With laptops naturally constrained by their form factor, cooling ability and battery life, upping performance in pursuit of standing out from competitors is not as easy as it is for their desktop counterparts. That, along with the fact that nobody likes lugging around a big chunk of metal and plastic, is why over the past decade the race has been on to make the lightest and thinnest laptop yet. While Asus isn’t about to win that award, it does stand the chance of winning a special mention for its latest creation, especially considering its price tag.
At just $300, the new Asus EeeBook E403SA is just three pounds and 0.7 inches thick, making it comparable in size and weight to Apple’s latest generation of MacBook Pros, though the Asus has a larger 14-inch display.
Of course, where a laptop like this does fall down is in performance. While there are no publicly verifiable benchmark results for the newly announced system, we do know that it will be utilizing an Intel Pentium processor, which is far from the powerhouse top end chips that Intel provides for enthusiast system makers. Liliputing speculates that the particular chip being used may be the Intel Pentium N3700, which is the same one that Asus used in its EeeBook E202.
One of the few notebooks out there which can actually beat Asus’ new miniature system at the weight game is Lenovo’s new LaVie Z, but at five times the price, you would hope so.
Other specifications for the new EeeBook include 2GB of RAM and 32GB of storage. We don’t know what resolution is being offered as of yet. It’s expected to go on sale in Q3 this year.
The question is: Is the performance trade-off worth the low price tag and lightweight design?
