Thin.... but not dumb! - ASUS Zenbook S 13 OLED

here today we have the Asus Zenbook s13 OLED and Asus was nice enough to not only sponsor this video but uh not send us a box so we got her bananas wow look at that thank you Asus for sponsoring this video first problem with it though they showed me at CES they're super nice ceramic coating that doesn't get you any fingerprints on the back this one right here you can see my grubby hand prints that said though this is a really cool finish look at this given how nasty my hands are right now it's doing a pretty good job and all you have to say this is a fantastic looking little machine we've got these nice little how the heck do they do this they must have anodized it bead blasted it and then machined out these little cutouts which would not have been a cheap operation that said though it does look really good Asus got back to me about what exactly this lid is made out of this uses a special process to transform the aluminum lid into a plasma ceramic aluminum that is exclusive to Asus what that means I have no idea I can guarantee you this right here is not a plasma at the moment you do not want the back of your laptop to be plastic also it's fully recyclable I think this thing is so thin it is 10.9 millimeters thick which is like five six millimeters thinner than you would expect for a device of this size and with that I am a little bit concerned a lot of the time a company will pursue thinness or something along those lines and in the process just kind of forget that they need to make a good device but we have evidence that Asus has not done that starting with the iOS right here full size type a port love to see it don't know how you did it in a device system also 3.5 millimeter headphone microphone combo Jack around the other side the i o continues to be shockingly good for a device of this size HDMI 2.1 love to see it as well as two Thunderbolt 4S and well that's it but it still is pretty darn good they didn't even have the little flappy Chum normally with these you expect there to be a little like thingy there they didn't have to do that now for the thinness did they have to sacrifice build quality oh it does a little flippy uppy thing so if you look here the hinge goes down so that it lifts up the keyboard just a tiny bit which I'm guessing helps with thermals on something this large I don't care how good of a job you can do with The Thermals you're gonna have problems if it's this small but if you lift it up you have a nice fresh airflow going in there looks like they have a bunch of heatsink all along the back here maybe it'll actually be good is it flubby there's a tiny bit of flex around the keyboard but as far as I can tell it's all just sort of macro chassis flexing which is for the most part okay what's a real problem is if there's like a soft spot but I don't feel anything that isn't just the entire chassis moving also look at the size of this trackpad given the size of this thing they have used up all the space they could get I really appreciate that I'm able to put my hands on here have them on the home row and I'm not falling off the back on a lot of 13-inch devices they will Super aggressively remove like the bezels here the bezels down here Asus has been kind of bad for this in the past and you're just left with no room for a trackpad or a palm rest but here they have done a fantastic job I can actually put my hands on here and it's all good and also the trackpad has had its size increased by nine and a half percent look at how big it is for the size of this thing I don't know why but we have a very small manatee in our search box can you can you see that David I don't know why but I like it thank you windows we forgot to look at the power brick so this right here USB type-c love to see it and also this right here is 65 Watts so that's about what you expect with the device of this size it's pretty small but also 65 Watts isn't a whole lot did I say what one kilogram shall we test it single kg 2.2 pounds one kilogram and 50 grams they have what one nickel worth of weight extra on here maybe we have a more SSD than the one kilogram model okay let's have a look at the keyboard here Asus is rep said that for the most part making it this thin and light they didn't really have to do any compromises like they just did it by engineering the shell that the screen goes in a little bit better and shaving off a tiny bit like just by engineering it well the one spot that it's a little bit of a trade-off though is the keyboard so you do get less actuation than last gen I think this is 0.6 millimeters of travel fortunately the keyboard is still fantastic on this now it isn't as good as if it did have an extra half millimeter of travel or so but they have made the whole thing quite satisfying to use it is not a whole lot of actuation force like it is quite easy to hit the keys but they just sort of snap down and it's pretty satisfying it feels a lot like Cherry Reds like the really low profile ones I could see this being an excellent keyboard if you were a gamer like you could really really quickly hit the keys one of the largest concerns with having really low actuation keyboards is that if the key stability isn't good you can very easily end up in situations where the key is dipping below the chassis before it actually actuates but here that isn't a problem the whole thing is actuating before it's able to sort of slop its way down it doesn't feel like the key consistency is perfect like I feel like R is slightly less forced than E I would still overall though give this keyboard an A so fantastic job below that we have the trackpad is this glass topped doesn't look like it that said though it does still feel good to use it doesn't have like fancy Force actuators or stuff like that it is just a very simple click but at the same time simple clicks work oh does it pass the pickup test good question it's all good you can hold it by the edge still Clicks in here for the processor we get the 13th gen core i7 1355u so that's two performance cores and eight efficiency and those performance cores go up to five gigahertz and a laptop like this like sure you only have two performance cores but you also still have 10 cores in a laptop that you can just toss around like this for Ram we have 16 gigabytes of ddr5 running at 6 000 Mega transfers per second it says slots used eight of eight which means it is almost definitely soldered directly to the board although if you want you can get 32 gigabytes when you buy laptop also for storage we have a one terabyte nvme SSD from Micron Wi-Fi 6E love to see it and of course Intel Iris XE Graphics which is fine of course this being the Zenbook s13 OLED it has an OLED screen and it looks pretty darn good it is 2080 by 1800 so that's 16 by 10 and it is an OLED panel which means it just looks fantastic and part of it looking fantastic is that uh yeah there is no touch screen here which normally I don't like too much but on OLED panels it is extraordinarily easy to screw it up the sub pixels between an LCD display and an OLED display are different and if you don't perfectly line up the digitizer for the touch screen it can make your OLED just look like trash here we do not have to worry about that at all and this right here looks darn good normally I expect on an OLED display to start being able to see the sub pixels somewhere around like here I'm probably out here on this I cannot see anything like there is no dirtiness of the gaps between the subpixels or I literally cannot focus on the display close enough to see the sub pixel oh there we go that right there is really showing off why OLED is just the absolute King especially when combined with the 550 nit Peak brightness like this right here I don't know computer generated Pringle just looks absolutely fantastic which is good because the OLED screen does of course have its trade-offs namely battery life but it would not look as good now this having Dolby Atmos means that it should be able to use some sound trickery stuff to make it sound much larger than actually is and with Sound by Harman Kardon hopefully it sounds good oh that's pretty good [Applause] not very loud though the Dolby Atmos of it is very interesting it sounds very thin when I'm back here and like it's just from coming from this then I moved somewhere right around here it becomes way larger I wonder it looks like the speakers are down firing if we have it on a hard surface [Music] I would say those speakers are Nifty but not very good so it's kind of strange because the Dolby Atmos surrounding you only really works when you're closer to the laptop than is comfortable I would want to be like right here [Music] which sounds fine but it's way better when I'm actually above it so here it sounds enveloping one thing that is really fun about the speakers though is that they vibrate the whole chassis you get this like tactile experience with the bass instead of actually hearing it [Applause] it's it's a bit on the quiet side for sure but given how much the whole thing is like jamming I feel like that if they had it any louder it would just be Distortion one thing that's awesome about OLED displays is that the pixel response time is just so so fast even though this is only 60 hertz just ripping around with the gaming mouse feels super responsive in a way that a lot of particularly unprofessional devices you just can't get that it'll feel super gross so we're here at 1080p medium getting a solid uh 24 FPS which does not feel as bad because again pixel response times excellent but I I don't love it oh dang this is this is doing pretty good so the 24fps was actually at 1800p which is impressive I am now at 1200p which is 16 by 10 1080 and I'm getting a solid 40 FPS which is honestly a lot faster than I was expecting so right here is quite playable and I didn't have to completely tank the visuals like we have grass and stuff it's so rare that you get grass when we're on an ultralight uh we are currently in the standard mode but let's put it into performance mode oh there's the fans they were quite quiet before now another audible that has netted us hmm six FPS or so this thing is going a lot faster than I was expecting like what's our processor at right now okay 2.1 but the GPU is getting absolutely hammered I'm shocked how good this is good job Asus see I'm gonna knock it down just a tiny bit more 900p solid 60 FPS this right here is doing shockingly well I'm impressed this is not a gaming laptop to be very clear but for something with just a simple igpu and given that it's barely over a centimeter thick Dang or in the Asus software let's just see what else they have here so we have ai noise canceling microphone omnidirectional mode hello I am speaking this is the microphone and we are in omnidirectional mode uh can you guys start making a racket a racket okay so they're making your racket we're now going to unidirectional mode I wonder if you can tell anything back to omnidirectional mode where you can apparently hear everything let's see what that was like all right we're good we're now going to unidirectional mode that's good I wonder if you can tell anything it's definitely not perfect like you could hear some of the raveling well it was in the single presenter mode but at the same time it did not bad and that's a pretty challenging situation so for a webcam it is 1080p I would say this right here is completely usable and the microphone is very very above average also alongside the camera Asus has Windows hello facial recognition up there which again fantastic absolutely love to see it so you don't have to worry about typing in your password or your PIN or anything you can just whoop and you're right in okay so apparently this has adaptive color so that means that depending on the color temperature of your surroundings it will change the display let's turn that on now I don't know if this is going to show up on the screen recording or not but I'm going to walk over there and maybe it'll change that's great it seems to work and that's the sort of thing where if you are using this for photo editing you can just trust that the colors that you see on the display are much closer to what it actually is instead of getting screwed up by ambient light or something like that in here we also have options for the display settings so I really appreciate they have it on normal mode instead of a chipping with Vivid which David described as the colors screaming at your eyes I agree we also have true to life which sounds bad but it's off by default so who cares and oh more camera stuff apparently they do the background blurring stuff and uh the Gaze correction if you want to be real creepy looking okay light optimization how does that do it looks the same but maybe with a lower frame rate um I cannot tell the difference at all it almost looks like a smoothing filter like I look worse I think okay so we'll leave that off background blurring how is this the background is certainly blurred and uh okay if I move around I can show it pretty well but it is doing its job it's not the most convincing bokeh I've ever seen that's for sure Gay's correction this is gonna be creepy uh so apparently it is correcting my great gaze I'm going to look over here is it I I don't know I I can't tell if this is working motion tracking it's zooming in okay cool and appearance filter it kind of just looks like it's a 720p webcam now uh I would probably never use any of that again but it's there if you want it 11 T5 screws later and we are in now do note they have longer screws at the back of the device than all of the ones in the front don't screw that up or you will have a bad time wow that's a battery right there 63 watt hour battery I think it is very fair to say that they could not have fit any more in here for one it is super thin this is an incredibly small battery Z depth wise but it is absolutely massive in every other way that is comical I love it it is unfortunate that they only have OLED screen options because it does hurt your battery life but this right here is going to do as good of a job as you can in something of this size without like having no speakers now the cooling system is nothing too special we have too little incredibly slim fans and two heat pipes but as we saw in valheim it does its job incredibly well also we have our Ram it's soldered down so you're not going to be able to replace that yourself but at the same time hit 6000 Mega transfer per second so nice and close to the die right there excellent even though you can't upgrade the RAM that's a all soldered down right here you can upgrade the SSD right here well overall I think this end book is a fantastic little machine they have not fallen for making it terrible in the pursuit of it being exceptionally thin it's a huge thanks to Asus for sponsoring this video you can check them out in the link down below and just have a good old day see you later

Channel: ShortCircuit

Views: 542,401

Keywords: shortcircuit, SC, unboxing, first impression, tech, gadget, home, fun, buy, laptop, ASUS, portables, teardown

Id: tXWebwlfqfc

Length: 16min 17sec (977 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 20 2023