EVERY NOW AND THEN, something comes along that challenges your expectations about how a product will work. We’re used to opening the lid of a laptop and using it like an L-shaped thing with a keyboard that’s too close to the screen, but what if that keyboard came off and revealed another screen underneath?
There have been attempts at doublescreened laptops before, but none have got it as right as this one. The pair of 14- inch OLEDs the Zenbook Duo is equipped with are capable of putting out almost 400 nits of brightness, are both touchscreens, and support a stylus. The stand that folds out behind the bottom screen is capable of holding them in landscape and portrait orientations, and despite the fact that unlike a folding phone, they are at all times two screens rather than one, the ability to have more app windows visible makes for a powerful productivity tool.
Inside, there’s one of Intel’s new Core Ultra 9 processors, with six performance cores (which can boost up to 5.1GHz), eight efficient ones, and two of the lowpower efficiency cores that appeared with the Meteor Lake architecture. It pulls a base power of 45W, and has Intel Arc integrated graphics featuring eight Xe cores, ray tracing, and 8K output. It’s not an obvious gaming laptop, though it manages over 100fps in the 3DMark Night