One of the best productivity laptops I've tested is not a ThinkPad or MacBook (and it's $300 off for Prime Day)

2 weeks ago 10

What's the Amazon Prime Day deal?

Amazon's October Prime Day event has officially ended, but many laptops are still on sale. The Asus Vivobook S 15 in particular is seeing a $310 discount, dropping from $1,300 to $989. It's the first Asus Copilot Plus PC and comes highly recommended for its performance.

Also: Amazon Prime Day: Best 160+ deals live ahead of October's Big Deal Days sale

ZDNET's key takeaways

The Vivobook S 15, Asus' first Copilot+ PC, normally retails for $1,299.
It's sleek and lightweight with a gorgeous OLED display, great battery life, and snappy performance.
The nature of Windows on ARM laptops means it's not yet optimized for certain apps and games.

Asus' first Copilot+ PC with the Snapdragon X Elite chip is the Vivobook S 15, a sleek and lightweight 15-inch laptop with a gorgeous display and ultra-snappy performance. Right now, it's currently $200 off the regular price, making it a steal for some of the newest processor technology on the market.

The chassis' minimalist, all-metal design is lightweight and airy, and it feels more premium than last year's Vivobook S 14. It's only 0.58 inches at its thinnest point, and it weighs just 3.13 pounds, making it particularly well-suited for hybrid or remote workers who want a powerful laptop with a gorgeous display that doesn't weigh a ton.

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Like all of the new Windows on ARM laptops released this summer, the Vivobook S 15 is fast and responsive with nice battery life, but it comes with new technology that isn't fully optimized for all tasks quite yet, which could limit its use case for some users.

For the average consumer, however, this is the epitome of a laptop that looks and feels good right out of the box, and it starts with the brilliant 3K OLED display.

View at Asus

With an 89% screen-to-body ratio and ultra-thin bezels, the screen is brilliant and high-contrast, rocking a max 600-nit brightness and 120Hz refresh rate for some silky-smooth and crisp image quality.

The display's 16:9 resolution gives it that premium widescreen feel, lending itself well to both watching and editing media, but it might not be for everyone. Most 15-inch laptops come with a 16:10 resolution, which might feel more "natural" for some, but ultimately the distinction is subtle.

With 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, Asus is able to keep costs close to that $1,000 price point with just the right amount of hardware on this machine. And it feels even better in tandem with the snappy, responsive performance the Snapdragon X Elite processor provides.

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The Vivobook S 15 features the 12-core, 3.4GHz chip with a 45 TOPS NPU, the same one found in the HP Omnibook X 14, but slightly below the 3.8GHz chip in the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Edge.

The benchmarking scores in Cinebench reflect that same hierarchy, with numbers above the Omnibook and just below the Galaxy Book 4 Edge. In testing the CPU's performance, I got a single-core score of 106 and a multi-core score of 969. In Geekbench, I got a single-core of 2447 and a multi-core of 14384.

Keep in mind that these scores were recorded while the device was plugged into power. While on battery, I got scores about 30% lower -- somewhat more of a difference than I expected. This is in comparison to the HP Omnibook X 14, which had a much narrower gap in scores in my testing, something I noted as I was reviewing it.

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This paints a picture of a laptop that has somewhat variable battery life, depending on what you're doing and what kind of mode you have the laptop in. There's no escaping the power this display requires, and if you're someone who typically ignores battery setting profiles and keeps your machine blasting at "Best Performance," you may want to adjust the power modes in either the MyAsus software or in Windows (or both) because you'll see a drastic difference.

That being said, the 70Wh battery performance on the Vivobook S 15 is good, but the user must manage it to maximize its efficiency. During the battery test that ZDNET runs on all laptops, I got about 10 and a half hours before it died, but that number fluctuated in subsequent tests with different power mode settings.

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Optimization is the theme here, and this also extends to its performance. The Windows on ARM architecture provides fantastic up-front performance in ways that are immediately apparent to most users. But when you start looking closely at more specialized tasks, things have the potential to get tricky.

For example, the Vivobook S 15's aforementioned 16:9 resolution OLED screen seems like it would be perfect for editing video. While the integrated Qualcomm Adreno GPU is up to the task, its interaction with different apps and their performance in Windows (via Prism) is still a work in progress.

During my testing, I ran DaVinci Resolve for Windows on ARM, and it worked mostly fine, but the performance is still not 100% optimized. There was some lag, graphic stuttering, and quirkiness, especially with 4K video. Adobe Photoshop, however, ran smoothly, with local AI-generative tasks popping off seamlessly with help from the NPU on board the Snapdragon. I expect performance to continue to improve as Windows gets better and developers improve their products for the platform.

The other elephant in the room is gaming, which is not entirely up to speed with Windows on ARM. Yes, technically, you can game on this laptop, but many titles still don't run, and the ones that do are not well-optimized. Although the Vivobook S 15 looks like something you might want to game on, I wouldn't recommend it as a dedicated gaming laptop. At least not yet.

Also: Google's new Chromebook Plus AI features could give Windows Copilot a run for its money

Instead, I see the Vivobook S 15 as a primary driver for remote workers or digital nomads who are already integrating AI into their workflows and appreciate an aesthetic laptop with a brilliant display that handles media well. Supporting that use case, it has a generous selection of ports: two USB-A ports on the right-hand side, two USB-C on the left, an HDMI port, a MicroSD slot, and a headphone jack.

It also has a "full" keyboard (the number pad on the right side has slightly smaller keys, as typical for sub-16-inch machines), which is satisfying and responsive to typing on. The keyboard has colorful LED backlighting that can be configured in many different lights and effects, but again, this is not something that I would consider high on the priority list when optimizing battery life.

ZDNET's buying advice

The Asus Vivobook S 15 is a sleek and lightweight laptop with a gorgeous OLED display and solid battery life -- as long as you're mindful about your power usage. I'd recommend it to forward-thinking digital nomads who want a performant, AI-ready laptop with the blazing-fast Snapdragon X Elite processor. It's a solid investment for people who regularly swap between creative work, productivity software, and media.

All things considered, the sale price of $989 is very competitive for this laptop, particularly for the display alone.

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