Is Evo a winner?

Intel has once again done what it does so well – establish excellent baseline specs for its partners.

Intel has done a lot of work to ensure laptop vendors are delivering outcomes that consumers actually want in 2021, which means you could pretty much pick any Evo laptop at random and you’re going to end up with a decent professional Ultrabook. While great for consumers, it makes it difficult for vendors to differentiate their products from the crowd and so price was a critical factor this year. Devices with long pedigrees continued to charge premiums, but with Intel performing quality control checks, it really opened the door for up-and-comers to undercut the more established competition.

The Most Evo-lved

The three winners in this roundup were all the most competitive on price but also managed to squeeze some value-add components into their setups without jettisoning anything critical. Asus’s ZenBook Flip 13 was our top pick overall, primarily because it was able to drop an OLED screen onto the unit without adding to the cost. In addition to this the device offers a trackpad that doubles as a number pad, a 4,096 pressure point stylus, 10-point touchscreen with convertible hinge and broad interface compatibility for the lowest overall price. A pretty amazing achievement if you ask us.

The two runners up were the Swift 5 from Acer and MSI’s Prestige 14 Evo, which were both great value, but also included storage bonuses. Acer’s was simpler in that it was just bigger, but MSI actually installed a 4th generation PCIe SSD, which can read and write more than twice as fast as what’s in the ZenBook Flip 13.

Dell has a loyal following that will forgo bells and whistles just to not have to live without that keyboard, and for the models it discounts this isn’t unreasonable. Intel also gave it an admirable crack themselves in the NUC M15, which Adata was able to add value to by installing the fastest SSD too.

Everyone’s a winner

What was perhaps most impressive is that all these devices now offer reasonable entry level gaming capabilities, and there’s no longer laptops that’ll only last half a day. When taken together this is a pretty awesome step in the right direction that makes 2021 Evo devices compelling for anyone considering an upgrade.

“This is a pretty awesome step in the right direction that makes 2021 Evo devices compelling for anyone considering an upgrade.”