Yesterday, I decided to sell my 5th Gen, 12.9 inch iPad Pro with m1 chip. I bought it back in 2021. During the Covid era, it makes sense and everything was on lockdown for most of the year. A tablet like the iPad Pro made a lot of sense when you are cooped up at home. But recently, in the last couple of years, I wasn’t using it much except for zoom calls and online meetings. It had a lot of potential that I wasn’t tapping on. So I decided to refresh my tech to suit my changing needs.
Meet the Asus ROG Flow Z13 2025 edition. It is a laptop tablet hybrid that can both function as a notebook for the more serious stuff, to a tablet for the more casual and laid back style suitable for content consumption.
Processor: AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 CPU with up to 16 cores and integrated Radeon 8060S graphics.
Display: 13.4-inch 2.5K (2560 x 1600) IPS LCD screen with a 180Hz refresh rate, Dolby Vision HDR, and Corning Gorilla Glass 5.
Memory: Up to 128GB LPDDR5X RAM.
Storage: 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD.
Battery: 70Wh battery providing over 10 hours of use on a single charge.
Connectivity: Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C, USB 4 Type-C, HDMI 2.1, and a MicroSD card reader.
Audio: Dolby Atmos support with two 2W speakers.
Camera: 13MP rear camera and 5MP IR front camera.
Cooling: Copper and stainless steel vapor chamber with dual second-generation Arc Flow Fans.
The model that I have right now is the Max+395 CPU with 32gb of RAM. I initially thought of getting the 64gb of RAM perhaps for trying out AI and LLM on a local system, but the price was a little too steep for me. I feel that despite the RAM being soldered and not being upgradeable, 32gb will be enough for me in the long run. Furthermore, the RAM is shared between the iGPU and CPU, and you can dynamically adjust the allocation according to your computational needs. This notebook tablet hybrid is a brand new version that was first announced in CES 2025 in January. I am lucky to get is as soon as it was available for sale.
I have watched and read the reviews on YouTube and the web and reviews are very favourable, praising the design aesthetics, the overall form factor and blazing fast CPU and powerful desktop like GPU despite being an integrated GPU. I have yet to really push what this device is capable off, but from what I have seen so far, the performance is really good. I mean, that fact that the CPU has 16 cores and 32 threads all in a tablet style form factor, says a lot about its potential as a workhorse machine, capable of both intensive productivity and gaming workloads.
So far, I am quite amazed by the form factor. While it is a little heavier than I expected in tablet mode, it is still feasible and practical to use in that form. I will need more time to evaluate how well it functions in tablet mode. What is truly mind-blowing is that the AMD has managed to squeeze a 16 core CPU and iGPU equivalent in performance to that of a mobile RTX 4060 in a relatively compact form factor. The only other company that can do that is Apple. Their current M4 chips are unrivalled. But now, with this new chip by AMD, the performance is almost neck to neck with the M4 Pro chip. And that is why I was leaning towards getting this laptop as I wanted M4-level performance on a Windows system.
This laptop-tablet hybrid is not cheap. On the official Asus Singapore online store, the 32GB variant is currently selling at SGD4399. That is very steep. However, I took a gamble and bought it from another seller that does parallel imports of similar devices but sold in other countries. He has a storefront on Shopee and by stacking vouchers and monthly sales promotions, I saved about SGD600 in total and got it at around SGD3800. Add to the SGD800 that I managed to get from selling my iPad Pro, and technically, the Flow Z13 now costs about SGD3000. Still steep, but not too shabby, considering this is a full-performance, gaming laptop, not some Chromebook.
I am so excited to try this outside, maybe at a cafe (during off-peak hours of course). I am also considering getting a UHS-II micro SD to expand my storage options. Sure the transfer speed is slower than that of and NVME M.2 SSD, but for storing documents, pictures and videos, it should work fine.
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