The Asus ZenBook S (UX393) is a thin and light laptop with a 13.9 inch touchscreen display with a 3:2 aspect ratio, a resolution of 3300 x 2200 pixels, support for up to 500 nits of brightness, and slim bezels for a 92-percent screen-to-body ratio.
Weighing just under 3 pounds and measuring about 0.6 inches thick, it’s a compact laptop that doesn’t skimp too much on ports — there’s a full-sized HDMI port as well as two Thunderbolt 3/USB-C ports and a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port and microSD card reader.
The only disappointing thing? The new Asus ZenBook S is a premium laptop that will ship with a 10th-gen Intel Ice Lake processor rather than a newer, faster 11th-gen Intel Tiger Lake chip.
Update: It turns out Asus is offering the ZenBook S (UX393) with Intel Tiger Lake after all. Just a few days after introducing the laptop with Ice Lake chips, the company has added it to a long list of Asus laptops with Tiger Lake processors.
Ice Lake chips are nothing to sneeze at – the Asus ZenBook S (UX393) features an Intel Core i7-1065G7 quad-core processor with Intel Iris Plus graphics, which means it should offer about twice the graphics performance of an 8th-gen Intel Core U-series processor. But Tiger Lake chips are expected to bring a 2X graphics performance boost, as well as a more modest improvement in CPU performance.
Tiger Lake also brings support for Thunderbolt 4 and USB 4 technology.
If you’re not holding out for a Tiger Lake version of the ZenBook S though, here are a few of its other key features: the laptop has a 67 Wh battery, a 65W USB-C power adapter, an IR webcam with Windows Hellow support, Harman Kardon speakers, and support for up to 16GB of LPDDR4x-3200 RAM and 1TB of PCIe NVMe storage.
There’s also an Asus NumberPad below the keyboard, which means that you can use the glass-covered touchpad as a number pad.
One thing that’s missing? A dedicated headphone jack. Instead the Asus ZenBook S (UX393) comes with a USB-C to 3.5mm audio adapter.