Tag: review

Sony CRE-E10 Review: Well-Rounded Hearing Aids

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When Sony entered the over-the-counter hearing aid market two years ago, it did so with a pair of products: the CRE-C10 and the more expensive CRE-E10. I was dazzled by the minuscule C10—it’s still one of the hearing aid options I recommend the most—and assumed the E10 would be even more impressive. Now that I’ve finally landed a pair of E10 aids to test, I can assure you that the E10 isn’t so much an upgrade to the C10 as it is a wholly different class of product with its own pros and cons.

While both the C10 and E10 rely on an in-ear earbud-like design conceit, their general approach is considerably different. While the 1-gram C10 fits nearly entirely inside the ear, invisible enough to require a small retrieval wire to remove it, the 2.94-gram E10 is much more bulbous and visible. It looks more like a standard Bluetooth earbud than any other hearing aid I’ve tested, filling the concha with its rounded body. Since, as the old saying goes, all concha are not created equal, your comfort level while wearing these hearing aids may vary considerably. In my ears, the fit was snug but not tight—comfortable for wearing for a few hours but not all day. Sony provides just four pairs of eartips you can experiment with to help improve the fit.

Photograph: Sony

The other big difference between the C10 and E10 is that while the C10 uses replaceable hearing aid batteries, the E10 features a more common rechargeable battery. The extra size of the device lets the E10 work for up to 26 hours (without streaming). The USB-C connectible and Qi-compatible charger provides enough juice for an additional two to three recharges.

Despite their larger size, the CRE-E10 aids do not feature any external controls, which is understandable because controls would be hard to access based on the way the aids sit in the ear. Instead, all controls are situated in Sony’s Hearing Control app (Android, iOS). This is the same app used for the CRE-C10, so I already had it installed, but I ran into immediate problems because the old aids were still registered to the app.

Photograph: Sony

To set up new aids, you have to remove the old ones from the app. To do that, Hearing Control requires you to enter a code sent to your registered email address. Naturally, I never received the code, so I couldn’t install the new set of aids. Eventually, Sony tech support instructed me to delete the app altogether and set it up again with a different email address—perhaps not the most elegant solution, but it worked to get me up and running.

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May 5, 2024
Orka Two Review: Sleek Hearing Aids

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Founded in 2018, Orka Labs feels like a bigger and more established hearing aid company than it is, with polished hardware that’s now on its second edition.

The Orka Two is something of a hybrid between prescription and over-the-counter hearing aids. The devices are registered as prescription-class aids but are sold online as OTC products. Professional medical consultations and adjustments are available (and included in the price) but are not required if you decide to go it alone.

The hardware is traditional in form, a behind-the-ear model with receivers that snake into the ear canal via flexible wires. But while they are a bit oversized in comparison to similar designs (and rather heavy at 3.8 grams each), they are distinguished by their glossy AirPod-white color and curvy, teardrop design. The units carry no physical controls, which further improves their sleekness. For behind-the-ear hearing aids, these look about as good as you could expect—and much better than the usual industrial-gray aids that are now so commonplace.

As with most over-ear aids, I found the units a little clumsy to fit and in need of significant fidgeting to situate them properly in my ears. The usual collection of open and closed tips is included in the box. While I normally find that medium-sized tips fit perfectly for me, I found all but the smallest uncomfortably large.

Photograph: Orka

In keeping with its hybrid design, Orka offers two ways to configure the units. There’s a capable hearing test built into the app, which can be used to quickly make the appropriate settings. Alternatively, if you have a professional audiogram, you can snap a photo and upload it through the app. Then Orka’s in-house audiologists will tune your aids accordingly (in one business day). Any adjustments can be made by emailing or calling Orka for tweaks, though the company notes its “remote consultation” feature, where you can schedule an appointment directly through the app, is currently being revamped and is offline.

Orka’s app is straightforward to the point of being idiot-proof, with two primary operating modes. “Normal” is the low-environmental-noise mode that relies on the settings made via your audiogram or in situ hearing test, while “In Noise” is, well, self-explanatory. Here, Orka gets more aggressive with settings, using an AI algorithm to adjust its settings dynamically in response to your environment. A beam-shaping option in the In Noise mode lets you target your hearing on a single person or on “everyone.” Volume can be adjusted universally or individually for each ear.

As noted earlier, there are no physical controls on the units. Unusually, hardware controls are found on the charging case (which is good for about three charges). Here you’ll find a program button that cycles through the two operational modes and another pair of buttons for adjusting volume. Pay close attention: Volume up is paradoxically the button on the left and volume down is on the right. Despite the reversal, I ultimately found the case-mounted buttons a lot more convenient than fumbling behind my ears to find the right buttons. For users with mobility impairments, this could be a game changer.

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May 4, 2024
Ambient Weather WS-5000 Review: A Fantastic Weather Station

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I now have a moisture sensor in my garden bed that tells me how dry my soil is, which is an awesome way to know I need to turn on my remote sprinklers while on vacation. An air quality monitor inside my workspace tells me temperature and humidity (important to monitor for some of my acoustic guitars), and another monitor really made me open the window when cooking indoors. All of these things are trivially combined by the system and displayed alongside my other metrics on the Ambient Weather dashboard. It’s the easiest thing to set up ever.

Ambient Weather recently added a better digital display that you can buy aftermarket. As I said, the one that comes with the unit is a bit retro-chic, requiring you to use physical buttons to input logins and passwords, and with only a few selectable layouts. The new Weather Window, as the brand calls it, is much larger and more modern-feeling, and it does include touchscreen controls and variable layouts, but it’s still not as fantastic as it could be.

Photograph: Parker Hall

I wish there was a way to show the weekly weather forecast on the main screen, instead of having to tap the display to see that, among other UI niggles. I do like that the Weather Window comes with a frame-like edge, which makes placing it where you might place a family photo, or hanging it on the wall, particularly easy.

By the Numbers

Most of us don’t need such minutiae in our lives, and that’s fine. For the person who wakes up and plans their whole day based on the temperature and precipitation, or who constantly checks weather radar and talks about it, the Ambient Weather system is the closest we will come to reaching nirvana on Earth.

That might not be you, but it is almost certainly someone you know. I love being away from home and knowing how wet the soil in my garden is, that my house temp and humidity are correct. I like seeing when the sun and moon are going to rise and set at a glance, and knowing how many inches of rain, at a spot above my head, we have gotten in rainy north Portland. Every time my dad and I get together, if we’re not talking about Formula One or the local soccer team’s current woes, we’re talking about what our stations are telling us.

If learning the micro-trends of your yard and chatting, meaningfully, about the weather to friends, relatives, and strangers is your kind of thing, then an Ambient Weather system, really any of them, is probably a fun thing for you to check out. You might even find it useful.

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May 4, 2024
Rabbit R1 Review: Skip This AI-Powered Hardware Assistant

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At the R1’s launch event in New York City, Lyu demoed an example of having the R1 look at a paper with a printed spreadsheet on it. He asked the R1 to swap two columns, and then send the result to his email. I didn’t have a spreadsheet on paper, but I did have an auto-inspection report that I wanted to send to my email. I asked the R1 and … it said it didn’t have my email address. (I set up my Rabbit account with my email information.) I asked the company about this, and I was told the R1 didn’t support documents other than spreadsheets yet. Great. So I printed a spreadsheet, asked it to swap two columns, and sent it via email, and it sort of did this. It swapped the two columns, but for some reason, it didn’t include several other columns that were on the paper.

I picked up my copy of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun and asked the R1 if it could look at it and tell me what it’s about. The R1 instead just described the cover and said it’s “likely” a work of fiction. If it could read out the name, why couldn’t it research it at the same time and give me a synopsis? Even the Humane Ai Pin could do this.

You can also have the R1 take notes, and edit these notes in the Rabbithole, but there’s no reminder functionality. I also find it annoying that the Rabbithole keeps logging me out after some time, so whenever I want to check a note, I might have to log in first. There are also voice recordings, and the R1 plays a nice tape recorder animation when it’s working. Too bad the recording itself is low-quality and muffled. It does summarize the contents of the recording though, and you can download the WAV file.

The translation capabilities, much like the Humane Ai Pin, are good. Just ask it to translate a specific language, and you can now have a back-and-forth conversation. The R1 will automatically change the translation language, so when I speak English, it changes it to Spanish. When the person across from me speaks Spanish, it swaps to English.

Hop to It

You know what else does all of this stuff pretty well? Smartphones! This is also repeatedly the question I’ve received whenever I showed someone the R1. “Why can’t it just be an app?”

I posed this question to David Widder, a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell Tech studying open-source artificial intelligence. “Hardware is cool—there’s increasing frustration from app developers on having to give so much money to Apple and Google. I think there’s a little bit of, ‘We want to do our own thing and not be beholden to them.’”

That’s fair, but the R1 is just not ready yet. I considered skipping this review and writing a more experiential story, but this is a product anyone can buy right now. A company is charging you $200 to be its beta tester, and while Rabbit has a roadmap of features and services—including a Teach Mode that lets you train the R1 to do specific tasks—I don’t see a reason to buy it now. Revisit it when it’s more feature-rich and genuinely useful, and buy it then if you want.

At the very least, I haven’t had the battery issues plaguing other reviewers. The R1 recharged quickly for me and doesn’t deplete juice too fast in standby mode. When you do use it, the battery drops fairly quickly though.

In the end, the biggest issue boils down to the fact that I now have to carry two devices. I’m WIRED’s resident smartphone reviewer and I hate carrying two phones—it’s why I always put my personal SIM into each new device I test. Over this past week, I forced myself to use the R1 but often ended up using my phone instead. (Weirdly, the Humane Ai Pin was better in this regard as it is wearable, and I don’t have to carry it in a pocket or hold it.)

Rabbit was clear in saying that the R1 will not replace your phone, but if I can do all of the same tasks and so much more on my smartphone (Google’s Gemini has given me identical if not better results than the R1), I have no reason to use it. At least it looks pretty. I’ll add it to my growing collection of AI-powered paperweights.

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May 3, 2024
Brane X Speaker: Compact Size, Home Theater Sound

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Bass is foundational. A dedicated speaker capable of reproducing convincing bass and sub-bass not only makes music and films feel more authentic, but can even improve the detail and dynamics of the higher registers by freeing up sonic space below. So attempting to jam a real subwoofer into a handheld speaker is by no means a crazy idea—it’s just crazy difficult.

That’s what makes the Brane X so impressive. Over the years, I’ve heard lofty claims about low-extension “woofers” in virtually every kind of compact speaker, but the Brane X is the first to hit all the notes literally. It does so with a specialized RAD (Repel Attract Driver) that seems to perform physics-defying magic from within the speaker’s stout frame. That’s matched by multiple high-frequency drivers above for clear and surprisingly expansive performance across registers.

To land this kind of breakthrough bass in a package you can take virtually anywhere, Brane charges a fee that will make most casual buyers spit up their beverages. But if your budget is negotiable, the Brane X is a fabulous wireless speaker that comes as close as I’ve heard to putting a full home audio system in a pint-sized box.

Surreal Sound

Do you listen to music with percussion or drums? Bass guitar, synth, or strings? If so, you’ll benefit from what the Brane X can do. What’s most notable about the speaker’s potent punch isn’t how much bass it pumps out, but the kind and quality. This is pure, full, and unadulterated low-frequency performance from the source.

Photograph: Ryan Waniata

As you might guess, the Brane X is most viscerally impressive when hammering hip hop and electronic grooves, where the kick hits with clean authority well below 50 Hz, without overpowering the other instruments. Yet, listening through my catalog, it became increasingly clear that the RAD subwoofer’s pointed touch is just as impressive when more subtly deployed.

The haunting vocal and guitar intro in Springsteen’s “The Ghost of Tom Joad” sounds clear and airy, as you’d expect from a quality portable. Then the bass guitar kicks in, and everything is elevated. The rich natural tone the Brane X reproduces adds depth and gravity to the song, bringing its full emotional poignancy to life.

I didn’t have a suitable portable that could stand up to the Brane X, so I called in some of my favorite homebound Wi-Fi speakers, including the Sonos Era 100 (9/10, WIRED Recommends) and Era 300 (9/10, WIRED Recommends). Even the thrilling 300, which serves up impressive bass in its own right, couldn’t match the Brane in the heaviest tracks, sketching out more of an impression of the lowest tones than the full monty.

Brane says its Repel Attract Driver can deliver this kind of authenticity by using a special magnet and spring system to cancel the “internal air pressure forces” that hinder other speakers. This results in a claimed “tenfold increase in sub-bass sound and a hundredfold increase in sub-bass efficiency.” It sounds like so much techno mumbo jumbo out there, but with the Brane X, you can actually hear it working, and not just from the performance. Tapping the power key evokes little whirring sounds, apparently adjusting its complex internal mechanism ahead of playback.

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May 3, 2024
Fujifilm Instax Mini 99 Review: An Instax Camera Photographers Will Love

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Fujifilm’s New Instax Mini 99 is an Instax camera for those who love manual controls and creative effects. It’s not the sharpest Instax I’ve tested—that remains the Mini Evo—but it might be the most analog and the most capable.

The $200 price tag is well above the entry-level point-and-shoot Instax cameras, but here you get exposure and shutter control, a swatch of color effects, and even the ability to simulate light leaks, like the ones you get with those thrift store cameras collecting dust on your shelf.

Manual Power

Except for the colorful and bubbly entry-level cameras, Fujifilm’s Instax design usually tends toward a retro-camera vibe, which holds true for the Mini 99. The 99 is all-black instead of the silver and black found in the Mini 90, but otherwise bears more than a passing resemblance to the older model. Fujifilm hasn’t officially said the 99 replaces the 90, but they feel close enough to each other that I’d be surprised if the Mini 90 continues for long.

Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

The lens of the Mini 99 is the same as the Mini 90. It’s a 60-mm lens made of plastic. It works out to roughly the same field of view as a 35-mm lens in 35-mm format (or if you prefer, somewhere between 1x and 2x on your iPhone). The shutter is fixed at f/12.7, which means you’ll be relying on the flash in all but bright, sunny, outdoor shots. That said, unlike quite a few other Instax models, with the Mini 99 you can turn off the flash for those well-lit shots.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the Mini 99, and something new for the Instax line, are the manual focus options. The Mini 99 does not have true manual focus where you turn a dial on the lens to get precise focus. Instead there are three zones of focus: close up (0.3 to 0.6 meters), midrange (0.6 to 3 meters), and infinity (3 meters to infinity). For those not metric-savvy, that works out to 1 to 2 feet, 2 to 10 feet, and 10 feet to infinity. While that’s not as precise as a true manual focus camera, it’s more control than you typically get with Instax.

I find the manual focus to be a little inconsistent—or rather, the results were less dramatic than I expected. Keep in mind that the aperture is f/12.7, which means the plane of focus will be pretty wide, even with the focus zone controls. The Mini 99 is capable of bokeh (the name for out-of-focus regions in a photo), but only in very specific situations like a portrait, and even then you have to use the closest focus, which means your subject’s face will mostly fill the frame anyway. That said, being able to play with focus at all is a step up from most Instax cameras, where focus is fixed, and the 1-foot close focus distance of the Mini 99 is nice for macro-style shots. Unlike some Instax cameras, there is parallax correction in the viewfinder so that what you see in the frame is very close to what you get.

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May 3, 2024
Crave Tease Review: Not Jewelry, Barely a Vibrator

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It’s hard not to smile while unboxing Crave’s latest semi-incognito sex toy, the Tease Ring. The small, textured black box bears the company’s name on the lid in silver gilt letters like a formal invitation to a ball. Inside, the ring rests on a soft pillow of felt-textured foam, and against the black background, the Tease’s gold chrome finish glints and glimmers in the light, promising a luxurious, top-shelf experience.

This is from the same company that makes the Vesper, a stylish vibrator that doubles as a bold necklace. That’s why I was excited to try this new sex toy, which goes on your finger, but unfortunately, as I learned during testing, the Tease Ring can’t live up to its promise of luxury.

A Poor Tease

The Tease invites you to imagine, selling you on its vibe as much as its vibrations. It conjures up images of flirtatious strangers in neon-soaked nightclubs, leaning in close to be heard over the thumping bass. The night is full of endless possibilities and carefree, reckless joy. No matter where the night takes you, you’ll have your Tease Ring on your finger, an intimate secret you wear openly—and maybe share.

Photograph: Crave

It’s a lovely fantasy. In reality, the silicone ring popped off my finger almost as soon as I put it on, rolling away to parts unknown. Fulfilling my destiny as an audacious sexual libertine would have to wait; I was too busy reaching into the dusty underplaces of my apartment. Eventually, with the help of a broom, I managed to fish the Tease out from under my bed. It was an inauspicious start, but I was hopeful. (There are three sizes to choose from, each encompassing a few ring sizes. Small, for example, works for anyone with a ring size between 3 and 6.)

Those hopes were dashed once I started testing the Tease. It’s a product that’s constantly in conflict with itself. In its pursuit to be a piece of jewelry and a vibrator, it fails to be either. The vibrator is too small and weak to use, and the ring has all the charm of one of those Livestrong bracelets from the early 2000s.

It’s a shame because Crave’s flagship, the Vesper, succeeds in both of these roles; it’s a good vibrator and a nice necklace. I’ve even seen it out in the wild, worn as an audacious statement piece, a knowing wink between queer people in sapphic spaces.

The Worst of Both Worlds

The Tease Ring is just plain awkward to use. If you leave it sitting on top of your knuckles in use, it feels like you’re fist-bumping your partner’s genitals. Flip it around so the ring is still on your finger but the vibrator is on the palm side of your hand, and it’s a little better. But because of the vibrator’s length, you cannot move whichever finger it’s on because it acts like a finger brace and keeps the knuckles on that finger from flexing. When you’re wearing it like this, it’s hard to use on yourself because it severely limits your manual dexterity, and it’s hard to use on a partner for the same reasons.

It’s also hard to feel sexy when you’re using this toy. When I had it on the palm side of my hand, I couldn’t stop thinking about those hand buzzer things from Saturday morning cartoons. The kind a birthday clown would secretly wear and ask everyone to shake his hand only to surprise them with an unpleasant jolt. Too bad I didn’t have the top hat or the water-squirting boutonniere to complete the look.

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May 3, 2024
Loopy Pro Review: The Best iPad Music Recording Software

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For pros and power users who nerd out about things like MIDI mapping, sequencing and automation, Loopy Pro is a wonderland of customization and inspiration that will serve as the central control hub of your studio after a bit of careful tinkering.

Click the pencil icon at the bottom of the page to view the array of widgets that can join (or replace) your donuts in the session view, which can be divided into a near-infinite number of pages that are accessible via tabs or custom mappings. One-shot loops are great for percussive sounds, while the clip slicer can point to an existing loop and automatically map each of its buttons to a specific “slice” of the loop, allowing easy glitched out goodness that fans of IDM heroes like Aphex Twin and Autechre will immediately love.

An X-Y pad mimics the functionality of a Korg KAOSS Pad, with each axis being freely assignable to any combination of knobs, buttons or faders within the session, as well as external MIDI devices that are connected via the 5-pin MIDI ins and outs of your interface, or MIDI over Bluetooth (BLE) if you’re allergic to cables. The latter takes about a minute to set up, and Loopy Pro’s MIDI mapping mode uses a standard “learn” method that can be as simple or complicated as you’d like it to be. Map one incoming MIDI message to as many widgets as you’d like, or do the inverse to make a single button-press in the session view adjust an infinite number of parameters on your outboard gear on the fly.

Just Bring Sounds

Loopy Pro doesn’t come loaded with any sounds of its own, so you’ll need third-party plug-ins to supplement your audio recordings with things like drums, synths and effects. The AUV3 format is the gold standard for plug-ins that work seamlessly within iOS DAWs, and the amount of highly-quality options available for free or just a few dollars in the app store is staggering.

To create a track simply open the mixer section of LP, click the + icon in the lower right-hand corner, select “Add Audio Unit Input,” select your plug-in, and a new channel automatically populates with your selected plug-in as the audio source. A similar workflow is utilized for external audio sources from an interface, Bluetooth MIDI sources, and MIDI plug-ins, which are essential if you’re into sequencing or manipulating MIDI messages in weird and creative ways before they’re routed to internal or external devices.

The mixer uses color-coded groups in lieu of channels, which is the one facet of Loopy Pro that takes a bit of getting used to. Assigning different colors to things like drums, bass, vocals and guitar helps keep things tidy, and the eye-catching contrast of the neon-color donuts and widgets against the black background makes LP easy to keep track of in any environment. Hardware inputs and color groups can be routed to the master bus or an infinite number of buses via discrete send knobs that are either pre- or post-fader, or other color groups that can re-sample separate audio sources that are merged into a single color group and loop.

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May 2, 2024
Le Wand Die Cast Massager Review: A Wand for Wand Connoisseurs

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Wand vibrators are a sex toy staple, a classic addition to anyone’s bedside table. They have a storied history, and since the original Hitachi Magic Wand hit store shelves in 1968, the design hasn’t changed much. Look in the wand category of any sex shop (or even Amazon), and you’ll see how similar they all look.

The Le Wand Die Cast Rechargeable Vibrating Massager follows in these well-worn footsteps and serves as proof that you don’t need to reinvent the wand to make a great sex toy.

Strong Vibes

Before I even unboxed this Le Wand, it was already making its first impression. The box was surprisingly heavy. I wondered if maybe there were some accessories inside or maybe multiple toys, but nope. It’s just the die-cast metal Le Wand, and it’s just that heavy. At roughly 1.15 pounds, it’s just slightly lighter than a full-size Maglite flashlight (with batteries). This is probably the heftiest sex toy I’ve ever encountered, let alone tested.

There is something satisfying about the weight, though. A product’s weight often influences how we perceive its quality, importance, or durability, and that’s definitely at work here. Even when I was testing other products, I found myself favoring the Le Wand over other similar models because it felt so good in my hand. The aluminum exterior is pleasantly cold to the touch, a nice contrast against the softer silicone on the head.

Photograph: Le Wand

The Le Wand is a full-size wand, so it’s also one of the biggest wands I’ve tested at 11.42 inches long. The size can make it awkward to use solo, depending on where you’re trying to reach with it, and the weight can make for some tired wrists. Most of the time, though, the added length is an asset, and the weight keeps the wand from vibrating your hands too much. Sometimes unibody wands and sex toys can feel like they’re vibrating your hands more than they’re vibrating anything else, but that’s not the case here. You can feel the vibrations in your hands, but it’s minimal—a good trait for anyone with carpal tunnel.

It should be no surprise that the Le Wand is not a toy that concerns itself with discretion or subtlety. As soon as you turn it on, the wand practically roars, its engine leaping to life so hard it practically bucks against your grip. Even on the lowest of its 10 vibration settings, it’s strong enough to provide a surprising degree of stimulation through clothes.

Like the original Magic Wand, this is a toy that’s best enjoyed through indirect stimulation, which makes its vibration intensity a welcome quality. Using it around erogenous zones like the clitoris, you can feel the vibrations penetrating deep below your skin to all those internal nerves and erogenous structures.

Short on Battery

The vibration patterns are another area where the Le Wand distinguishes itself. There are 20 in total, and they’re all relatively distinct from one another. The only downside to having so many is having to cycle through all of them to find your favorites—and you’ll definitely have more than one. The patterns are laid out visually in the Le Wand’s manual to give you an idea of what sensations you can expect.

The button layout is familiar—the standard choices you get on most wand vibrators, which is a good thing. There are buttons to increase and decrease vibration intensity, and one button in the middle to cycle through the vibration patterns. You turn it on by holding the increase-intensity button for a couple of seconds, and turn it off by pressing the decrease-intensity button for a few seconds. No deviations from the norm here, which means there won’t be any confusion when you’re trying to feel for the buttons in the dark.

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May 2, 2024
Asus Zenbook 14 OLED (2024) Review: Good Performance for the Price

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The march of lower-cost laptops that offer some measure of artificial intelligence-focused tuning continues with the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED, the latest in a line of affordable, no-nonsense, ultralight laptops that has been kicking around for more than a decade. Like the Acer Swift Go 14, the Asus Zenbook 14 (model UM3406HA) hits the market at a price that’s comfortably less than $1,000. But unlike the Swift Go, the Zenbook is built around AMD’s latest Ryzen CPU. Among other questions, I was curious to see how the two directly compared.

The Acer and Asus laptops have more than a little in common. Both feature 14-inch touchscreens at 1,920 x 1,200-pixel resolution, 16 GB of RAM, and integrated graphics. The Zenbook has a more basic 512-GB solid-state drive compared to the 1-terabyte model on the Acer, but the biggest difference is the CPU, an AMD Ryzen 7 8840HS on the Asus instead of Acer’s Intel Core Ultra 7.

Photograph: Asus

Walk around the laptop and you’ll see a considerably less well equipped port lineup too. Two USB-C ports (one USB 4, one USB 3.2; one is used for charging), a single USB-A port, and a full-size HDMI output are your connectivity options, altogether a clear step down from what Acer has on offer. Again, all ports are side-mounted here, as the design of the screen causes the rear edge of the LCD to cover up the backside of the chassis when the screen is opened.

The aluminum frame feels much sturdier than you typically find in this price bracket, but I wasn’t in love with the overall design. It’s entirely black with a lid that’s etched with seemingly random lines, creating a haphazard geometric pattern that feels more and more like it was drawn from the ’80s the more you stare at it.

I like the keyboard, which is compact but thoughtfully laid out and offers acceptable key travel, including a Copilot key and functional, half-height arrow keys. The keyboard backlighting is understated. The touchpad is large but just shy of being too big; my palms tended to brush against the corners when typing, but this fortunately didn’t adversely impact the user experience. The Harman Kardon speakers are loud and offer plenty of range for any entertainment needs.

Photograph: Asus

The big question surrounds performance, and I’m happy to report that compared to the Acer Swift Go, the two laptops turned in similar results. On a few tests, the Zenbook would score moderately higher, on others, the crown would go to Acer. Quite a few benchmarks saw results that were functionally identical, including big ones like PCMark 10, which measures mainstream application performance.

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May 2, 2024