ASUS ZENBOOK PRO UX501

£1,499 inc VAT • asus.com/uk

There’s a lot of talk about laptops diminishing entirely at the moment, but those hanging on to the spotlight right now are small and very portable. There’s no staying in one place for too long today, it seems.

The Asus ZenBook Pro UX501 seems to think there’s still an appeal to an older style of laptop. It has plenty of power, enough to act as a desktop-replacer for many, but has a fancy design and an edge of portability too. It’s a real all-rounder. However, not every aspect of it has been totally well-handled, lumbering it with a few issues that are not all that easy to accept at the price.

Design

As you so often get with laptops at an ultra-premium price, the UX501’s outside is made almost entirely of aluminium. This is an expensive-looking computer, and it has the hard, cool metallic feel to match. The ‘Pro’ is much more a reference to something like the Apple MacBook Pro than the sorts of ‘professional’ Dell monsters you may have used as work PCs in the past. It’s a rather nice, if boxy, piece of hardware.

Little design tweaks specific to Asus’ style include the circular brushed finish on the lid and the circular arrangement of dots on the UX501’s inside. Its flashy elements are subdued. This feels like a laptop that should be used 80 percent at home or at work, and 20 percent on the go. While it’s not a gigantic workstation, it does still have some weight to it, and is twice as heavy as the kind of laptops meant for real roving use. It weighs 2.27kg and is 21mm thick. The thickness isn’t an issue, but the weight might be, liable to become a bit of a shoulder-ache after a few hours unless you’re used to lugging around heavy stuff. Being a 15in laptop it’s also likely to fill a lot of shoulder bags.

This is where the rival Dell XPS 15 has a real advantage. It has a more dynamic design that really tries to shave down the footprint of the 15in laptop, whereas the UX501 is of a conventional shape. Its hinge doesn’t bend back far either.

Connections

The design has a ‘premium’ sensibility, but isn’t that dynamic. It comes across as a mite stiff. However, it does make changes to

Build Features Performance

Value