Asus drops two OLED Zenbooks and a new logo
Asus has quietly announced two additions to its Zenbook line that are all about the screens. The new AMD-powered Zenbook 13 S joins a limited, but slowly growing lineup of 13-inch OLED laptops for folks seeking the benefits of OLED technology for a consumer-accessible price. But Asus isn’t leaving Intel behind — the company has also unveiled a new Zenbook Pro 15 Flip OLED convertible powered by 12th-Gen Core processors and Arc GPUs.
The Zenbook 13 S OLED doesn’t look too different from 13-inch Zenbooks we’ve seen before. It weighs 2.2 pounds and is just over half an inch thick. It’s available in some fun colors: Ponder Blue, Aqua Celadon, Refined White, and Vestige Beige. But the most interesting thing is that the word “Asus,” famously prominent on Zenbook lids, has been replaced with a new arrow-shaped logo. This looks much nicer to me and more like something I wouldn’t mind having in a coffee shop all day.
About the screen: it’s a 2.8K 16:10 touchscreen with a 0.2ms response time and a claimed 550 nits of peak brightness. The 13-inch OLED Zenbook we reviewed last year delivered a vivid and bright experience, and such a screen could be a good option for multimedia viewing. In terms of connectivity, there’s 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 32GB of RAM (LPDDR5) and 1TB of storage. We haven’t gotten to do a ton of testing with these processors yet, but we expect them to be more than capable of handling entertainment, office work, and other tasks generally done on 13-inch laptops.
Asus has not given us a price or release date for this device, but a 13.9-inch Zenbook S (with no OLED) is currently going for $1,699.98.
This could be you, if you buy the Zenbook Pro 15 Flip OLED.
Image: Asus
Flip it into tablet mode.
Image: Asus
Or whatever you call thsi mode!
Image; Asus
Here’s the Zenbook S.
Image: Asus
This one comes in funky colors.
Image: Asus
On the Intel side, Zenbook Pro 15 Flip OLED is more of a workstation device. It’s powered by 12th-Gen 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 1TB of storage, and up to 16GB of memory (which is odd since the 13-incher goes up to 32GB). Previous Zenbook 15 Flip models (with Nvidia GPUs rather than Intel ones) are currently going for as much as $1,499.
We hope to update this information with prices and release dates as soon as those are available.
