This year, more people than usual are considering replacing their laptops. A common motivation is the end of official support for Windows 10, but there are also technical reasons that encourage you to buy a new notebook. In short, notebook computers have become much better over the last few years. To some extent, this is due to the first MacBooks with the Apple M1 processor, which significantly raised the bar for the entire industry in areas such as battery life, performance when working with multimedia, performance when disconnected from the charger, etc., and forced the entire market to catch up. For the benefit of everyone, as the tests of the Asus ExpertBook Ultra business laptop showed me.
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Asus ExpertBook Ultra: thin and light, but solid
The mentioned Asus ExpertBook Ultra is premium business laptop and you can see and feel it right away. Its housing is made of aluminum and magnesium alloymaking it very thin and light (just over 1 kg in the tested configuration with a touch screen and the matte version of Gorilla Glass Victus glass), and at the same time very solid and stiff. What is very important for many people, the mentioned thinness and lightness did not negatively affect not only the quality of workmanship, but also the functionality, because this notebook was equipped with two classic USB-A connectors and a full-size HDMI 2.1 connectorso it does not force the user to use annoying accessories with additional ports.
Thin and light, but still functional with USB-A and HDMI 2.1 connections.
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Mieszko Krzykowski / Onet
ExpertBook Ultra casing it is finished with a special matte ceramic coatingwhich is very resistant to scratches and does not collect fingerprints at all, which is a big plus for me. However, not everyone will like it because of its feel. It's hard to describe, but it feels more like “premium plastic” in this respect than the metallic coldness of a typical MacBook Pro. This is the specific charm of the materials used.
ExpertBook Ultra has an interestingly designed glass haptic trackpad that is not built in at the bottom edge.
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Mieszko Krzykowski / Onet
Brilliant matte Tandem OLED screen of ExpretBook Ultra
However, it is certainly a matter of taste that the first thing that catches your eye after opening the ExpertBook Ultra is its screen. It was installed in the configuration we received Tandem OLED touch panel covered with frosted glass and he is brilliant in every possible way. You can think of it as a slightly larger and slightly darker version of the iPad Pro OLED screens with a nanostructured coating, which in practice means almost reference color reproduction, perfect image readability in all conditions and excellent support for HDR content.
The matte, OLED touch screen is definitely one of the biggest advantages of the ExpertBook Ultra.
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Mieszko Krzykowski / Onet
If you often work outdoors or process multimedia – especially those mastered with HDR in mind – you will be delighted. And from a broader perspective, the quality of screens like the one on the ExpertBook Ultra and touch support are currently some of the main advantages that Windows laptops have over MacBooks.
Thanks to Intel, Windows laptops are learning new tricks
The main reason that the title of this article contains information about the laptop of the future is the tested ExpertBook Ultra new Intel Core Ultra 300 series processor (more specifically, Core Ultra X7 358H). These systems had their official premiere at the beginning of the year and will appear in subsequent laptop models over the next few months. They are definitely worth remembering, because they are not just another boring chips that do not change much in practice. You can think of them a bit as the Intel equivalent of Apple's M processorswhich revolutionized MacBooks a few years ago.
The new generation of Intel processors for thin and light laptops brings a generational leap in quality.
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Mieszko Krzykowski / Onet
The difference in performance compared to the Core Ultra 200 V series processors, i.e. their direct predecessors, is huge – in applications using many processor cores, of which there are as many as 16 in the tested model, it can even be almost twice as high. Importantly, a very large part of this performance can be used not only when the laptop is connected to the charger, which has been the Achilles' heel of Windows laptops for years. And what is even more important, this high efficiency does not reduce the battery life, because on the contrary – tests show that new Intel processors are currently the most energy-efficient systems for thin and light Windows laptops. In the tested Asus ExpertBook Ultra, I had no major problems with achieving a battery life of several hours.
Asus ExpertBook Ultra
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Onet
It deserves separate mention the letter X in the processor name tested ExpertBook Ultra. It denotes models with more powerful, 12-core GPUs. People who use GPU-intensive applications, including AI, should pay attention to them. Intel Arc B390, which is the full name of Intel's most powerful integrated GPU, allowed me to comfortably use, among others, the GPU-accelerated AI functions of the Adobe Lightroom application, such as fast masking and AI denoising (in the case of 26 MP photos it took about 8 seconds). Its performance when editing video using Adobe Premiere and DaVinci Resolve is also very good. Finally, I loaded the gpt-oss:20b language model and it ran at a rate of 30-35 tokens per second, which is already very usable. Until now, to be able to work comfortably with these applications and tools, you had to choose hardware with a dedicated GPU or alternatively one of the few laptops with an AMD Ryzen AI Max processor and put up with worse battery life, greater weight and often more noise. Now these compromises are finally no longer necessary.
Thin, light and efficient.
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Mieszko Krzykowski / Onet
This year's laptops promise to be great. There is only one catch
To sum up, the tests of the representative of the business “laptops of the future”, the Asus ExpertBook Ultra, were very good. This equipment has everything to satisfy even the most demanding users of notebooks of this class. In terms of build quality, keyboard and trackpad, it is a top-class notebook its matte, touch-sensitive Tandem OLED display is a technological work of artfrom which you cannot take your eyes off. However, the new Intel Core Ultra X 300 series processor makes it not only efficient – especially in multimedia and AI applications – but also long-lasting battery life. You could say that this year, many Windows laptop users will finally get a viable alternative to MacBooks — in some ways even better than them.
A magnesium and aluminum alloy covered with a ceramic coating makes this laptop very light, but at the same time solid and scratch-resistant.
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Mieszko Krzykowski / Onet
The only potential problem is that its availability and final price are a big question mark. This is not Asus' fault, but the global problem with the availability of computer memory and the related skyrocketing component prices. Since it is a premium computer, it should be more resistant to these market turbulences, but it will not be easy to price it attractively. Whatever the case, if you're thinking about purchasing a new thin and light premium business laptop, it is worth looking out for the April store debut of ExpertBook Ultra and other representatives of the upcoming wave of laptops in this class, because in some respects they bring with them a generational qualitative leapwhich we haven't had on the Windows laptop market for a long time.
