High-earning business professionals: The Asus ExpertBook Ultra is a near-perfect, do-it-all ultraportable with fabulous performance, solid battery life, an absolutely gorgeous display, and an impossibly thin design. Its price reflects that.
Anyone who wants a really, really, really nice screen: I can’t stay enough about this laptop’s display. It’s to die for.
On paper, ExpertBook Ultra seems like it shouldn’t exist: A laptop that’s much lighter than a MacBook Air and just as slim, yet as powerful as an entry-level gaming laptop? Not possible… so you’d think! The only catch is that it’s quite expensive, which shouldn’t be all that shocking given its specs.
The ExpertBook Ultra runs on Intel’s new Core Ultra X7 385H chip, an upper mid-range CPU that offers above-average single-core performance and MacBook Pro-level multi-core performance — which is to say, it can easily handle the most demanding professional workloads. The neat thing about that chip is that it comes with the Intel Arc B390, an integrated graphics card (iGPU) that performs as well as a lower-end discrete graphics card. In my testing, the ExpertBook Ultra could run Cyberpunk 2077, an incredibly taxing AAA game, well above its 60fps minimum with AI upscaling tech turned on. What’s more, it stayed impressively cool and quiet thanks to the wind tunnel-style thermal setup inside its base.
The ExpertBook Ultra weighs a mere 2.4 pounds and measures 0.43 inches thin at its slimmest point, making it incredibly sleek and portable. (It’s 0.3 pounds lighter than a 13-inch MacBook Air and 0.01 inches thinner.) Its magnesium-aluminum body has a matte finish that isn’t prone to smudges and scratches. It features a haptic touchpad, a snappy island-style keyboard with a UV coating that prevents its keys from looking greasy, and a surprisingly nice mix of ports, including double-sided Thunderbolt/USB-C charging ports.
But my favorite thing about its design is its display: It’s a luscious 2.8K OLED touchscreen with a 30 to 120Hz refresh rate, 1,400 nits of peak brightness, and a matte finish that averts annoying glares. I’ve never encountered a nicer display on any laptop — PC, Mac, or Chromebook.
