It’s been 9 months since Asus unveiled a 14 inch, 3.3 pound budget laptop called the EeeBook E403SA. While the company promised it’d be available in the US in the second half of 2015 for $299 and up, that didn’t happen.

But now you can buy the E403SA. The bad news is that the starting price for the US model of this laptop has gone up by about $100. The good news is that specs are much better.

e403sa_02

The notebook, which is branded as the VivoBook E403SA-US21 on the Asus Store website, is also available from B&H.

It has an Intel Pentium N3700 quad-core processor, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of eMMC storage, as well as a 14 inch, 1920x 1 080 pixel display, 802.11ac WiFi, and Bluetooth 4.0.

The laptop has a USB Type-C port, a USB 3.0 port, and a USB 2.0 port, as well as HDMI, headset, and SD card ports.

Other features include stereo speakers, a microphone, a 57 Wh battery, and a VGA webcam. The laptop measures 13.4″ x 9.3″ x 0.7″.

There’s no word on whether Asus still plans to offer a cheaper model with 2GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, but a product page for the laptop suggests that there may be variations with less storage and memory, slower processors, and lower-resolution displays.

thanks Rufus!

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49 replies on “Asus E403SA laptop has 14 inch FHD display, 4GB RAM, $399 price tag”

  1. Why no affordable 13.3 inch models running Linux? Are WinTel lawyers causing a conspiracy to prevent it? If I have to pay over $500 for a 13.3 inch laptop, a Macbook Air with an SSD is my #1 choice.

  2. Wait for the new Onda OBook 10pro with 10.1 inches and Intel cherry trail X7 8700

  3. It does not surprise me that Asus raised the price on this laptop. They’ve been trying to reinvent the netbook market segment for a while now because of the low margins. In this case, they may have gotten a little too greedy.

  4. Finally perhaps we see the end of lo res laptop screens on budget models? Long been my pet peeve. I use my 75 year old parents as the benchmark. They seem to always want to pay no more than $400 for a computer and end up with something that works okay when brand new and within a year just seems pretty slow and dreadful. And has a 1366×768 screen with resolution of coarse sandpaper. Goodbye please. (Of course now they mostly just use their phones. Which have better than 1080p screens.) And everyone wonders why the PC market’s been dying.

  5. Almost good enough. Not really light for 6 watt processor. Almost decent screen. Too big ASUS logos. Not enough substance.

  6. This sounds like a really decent deal. I wish it was slightly lighter — it’s 3.3 pounds but that isn’t a deal-breaker. Is the RAM upgradable? I’d hold off until I hear how well it works running Ubuntu (or whatever distro) as I don’t feel like being a guinea pig for that!

    Chromebooks make poor machines for switching to Ubuntu as the keyboards are missing required keys!

  7. ASUS, if you’re listening, please make this touchscreen and ChromeOS, the Flip needs a big brother!

    1. On space limited installs W10 can dynamically compress itself… Also, unlike W8, W10 doesn’t require a separate recovery partition and that saves about 8GB vs W8 installs by itself…

      Even W8 could be installed to a 16GB drive with a special compressed install method, which the W10 system is a improvement upon and can basically squeeze itself under 10GB, optimally…

      However, even with 20GB of free space that can go away rather quickly if you’re not careful… So it mainly means you have to do regular maintenance to keep the free space and updates can eat into it too… and you may not be able to install everything you want, and rather juggle app installs as you need them…

      Though, hopefully the Redmond update should finally include the install apps to SD card feature to help alleviate that limitation…

      While near full drives tend not to perform optimally… it’s better if you can keep the drive about half empty… Thus larger drives are still preferable and it doesn’t help that not everyone can get the maximum free space if the W10 install isn’t using maximum compression… along with worry about whatever bloatware the OEM may have installed… So it’s possible to get a W10 with significantly less than 20GB free on a 32GB drive… Meaning you may have to redo the install yourself…

  8. This is the most affordable (retail price) 13-14 inch 1080p windows laptop ever introduced. On top of that, it has the power of an x7, plenty of graphics power, 128gb of memory, and 4 gigs of ram…and half these comments are of people complaining about it being too expensive. What am I missing here?

    1. Storage is eMMC, Lenovo is putting 120gb SATA SSDs in $230 laptops these days.

      1. Still, eMMC is still way better than traditional hard disks that many laptops still use, even if the max bandwidth isn’t as good as full SSDs.

        1. I’d rather have the traditional HDD, at least those I can upgrade to a real SSD later.

      2. I’m interested in that $230 Lenovo with the 120gb SATA SSD in it! Which one? Thanks!

          1. Because of Windows’ resolution scaling problems. I actually prefer a 768 screen for something as small as an 11.3″ laptop. Once you get up to 13.3″ or 14″ screens, I’d like a 900 or 1080 screen, assuming they’re good IPS screens like on the Zenbooks. Lack of removable storage is a bigger deal breaker for me.

      3. Link please? And unless you are referring to direct-from-China or an open box special I don’t believe it. .

      1. You can’t buy those in the U.S. though, and they’re cheaply made. Good luck getting customer service on your chinese laptop.

        1. Ironically Asus laptops are made in China too,and yes you can buy them in the US.

          1. They’re made in taiwan, and you didn’t say made in china, you said chinese brands.

          2. You think because Asus are based in Taiwan that all their manufacturing is there? Lol. Do you think Apple products are made in America?

          3. Doesn’t Foxconn make most of Apple’s products… Another taiwanese conpany..

          4. Asus takes up the liability for tech support (for whatever that’s worth). Good luck getting one of those no-name companies to own up to product liability laws in your country.

          5. Spend 2 minutes on the ASUS facebook page to see 100% of posts about how Asus ignore them 🙂

          6. Ayup, I had an Asus laptop a long time ago too…with international VIP care package. They lost my warranty registration somehow along the way and I couldn’t really make headway with their warranty service. I eventually gave up and repaired it myself with parts from ebay, It taught me a valuable lesson: Asus warranty don’t mean jack. But if the damn thing catches fire and burns my house down. I know who to sue, and my lawyer will talk to their lawyer (and most likely an out-of-court settlement will happen), something that’s quite a bit harder to do with some no-name Shenzhen company that doesn’t have an office in my country. 😉

    2. First of all, it’s not an X7, it’s an N3700. Secondly, If it’s running eMMC for storage, it’s not a real PC.
      If that eMMC were changed to a standard form factor SSD, I think people would grumble a bit at the price but it would have been accepted.

      1. its also important to point out that the N3700 is in fact a jan 2015 cpu/soc why are the brand names so far behind,trying to sell a year+ old soc as the new shinny!

        1. Well, I’m assuming it’s because Intel doesn’t have a successor to Braswell/Cherry Trail yet…

  9. Seems overpriced. You can buy a 15.6″ Acer Chromebook with 1080p IPS, 4 Gigs RAM and 16 or 32GB storage for considerably cheaper. I believe those use M.2 storage as well so you could upgrade to the 128 and still be under the price for this 14″ model.
    Most importantly that Acer uses a Broadwell class Celeron rather than a Braswell processor. Not that an n3700 should be horrible. But that Broadwell is a definite upgrade.
    Of course this appears to be a Windows machine. So that’s… something.

    1. Amazon have a 15″ Acer Celeron Chromebook with 32GB for $389, this is 128GB model for $399. I know which I’d rather have.

      Perhaps you can get it “considerably cheaper” from somewhere else, but then that may be true of the Asus too – remember that brand new models tend to be more expensive for a while, discounted prices come later on.

      1. You are correct about new models costing more. Very fair point there.
        Acer has the 15.6″ in quite a range of specs. I see even Google Store has the 4GB/16GB 1080p screen for $279 though. From memory these use M.2 for internal storage so you could put in the 128GB in place of the 16GB for probably $60.
        Of course there is still the Windows vs Chrome OS thing to consider. That depends on what you need. For myself I’d choose Chrome OS at even money over Windows for my laptop usage.

    2. The problem I see with Chromebooks is that they can only run Chrome OS (maybe Linux depending on models). Most Windows laptops can run Windows, or Linux or Chrome OS…or even multiple combinations of the above through VMs or partitions.

      1. That’s true with the exception of them being able to run Chrome OS. But that flexibility carries a price in the form of complexity and maintenance time. So if you aren’t going to use that flexibility then Chrome OS is ideal. Within the framework of what it does – and the web does a lot today and will do all the more tomorrow – it is superior I think.

  10. I would buy one of these immediately once they land in EU/UK. Glad to see full HD displays making it onto ever cheaper machines. The UX305 range has been really tempting too but my current big laptop is still going strong. At £300-£400 this would tempt me to get this just for travelling.

    1. Hold the bus! On the specs page of the site the display is listed as… 14.0″ Auto HD 1366×768.

      No idea what Auto HD is but I’ll pass on this if it’s 1366×768. I gave up on that resolution 10 years ago and still can’t believe it’s everywhere.

  11. This looks great for an entry level machine, I would have been tempted at $299. Though the N3700 is only about the same performance as the x7-z8700 Atom, with a slightly better GPU and extra peripherals.

    1. I would assume so since the specs don’t say otherwise. Too bad because this is a nice fanless notebook.

  12. Will this be good for my aunt? She wants a large screen laptop, this isn’t 15 inch but it’s bigger than the 11 and 13 inch ones.
    Good to see it have usb type c

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