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The Asus ZenBook 13 laptop has been out for more than two years, so it’s not packed with the latest technology. Its glossy chassis is a fingerprint magnet, and its shallow keyboard might not agree with your typing style unless you’ve spent some time seated in front of the butterfly keyboard of MacBooks of yore. But like a MacBook, it oozes style with its all-metal design, trim dimensions and light weight. Plus, it offers more solid-state storage capability than almost any other laptop at its current price, which is: just $652 at Amazon. That’s down from $770 the beginning of May, and just $700 a couple of weeks ago. (It has bounced between its previous all-time low price of $663 and $700 for the past week.)
Why take the plunge? We reviewed the Asus ZenBook 13 in a similar configuration in 2018 that featured a smaller SSD and dedicated GeForce graphics (also at Amazon for $800). But here’s the TL;DR: This 13-inch ultraportable laptop was released in early 2018 and features an eighth-gen Core i5 CPU and 8GB of RAM — both standard components for the price and its era. What stands out is the 512GB SSD, which is double the capacity that you’ll find in the vast majority of laptops that cost less than $1,000. It also boasts an all-metal enclosure, another rarity at this price where plastic lids or bottom panels are common.
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The 13.3-inch touch display offers a 1,920×1,080-pixel resolution and 300 nits of brightness. It also offers active pen support, although this is a traditional laptop with a display that, unlike a 2-in-1 convertible laptop’s, can’t rotate 360 degrees into a tablet mode that would make writing on the display more comfortable. If you’re looking for a portable, 13-inch laptop, however, it fits the bill with its 2.5-pound weight. It also ran for nearly 11 hours in our demanding battery-drain test, and the system we tested had a dedicated GPU that usually has an adverse effect on battery life. This discounted model features integrated graphics, so you can expect 11 hours or more of running time.
Not to your liking? Check out our list of the best laptops of 2020 for options with fewer caveats — but expect to pay more.
