ASUS ZenBook 3 review: lots of powerful hardware, thin, cheaper than competitors, but keyboard and trackpad hard to use
Apple's tiny MacBook was a revelation when it debuted last year. It was thinner and lighter than most ultraportables on the market, and its refined design brought over some cues from Apple's mobile hardware.
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's 2015 MacBook set the ultraportable template: remarkably thin and light, with a great display and trackpad, but performance a step behind its own Broadwell siblings and life with one port as a compromise. In May, ASUS answered on paper with the ZenBook 3 announcement — thinner, lighter, faster, with a Core i7, 16GB RAM, and a 1TB SSD at $1,999.
This review is the verdict on that spec sheet: the hardware and price hold up against the MacBook, but the keyboard and trackpad — the two surfaces a buyer touches every minute — are hard to use. The trade ASUS made to hit the thickness target shows up exactly where Apple spent its engineering.
First-order effects
- Ultraportable buyers get a credible MacBook alternative with more RAM, storage, and CPU headroom for the same class of money — but only if they can live with subpar typing and cursor control.
Second-order effects
- ASUS's price-to-specs attack forces the comparison onto inputs rather than numbers, which is Apple's home turf — a gap reviewers were still crediting Apple for in the MacBook Air M4 review nearly a decade later.
Third-order effects
- The pattern repeats across ASUS's line — the Zenbook Duo traded a higher price for unoptimized two-screen software, and the Zenbook A16 paired strong specs with a cheap-feeling chassis — suggesting a structural split where Windows vendors win spec sheets while Apple compounds a refinement moat.
The trend: Ultraportable laptops are converging on Apple's thinness-and-price formula on paper, while sustained competition increasingly hinges on input quality and chassis refinement rather than raw specifications.