Laptops have made serious changes over the years, and we’re all benefitting in th best ways possible. Getting something made to be powerful doesn’t mean sacrificing thickness or weight, and with high-end parts in smaller designs, outside of the obvious screen size factor.
While the idea of the high performance laptop is still one that offers oodles of capability, the upside to getting something made in this day and age is that it also doesn’t need to weigh you down.
We’ve certainly seen models from Apple and Dell in that regard, and Asus appears next on the list with an offering of its own.
The latest take on high-end tech in a lightweight form comes in the ExpertBook Ultra, a laptop that will see an Intel chip handle processing and graphics, sitting under a 14 inch 3K OLED touchscreen, and actually try to do AI offline using localhost approaches (meaning no cloud).
Technically, any AI PC can do local AI processing, but so far almost none have out of the box. You’ve had to know what you’re doing to get it speaking that language, with few companies preinstalling the apps to make AI work offline (outside of Apple, which has its own Foundational Models on iPhone, iPad, and Macs).
For the ExpertBook Ultra, however, Asus is using Intel Core Ultra processors from the third-gen range, not unlike what we saw on the Zenbook Duo, and pairing it with between 16 and 64GB RAM, up to 2TB SSD, and turning on the graphics capability with what Intel and Asus says should see the performance outperform an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050.
That system will sit inside a magnesium-aluminium alloy casing, a material and chassis that manages to sit under a kilogram, all while keeping a 10.9 mm slim profile and still featuring a standard rectangular USB-A port alongside USB-C, HDMI, and a 3.5mm headset jack.
The design is made to be slim, and will feature the aforementioned 14 inch screen running 2880×1800 using a tandem OLED panel running at 120Hz, effectively blending two panels in one much like what Apple uses on its iPad Pro 13 inch models.
With that sort of technology, it does seem like the ExpertBook Ultra has the word “premium” in mind, and with a six-speaker Dolby Atmos system inside, it does suggest that’s the case.
Australians curious about the laptop can expect to find it from $3399, though only with the Core Ultra 5 in that price, with a push to the X7 Ultra seeing a starting price closer nearly doubling it to $6199. Oof.
