Fear and blogging (and prerelease laptop testing) in Las Vegas
TL;DR
The author tested an unreleased Asus Zenbook A16 with a Snapdragon X2 processor at CES, expecting issues but was impressed despite some pre-production glitches.
At CES, I did what you're not supposed to do: I brought a pre-production laptop to use as my primary workhorse during a hectic event. The unproven rifle in question is the new Arm-based Asus Zenbook A16. It's a 16-inch laptop that weighs less than a 13-inch MacBook Air and comes with a high-end Snapdragon X2 processor. Going into CES with a Windows on Arm laptop running an unreleased processor sounds like a recipe for disaster. But to my surprise, aside from pre-production hardware glitches, I came away impressed.
The Zenbook A16 that Asus sent me for early testing has a Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme X2E-94-100 chip. It's one of the flagship …