- 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. But first, our sponsor. Thanks to Vessi Footwear for
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at vessi.com/ shortcircuit. 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 wifi
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 Wifi 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.
