The acquisition for a replacement travel laptop has been long in gestation: as in the Dell XPS 13 9380 refurbished laptop I picked up from the Dell factory outlet store four years ago have been barely keeping up in 2023 with its intended use case: photo and video editing when I’m traveling. To be fair, the XPS 13 is otherwise still in great working condition, and thanks to a Dbrand decal skin I applied right after I got the laptop, and the twice a year cleaning of its internals – especially the gunk and dust accumulated at the air intake vents and also cooling apparatus. However, trying to edit the drone footage I shot in Hanoi last June on the XPS was a nightmare! So, the Dell XPS 13 will probably get distributed to the kids as a home-based learning laptop, relatively over-powered for that function as it is though.
My requirements for a travel laptop replacement for 2024:
No more than 1.3kg, and the closer it is to 1kg, the better.
16GB RAM + 512GB SSD (or more).
Build that doesn’t feel like it’s going break into pieces if I apply any kind of pressure to it.
Size that’s the same or smaller than the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Pro, my current non-work daily driver laptop.
OLED screen with 90Hz refresh rate, or something near that. It’s really hard to go back to laptops without OLED screens after having used one!
Costs less than $2K.
For those of us who’re familiar with what’s available in the laptop end of things, these requirements above are a pretty tall order. The three opposing laptop traits: cheap, good, and light are basically opposing! E.g. what’s cheap and good won’t be light. What’s good and light won’t be cheap. And cheap and light won’t be any good LOL.
Still, over the months since I’ve been searching for the Dell XPS 13 replacement, a couple of laptop models were permanent residents in consideration. They included:
Dell XPS 13 9315: this laptop met most of the requirements above: in that the build quality of the Dell XPS continue to ooze quality and right up there with the Macbooks, and are built like a tank. The 9315 is reasonably light and compact, and refurbished units can be had for as low as $1.3K. Its problems though lied in the pretty pedestrian onboard processor – an i5-1230U – that was going to be only marginally faster than the Dell XPS 13 9380 it was replacing.
Acer Swift 14: this line of Acer laptops are very well-built and offer very good specifications – including at or near OLED quality screens – and at relatively low prices. They’re not exactly light though, and would had been at around the 1.3kg weight limit or slightly beyond that.
Microsoft Surface Pro 9: this was also in real consideration alongside the Dell XPS 13 9315. The Surface Pros would have easily met the weight and build requirements. The big electronic stores here in Singapore regularly put out these units bundled with Microsoft’s Signature Keyboards at attractive prices of around $1.4K or so for the i5, 8GB RAM and 128GB storage option. I was pretty OK with the limited storage, since I could easily buy a larger capacity 2230 NVMe SSD to replace it on my own. The 8GB RAM onboard was a hard limitation though, and that was going to severely limit any kind of video editing work I’d need the Surface Pro to do. Another worrying trait of the Surface Pros was that I would be unable to do any kind of maintenance on it: disassembling a Surface Pro is well outside my skill level!
Aftershock Lunar 14X: this built-to specification ultra-portable laptop was tempting, and would have met most of all the requirements above, excepting an OLED display. The i7-13700H processor it comes with in particular is crazy fast, the 14X has a huge battery, and I can cram in as fast an SSD as I want in a custom configuration. The only caveats? The laptop is perpetually in pre-order only, it weights 1.3kg – i.e. about where the Slim 7 Pro is, and the build quality is so-so.
LG Grams: LG continues to put out new models in its very long running series of ultra thin and light laptops. These look great and the cheapest models are at the around $2K price point. However, I’ve never been impressed with the Grams’ build, and they – in my opinion – feel flimsy, and has a worrying amount of flex when I apply pressure on the keyboard deck.
In short, all the possibilities I looked at were all decent options, but they each invariably were short in one or two requirements. I was ready to defer my search for a travel laptop till closer to our June vacation. Until over the weekend, I chanced upon an unusual laptop model that I’d not seen on sale before, and at the Millenia Walk branch of Harvey Norman: the Asus Zenbook S13 Ryzen. Its highlight specs:
AMD Ryzen 7 6800U processor: a well-regarded not-Intel processor that’s almost as fast as this Slim 7 Pro’s Ryzen 9 5900HS.
OLED screen and at 2880×1800 resolution. Oh my. But it’s at the ‘normal’ 60Hz refresh. Gah.
16GB RAM + 512GB SSD.
A fairly large 67Wh battery.
1.08kg light! Yes!
And for $1688!!
The laptop was unusual because, simply put, Asus’ top of the line 13.3″ ultraportable laptops usually cost around $2.5K, albeit for the Intel models. That this laptop was priced so attractively I reckon is because it comes with the Ryzen processor, which are cheaper than the Intel equivalents. I didn’t think that it’d be possible to find a ultraportable laptop that is good + light + (relatively) cheap, but this would be it. It ticked every requirement checkbox I had, excepting that I’d hoped for a display that supported higher than 60Hz refresh. Thankfully, that was more a nice to have but not finally something I couldn’t go without.
A quick check online for information on this model all noted very positive remarks of it: like at Ultrabookreview, which called it one of the best-value ultraportables available as of mid-2022, and Notebookcheck.net, which described it as a very successful compact notebook and that they did not encounter any significant weaknesses in their evaluation.
And so, one day after stumbling upon the laptop, I returned to the Millenia Walk outlet during work lunch hour to pick it up, and spent the evening setting it the new ultraportable up. The laptop is indeed as good as from my initial impressions at the store: it’s light, pretty well put together though not to the level of the Dell XPS 13, and has that absolutely stunning OLED screen.
The real test of course would come several months from now: when it comes with me to Cebu and I put it through the expected task load of photo and video editing. So, more notes to come on it soon in June!