A new laptop review is usually quite – dare we say – easy. At this point after years of reviewing tech the benchmarking software we use is loaded on a thumb drive along with a spreadsheet of results from that software to compare it to.

This time, however, things were different because instead of an AMD or Intel processor and AMD or NVIDIA GPU, we have a Snapdragon X Elite system-on-chip inside of the ASUS Vivobook S 15. This is in service of what Microsoft calls Copilot+ PCs, computers that are made to leverage Microsoft’s latest AI play.

The thing is, there is very little to tempt folks into using these machines, and at R29 999, these laptops have to be somewhat special, and there are glimmers of that here.

Windows on ARM64

While benchmarks are great because they give you a number you can then use to compare one machine to another, benchmarks in this instance tell us very little.

For example, we can tell you that in GeekBench 6 we recorded a single-core score of 2 401 and a multi-core score of 14 421, but those scores hide something. That hidden aspect is how Microsoft is running some applications. As Snapdragon’s platform is based on an ARM64 architecture, some applications may refuse to run or crash mid execution because of compatibility issues.

Microsoft gets around this with Prism, an emulation kit that means you’ll have a relatively easy time running most apps. The good news is that thanks to Apple’s M chips, more developers are creating their apps with ARM64 support in mind so finding an app that won’t run well on the Vivobook S 15 will thankfully be a rarity.

What we can say is that even if Prism is running, you won’t notice it. Apps run well on this platform and you won’t be left waiting for boot times or anything really.

The only place we foresee problems is in gaming but really, this laptop isn’t supposed to be used to play games outside of basic 3D time wasters. That’s really fine though because from what we can tell given our time with this laptop, it’s destined for the office. We did test gaming in the likes of Cyberpunk 2077, but our experience wasn’t the best with frame rates topping out at 30fps and the quality preset on low. We’d advise against considering this laptop if you plan on using it primarily for gaming.

When you’re running Photoshop or the Office suite, the Vivobook S 15 is going to meet your performance requirements and for a business that’s great news. Until recently, anything more demanding than opening Outlook and Google Chrome at the same time meant forking out for a notebook with oodles of RAM and a discrete graphics card just to keep complaints about a slow laptop at bay. Now, you can dispatch a Snapdragon X Elite PC and performance will be admirable.

Really, in the use case it’s meant for, there’s little to fault here and we could see how laptops like this could lure Mac users back to the Windows team.

Battery boost

Things get better when we look at the battery. While the 70Wh lithium ion battery is rather small, the hardware sips on that power supply in such a way that you may think it’s not draining at first. The battery can be juiced up quickly with a 90W AC charger that’s slim enough to slide into most bags.

Over the course of our standard 8am to 5pm work day, it would be normal to finish the day with a laptop charging from the wall. With the Vivobook, however, we managed to only connect the charger half way through the second day of use. In total you can expect around 14 hours of battery life depending on what you’re doing of course.

This is going to be the main draw card for many when it comes to choosing a laptop and in a professional setting, fewer charges is going to have a noticeable impact on energy prices.

Impressive as this is, it’s worth remembering this is the first real dive into modern ARM64 based machines for many manufacturers so we have to think that eventually, battery life will just improve.

Build and specs

ASUS makes some swish looking laptops and the S 15 is no different. The all metal body is lightweight and thin and a logo etched with a CNC machine adorns the lid of the laptop. There are plenty of ports available including USB Type-A and Type-C, an HDMI port, a microSD card reader and a combo audio jack.

The keyboard is a chiclet style and has a single zone RGB light and while we loathe a chiclet keyboard, it gets the job done for the average work day. The cooling here is great as while the keyboard gets warm, it’s never uncomfortably hot.

This is largely due to what’s inside the Vivobook S 15.

As mentioned, this laptop is home to the Snapdragon X Elite system on chip. This package includes a 12-core CPU clocking up to 4.2GHz, an NPU capable of 45TOPs and a Qualcomm Adreno GPU with 4.6 TFLOPS and Direct X 12 support. The best feature about this system is that it sips power compared to the discrete CPU and GPU laptops that are commonplace.

Even though Windows is still power and resource hungry, the Snapdragon X Elite offsets that and frankly, we hope to see more laptops sporting this hardware – along with some improvements on the GPU side – in future.

Conclusion

While the Copilot features are the marketing angle with these new laptops, the real draw card here will be the battery life and performance.

The ASUS Vivobook S 15 Copilot+ PC is a great machine, even if like us, the AI features aren’t even a secondary thought during your day to day activities. The Snapdragon silicon performs better than we expected it to and for most, find apps that crash or outright don’t run will be a hard ask.

The one downside of this laptop is the price.

At R29 999, one could get a machine with better specs albeit with a less impressive battery life. Furthermore, for most businesses R29 999 per seat is a tough justification, even if performance is great. There are cheaper Chromebooks and entry-level laptops that can handle being a daily driver that cost half of the price.

That leaves us in a bit of a conundrum – who is this laptop for?

We believe this is for an executive who needs a Windows machine that lasts a long time away from a power source and that needs a basic suite of applications to run well.

This laptop is exciting though as it showcases a dream that many have had for a long time, a decent Windows experience on an ARM64 platform. We hope that ASUS continues to invest in this sort of machine and that in future the price point drops to a level where laptops like this are more easily accessible.

FINAL SCORE: 8 OUT OF 10.