Asus and Amazon have dropped the price of the Vivobook 15 for Prime Day to a tiny $269.99, that’s a $100 saving or 27%. Now, I am not usually wax lyrical about cheap laptops but this one certainly caught my eye for a number of reasons.
It features a 12th generation Core i3 CPU, the criminally under-rated 1215U, the cheapest in it category to feature that processor. Now that’s a special processor as it is a 6-core, 8-thread model, which makes it far faster than more expensive, rival devices.
For example, it is faster than the Ryzen 5 7520U (an AMD CPU that powers the Asus Vivobook Go) or the Intel Core i7-1195G7, a top-end 11th generation CPU that can be found in premium laptops such as the Dell XPS 13 OLED.
There’s also the fact that it has 8GB of RAM and 128GB SSD; you’d be lucky to get half the RAM and a real SSD (as opposed to slower eMMC). What’s even more enticing is that you can stick another RAM stick and replace the SSD. I also liked the fact that it has plenty of ports (seven in all but no microSD card reader) as well as Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 4.1.
Users looking for a basic business laptop will appreciate the fact that it has a dedicated numeric keypad, a privacy webcam shutter and is MIL-STD-810H rated. Asus also says that its antimicrobial guard plus treatment will kill 99% of viruses and bacteria. I also liked the fact that it uses a single large hinge which makes the screen more stable and is a mere 0.7-inch thick, a tiny bit thicker than the 16-inch Apple MacBook Pro.
Just bear in mind that the F1504ZA-AS34 (as it is known) does have some shortcomings according to user reviews on Amazon and elsewhere. It is built using plastic mostly and its display - a full HD 15.6-inch model with thin bezel - is not as bright at only 250 nits. Ditto for the battery life, one review from Digitweek mentions the less-than-stellar battery life at less than seven hours (continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi at 150 nits of brightness).
Oh and one last thing; it runs on Windows 11 S which can be easily transformed into a more traditional Windows 11 Home for free.
