Let me start off with I really wanted to like this laptop. I have loved ASUS products for awhile now, but this was sure a complete disappointment. I researched this laptop for months before purchasing. It’s essentially the US version of the Zenbook flip 15. Best Buy must have bought marketing rights and just labeled it as a Q series. The only difference is there isn’t a fingerprint reader on this model, 4k screen instead of a HD (1920x1080p) screen, and the storage is different. But this laptop has some major design quirks.
Let’s start with the good:
- Screen resolution and quality (except burn in, see below)
- Body build quality (except bottom of the chassis, see below)
- Track Pad was probably the best I have ever used. Very responsive and not finnicky
- Good amounts of USB ports and Thunderbolt 3 ports.
- Extremely fast, SSD paired with the 1050, the ram, the i7, it booted and ran like a true workhorse.
- Good components (ASUS uses quality parts, other than the screen…)
- Good key travel and feeling keyboard, great lighting on the keyboard. (horrible 10-key, see below)
- Windows Hello facial recognition
- Sleek design and great color
Now, the bad:
- Screen burn in right out of the box:
This is the main reason for my two stars, I cannot believe that ASUS shipped these laptops with such horrid issues right out of the box. The screen depth was nice, its clarity was great. But man, the task manager after a few days immediately burnt into the screen. It was hardly noticeable, but on certain darks on movies, or certain grays, or drawing on the screen you could obviously see the windows icon, the time, etc.
I didn’t want to believe the reviews, I wanted this laptop to be the one that worked. Some people got away without having screen burn issues by hiding their task bar. But I guarantee you are going to see major issues in the future. If you accidentally left your screen on for more than 4 hours without some type of dimming or screen saver (it happens, like falling asleep on a movie title screen) you will FOR SURE get screen burn.
This was completely unacceptable for a $1,500 laptop to me. Maybe to you it won’t be a big deal, but I couldn’t handle this, and it made me very disappointed with ASUS. I tried including a image of the burn in, and mine wasn’t as bad as others (I only had it for around 3 weeks.) But Best Buy only let's me upload two images, and it's hard to tell when you're using a phone to take a picture of the screen. Just take my word for it, I didn't want to believe anyone when I heard it.
A note on this only the 4k resolution screens appear to be having these issues. The 1080p Zenbook flip 15 (not sold in the US) has had no screen burn in reports. Asus must be going through a cheap manufacturer for the 4k screens.
- Windows Pen Protocol and Windows Ink doesn’t work well, or at all:
The touch screen was horrible when trying to use the Windows Pen Protocol with my Bamboo Ink. It always, always glitched. I couldn’t take notes or write consistently without it skipping lines or being unrecognizable. I’m assuming this was some random issue with it keeping performance going to the windows ink workspace. But this was one of my main selling points, and it didn’t work like it was supposed to.
- Horrible Number Pad:
This was another selling point for me is to have a 10 key number pad, but the layout of it was so bad it pretty much shouldn’t have been there at all. They tried to just cram it in the corner, the enter key didn’t feel right, the addition and subtraction was in a weird spot, it just didn’t feel good to use. It probably would have felt better over time of getting used to it, but doing my physics homework I hated typing in formulas with this 10 key.
- Poor motherboard protection for the air intake on the undercarriage:
You literally can see the exposed motherboard through the vents in plain light (see images below). Absolutely no dust protection, and no protection to the motherboard. The vents were huge, and really didn’t pull much air in at all in that location. If you set your laptop down on a weird object, I’d say goodbye to your motherboard. The vents felt sturdy, but I wouldn’t trust them one bit.
- Poor cooling design in general:
I’m pretty sure part of the screen burn in issues comes from one of the exhaust vents for the CPU shooting straight into the screen. It doesn’t go behind the screen, it puts the heat onto the screen from the weird hinge design. I’ll talk about that below.
- Poor screen hinge design:
The laptop when used normally (not flipped over in tablet mode) has hinges that make it so the laptop rests on the screen itself. It has these small, ridiculous rubber feet that keep your screen off of what you are resting it on, but I think this is a horrible design. Those small rubber feet will wear off or peel fast, and you will just be resting your screen on the table. It slightly props the laptop up so it gets more cooling, but it’s still a horrible design. (Picture included below showing how bad the screen droops from the actual chassis).
- Medium to heavy gaming is horrible:
Now, this laptop will absolutely give you great frames on low / medium settings like PUBG, Battlefield, GTA, etc. The problem is thermal locking. This laptop cannot for the life of it keep the GPU and CPU cool. I had it placed on a Cooler Master laptop cooler even, and the laptop was too hot to even touch during a game of PUBG. Light gaming is fine, but really, this laptop cannot keep up with cooling. I’d assume you could get some hardware damage over time of gaming. If you plan on using this for any type of major processing or heavy gaming I wouldn’t think twice. It cannot keep cool, it doesn’t have the thermal dissipation that most gaming laptops have even though this is the same price. I’d say it’s too powerful for its own good.
- Large charger, and less than average battery life:
Even on power saving and medium-high brightness it never showed more than 4 hours with light use. (like surfing the web, mild workplace use.) It’s a laptop made to be on the go, but you are guaranteed to be carrying around a hunky charger with it. Obviously, it needs that power for the GPU and CPU, but in reality, it can’t even keep up with cooling to use either of them effectively.
My Verdict:
I think this isn’t a bad laptop by any means. But those issues mentioned above really made this laptop not worth the price to me. I really wanted to love this laptop, I spent a few months researching this and competitors and this seemed like the perfect fit for me. But, in the end over using it I had to take it back. For $1,500 you can get some extreme quality 2 in 1 Ultrabook’s. This Asus was just crammed down by hardware faults, design flaws, and it didn’t seem to know what its identity was.
Would I recommend you buy this laptop? Absolutely not, unless it was $1,000 instead of $1,500. If they fixed the burn in issues, WPP issues, then I’d probably recommend it. As of now, until they update this model, it’s not worth it’s price.
The laptop I ended up exchanging for is the new design HP Spectre X360 15” (15-CH011DX). They seemed to fix the cooling issues with the new model, and I’ll make sure to write a review about this laptop. I do enjoy it much more than I did the Asus though, but it has its own quirks.