LG isn’t the only company slimming down the size of its 17 inch laptops. Asus has a new 17 inch mobile workstation on the way that should fit into a laptop case designed to carry a 15 inch MacBook Pro.
It’s called the Asus StudioBook S W700, and the laptop sports slim bezels, a thin design and an awful lot of horsepower under the lid, which helps explain why it’s thin, but not necessary very light.
The StudioBook S W700 measures 15″ x 11.3″ x 0.7″ and weighs about 5.3 pounds. That’s pretty compact for a 17 inch notebook, but there are plenty of lighter models with 15.6 inch or smaller screens.
But few of them have specs like the StudioBook’s. It will be available with up to an Intel Xeon E-2176M processor, up to NVIDIA Quadro P3200 graphics, up to 64GB of RAM, and up to 4TB of PCIe NVMe storage.
There are two slots for memory and two for storage.
The system has a 1920 x 1200 pixel display, a 180-degree hinge, a Thunderbolt 3 port, three USB 3.1 ports, HDMI 2.0, an SD card reader, 802.11ax WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0.
Asus also borrowed an idea from some of its recent ZenBook laptops and put a number pad function in the touchpad. When active, you’ll be able to see a numeric keypad illuminated on the touchscreen. Or you can turn off the number pad by clicking the corner to use the touchpad normally.
If there’s one weak point it’s probably the battery: I’m skeptical that you’ll get a lot of run time out of a computer with that kind of hardware when it relies on a relatively small 57 Wh battery.
Asus hasn’t announced the price or release date for the StudioBook S W700 yet.
This texture makes me dizzy.
I imagine battery isn’t much of an issue since it will be used like many 15-inchers, generally as more of a portable-from-one-location-to-another rather than and on-the-go- pc; Any users confined to the space of a train or plane, etc, would probably prefer a 13-incher – and even those places are starting to offer plugin points now.
It will be interesting to see what the cost is, and whether there is a touchscreen version?