Microsoft’s newest Floor Professional is the standard-bearer for removable 2-in-1 Copilot+ PCs. However as I famous in my review at the time, it suffers from a number of points—most notably a sky-high worth of $1,950 because it was configured for our assessments. It doesn’t matter what you consider the removable keyboard idea, this system comes with an awfully arduous worth to swallow.
Enter Asus with a suspiciously related idea, albeit significantly cheaper. I wouldn’t fairly name this the Wish model of the Floor Professional, however at $1,100, the ProArt PZ13 might a minimum of take a number of the sting out of the money outlay do you have to enterprise down this street.
{Photograph}: Christopher Null
To trim the value, Asus has made its justifiable share of sacrifices. Sure parts stay the identical, together with a 13-inch touchscreen, 16 GB of RAM, and a magnetically connected keyboard, which comes included along with your buy. In any other case, the ProArt comes throughout as a barely totally different animal. It begins with the stripped-down CPU: The ProArt makes use of a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus X1P42100 as an alternative of the extra succesful Elite that dominated the first wave of Copilot+ PCs. The facet ratio and backbone of the 2 screens are barely totally different—2,880 x 1,920 pixels on the Floor versus 2,880 x 1,800 on the ProArt—and though the ProArt display screen isn’t practically as vibrant and shiny, I had no complaints with it via a number of days of use.
Surprisingly, there are a few upgrades on faucet from Asus over what comes on the Floor Professional. As an alternative of Microsoft’s 512-GB SSD, Asus packs in a 1-TB drive by default. It additionally enhances the 2 USB-C 4.0 ports—one required for charging on the ProArt, in contrast to the Floor Professional—with a full-size SD card slot. Oddly, the cardboard slot and one of many USB-C ports are hidden underneath a inflexible plastic flap that’s tough to open and does little greater than get in the way in which.
{Photograph}: Christopher Null
