previous gen CPU is better for some purposes - in particular, look at the number of cores and hyperthreading if those figure in your requirements.
What's "new and improved" on the series 200 Ultra 7 is the - apparently - far more capable AI aspects of the chip. I say "apparently" because I've very little knowledge of AI laptops and there's currently not that much use being made of them anyway - but it is very noticeable that this is a "copilot+" laptop and Windows 11 alone has a lot of options and features that don't even show up on any of my other Windows 11 devices. I won't review copilot - I'll just say that I don't yet have any real use for it but expect that it will soon become a fact of life for all IT users so I count it here as "future proofing".
Sound-wise - it's extremely good. There's plenty of beef from the onboard speakers, especially with the included Dolby Atmos feature. It's pretty loud too without distortion. Again, very much better than the last gen Zenbooks, and they were not bad by any standard.
The OLED screen really is jaw-droppingly good (and even looks better than my last Zenbook - apparently Asus are using a new touchscreen overlay that is pretty well invisible, unlike the last gen ones which showed up as a grid on some lighter screens). I love the OLED screen - I know it's not needed for most computer applications but it still makes me smile to see those perfect blacks and brilliant whites when watching HDR videos on a laptop. And thanks to these new Ultra CPUs, there's now native Dolby Vision support too. Support for HDR from streaming services is still poor - they seem to take the attitude that we'll all copy anything we watch in Dolby Vision or HDR10 but won't bother in SDR - if Intel is adding Dolby Vision to all future CPU/GPUs, that could tip the scale. The touchscreen is as accurate as ever but there are limitations - it's hardly ideal to try to draw on a vertical screen and because of the new rear venting, this screen will no longer lie flat backwards. So it's not a great screen for drawing with a stylus but for touching up photos or just general touchscreen use, it is extremely good and is almost eerily good at "guessing" exactly what you meant to touch, no matter how small the object is under your wobbly old finger. The native resolution of 2880 x 1800 may seem like overkill for a 14" screen but it means everything looks incredibly crisp.
Asus include an app called MyAsus which contains some system settings and options plus diagnostics and some promotional stuff - but unlike similar apps from other manufacturers, I'd recommend using this one, if only for those settings and the background handling of genuinely worthwhile updates. A couple of other apps are available but not installed by default.
I'm very impressed with it - it feels like it's something that will serve me well enough for a good few years.
Incidentally - I noticed that my Asus account and the MyAsus app showed an incorrect end date for the included one year warranty - it seemed to be only showing around six months remaining. I emailed Asus and got a reply within 24 hours to say that their system shows a year from the date of manufacture - and they gave me a link to send them a copy of my receipt, and when I did that, they updated the warranty within a few minutes. They assured me that they would honour the sale-date for their warranty anyway, but it's nice to see it in writing on my account - and that was some pretty good customer service too.
Peter N
