Asus has quietly announced two additions to its Zenbook line, all about the screens. The new AMD-powered Zenbook 13 S joins a limited but slow-growing range of 13-inch OLED laptops for people seeking the benefits of OLED technology at an affordable price. But Asus is not leaving Intel behind – the company has also unveiled a new Zenbook Pro 15 Flip OLED convertible powered by 12th generation Core processors and Arc GPUs.
The Zenbook 13 S OLED does not look as different from the 13-inch Zenbooks we have seen before. It weighs 2.2 pounds and is just over half an inch thick. It is available in some fun colors: Ponder Blue, Aqua Celadon, Refined White and Vestige Beige. But the most interesting thing is that the word “Asus”, which is famously prominent on the Zenbook doors, has been replaced with a new arrow-shaped logo. This looks much nicer to me and more like something I would not mind having at a cafe all day.
About the screen: it is a 2.8K 16:10 touch screen with a response time of 0.2 ms and an alleged maximum brightness of 550 nits. The 13-inch OLED Zenbook we reviewed last year delivered a vibrant and bright experience, and such a screen could be a great option for multimedia viewing. In terms of connectivity, there is an audio jack (which has been missing from some recent Zenbooks), and there are three USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C ports that support DisplayPort and Power Delivery. There does not appear to be USB-A, which makes me sad.
The 13 S is powered by AMD’s Ryzen 6000 processors, including a Ryzen 5 6600U or a Ryzen 7 6800U. It can be configured with up to 32 GB of RAM (LPDDR5) and 1 TB of storage space. We have not done a ton of tests with these processors yet, but we expect them to be more than capable of handling entertainment, office work, and other tasks generally performed on 13-inch laptops.
Asus has not given us a price or release date for this device, but a 13.9-inch Zenbook S (without OLED) currently costs $ 1,699.98.
On the Intel side, the Zenbook Pro 15 Flip OLED is more of a workstation device. It is powered by 12th generation processors up to a Core i7-12700H and Arc GPUs up to an A370M. Its 15.6-inch screen has 2880 x 1620 resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate (thumbs up) with a 16: 9 aspect ratio (thumbs down). You get up to 1 TB of storage and up to 16 GB of memory (which is strange since the 13-inch goes up to 32 GB). Earlier Zenbook 15 Flip models (with Nvidia GPUs rather than Intel) currently cost as much as $ 1,499.
We hope to update this information with pricing and release dates as soon as they are available.