For several years now, Asus' Zenbook ultraportable line has largely been a more affordable but capable alternative to some of the best ultraportables, like Dell's XPS 13 or HP's Dragonflys. In recent years, Asus has aggressively shifted to OLED screens, which helped the line stand out a bit more. But with its 2023 model, the Zenbook S 13 OLED (UX5304), Asus seems to be attempting to go from an also-ran to a leader in terms of design, while also maintaining its value angle – at least for those who can make use of its ample specs.
With an Intel 13th Gen Core i7-1355U processor, 1TB SSD and an impressive 32GB of RAM as standard, along with a 13.3-inch 2880 x 1800 OLED display, the Zenbook S 13 brings impressive specs for its $1,399 price. And while that's more than the $1,099 starting price of last year's model, it's also 0.23 pounds lighter (2.2 pounds) and thinner (0.43 inches) than its predecessor while delivering both Thunderbolt 4/USB-C ports and a still-handy USB-A port. While its battery life wasn't better than the MacBook Air or the most recent XPS 13, the Zenbook did last over 10 hours in our testing, which is solid for something this thin and light.
But while all of that sounds (and indeed is) quite impressive, there are some downsides to the Zenbook S 13. For starters, the laptop ships with some nagging bloatware (McAfee is the main culprit). And performance in CPU-heavy long-term tasks definitely suffers as a result of the limited cooling afforded by the laptop's stylishly slim design. So it's better suited to light and bursty computing tasks.
It's also important to note we had a major issue with our first review unit. Near the end of our 30-minute Cinebench stress test, the display suddenly went permanently black, refusing to display anything, while every other aspect of the laptop functioned normally. We were worried that heat may have caused this issue, but Asus sent us another unit, which we put through the same stress test – three times in a row just to be sure – and the display on that unit continued to function perfectly. Considering no one else who reviewed this laptop seems to have suffered a screen failure, and we couldn't find any user reviews complaining of the same problem, it seems likely that our first unit was just faulty.
