It's made out of aluminium, has a glass touchpad and costs around half of what a similarly priced MacBook pro costs in Germany.
It's my first non-Mac after 20 years. I've owned it for a good week and so far I'm very happy. It has superb battery life, great build quality and is fast. Only 1 minor con: the fan always runs, but it's not too loud and I can live with it...
This one looks good enough: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Water-Resistant-VicTop-Mechanical-W...
IF you're concerned wrap it in some kind of cloth but for under 30 bucks it's not a major concern if you get a decent lifespand out of it. I'd say anything over 2 years is a huge win.
Be good to try something cheaper, though the single-height enter key would drive me CRAZY.
[0] http://www.keyboardco.com/keyboard/realforce-88ub-45g-key-bl.... £192!!
THIN became a much more important marketing tool than GOOD, or even FUNCTIONAL.
How do you explain the widespread perception that laptop keyboards used to be good but are now crappy?
> real rather than purely subjective benefit
Subjective benefits are real benefits.
I have Cherry Blues at home but wouldn't dare use them in an open-plan office environment - far too noisy.
Can't beat that.
[1] http://www.amazon.in/ZenBook-UX360CA-13-3-inch-Touchscreen-W...
(I find the shiny brushed aluminium look to be embarrassingly tacky, though not quite as bad as the rose gold model.)
Shame about the keyboard not coming in different variants, though. I am sure that some people like numeric keypads, but ever since my first PC cirka 1992 I've always hated them. It's the last thing I need on a small laptop.
The 14'' Razer Blade [2] also has a normal keyboard, and comes close to being a MBP replacement, though it's not perfect.
Apparently a lot of these laptops have issues with heat and noisy fans. Some articles say i7 laptops (the quad-core ones) tend to have low battery life. I'm getting about 4 hours from my MBP 2015 using only Safari, Terminal and VSCode, and I can't imagine these other laptops would be worse than that.
[1] http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/11/2/13497094/be...
They had two models of ssd, but one laptop sku. One model went to review websites, the other's performance degraded to actually be noticably slower than a hard disk. You could replace the ssd, but it was a non-standard form factor, so you needed to buy an expensive m.2 converter.
The keyboard dropped keystrokes.
The screen was meh for the time.
This was their flagship laptop that year.
After it has been a full decade, I might consider buying another asus laptop.
Are there laptops where it doesn't? I've had 4 different models from 4 different makers, including a MacBook Pro, and every one has run the fan 100℅ of the time.