Asus told reviewers that its Zenbook A16 laptop, one of the first with the Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite inside it, would be $1,599. A day after the launch, it raised the price. Is that fair, even in the age of shortages?
For ARM Linux comparison, I ran the Speedometer 3.0 benchmark the author uses on my daily driver Macbook Air M2 (24GB RAM) running Asahi Linux Fedora Remix 42 (KDE). I used FF 149 which is just what I had installed. It scored 22.0 which apparently was better than this Zenbook and even beat out several Ryzen 7 and Core i7 offerings:
A used M2 Air with my spec mine (24GB RAM 2TB SSD) is $800-$900, which is a fraction of the $1600 Asus wants for their slower unit new, but the Asus does have more RAM.
For ARM Linux comparison, I ran the Speedometer 3.0 benchmark the author uses on my daily driver Macbook Air M2 (24GB RAM) running Asahi Linux Fedora Remix 42 (KDE). I used FF 149 which is just what I had installed. It scored 22.0 which apparently was better than this Zenbook and even beat out several Ryzen 7 and Core i7 offerings:
A used M2 Air with my spec mine (24GB RAM 2TB SSD) is $800-$900, which is a fraction of the $1600 Asus wants for their slower unit new, but the Asus does have more RAM.