Right here’s what Asus is pitting in opposition to the MacBook Professional this yr — 9 OLED laptops

From the start, the Asus Zenbook was an try and beat Apple’s MacBooks at their very own sport — utilizing data Asus initially obtained whereas serving to to construct these laptops for Apple. Why do I carry that up? We’re questioning whether or not the brand new Asus ZenBook Professional 14 and 16X would possibly give them a run for his or her cash.

Considered one of them, the Zenbook Professional 14 OLED, is brand-new, with a 14.5-inch 120Hz OLED display screen at 2.8K decision that shows 100% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut and homes as much as a Core i9-13900H and GeForce RTX 4070 GPU — and may let these chips hit 105W regardless of its 1.8cm (0.7-inch) body. (That’s solely barely thicker than Apple’s MacBook Professionals.) It manages to suit a 76Wh battery in there, too.

It could possibly activate and off that 40-series cell GPU with a devoted swap and contains a full-size SD card slot, full-size HDMI 2.1, full-size USB, Thunderbolt 4, and USB-C, all at USB 3.2 Gen 2 speeds, plus a headphone jack.

Then there’s the Asus Zenbook Professional 16X OLED, the refreshed model of the fancy keyboard-tray-lifting machine I told you about last year. It’s greater than your common refresh: Asus says it labored with Intel on a customized i9-13905H chip, shrunk the motherboard by 38 %, and added liquid steel cooling and a curved vapor chamber so its chips — together with an RTX 4080 cell chip — can hit a 155W TDP. That one’s obtained a 3.2K 120HZ OLED panel, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, an SD Categorical card slot, HDMI 2.1, and a pen, plus a 96Wh battery all in a 16.9mm body.

Reasonably than inform you about all the remainder, since they’re principally spec refreshes, I’m going to reap the benefits of Asus’ helpful bento field fashion spec and have breakouts! However I’m actually wanting to see how the Zenbook Professionals carry out later this yr. Here’s the press release if you want more proper now.

Asus didn’t reveal costs for these new machines but, however they’re additionally not coming instantly — the Zenbooks, ProArt Studiobooks, and Vivobooks are coming in Q2, with the ExpertBook B9 arriving in Q3.