Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The Asus Vivobook E403SA is twice the price of the other "wow that's a cheap Windows laptop" laptops. What do you get for that price hike? 1. Twice the number of CPU cores. It does come out to just about exactly twice as powerful as the N3050 that's in a ton of the $200 models. 2. 30% stronger GPU 3. A 1080p display which is pleasantly matte and very sharp. 4. A lot more storage. You usually get 32gb with the $200 models, sometimes 64gb for a few bucks extra. This has 128gb. 5. Improved battery - most laptops half this price run for 8-12 hours, and this does indeed run for right around 14 hours. 6. Twice the RAM. It helps, especially when we're talking 2gb vs 4gb. 7. One USB Type-C port supporting quick charging. This IS going to matter a lot more in a few years. Other strengths worth noting: The screen bezel is rather nice, it's notably thinner than any competitors I've found. It's very thin and quite light, without being top-heavy at all. Viewing angles are tolerable, and 1080p is very crisp at this screen size. It has absolutely ZERO worthless bloat software on it, and so it's quick right out of the box. Meh-points: The trackpad has some weird settings out of the box, like it doesn't 2-finger click to right-click for whatever reason. It scrolls very smoothly and seems very precise, but that threw me off. I would have really enjoyed an ability to add RAM, but that's what you get with this kind of device. It's way cheaper to put the RAM permanently on the board than to put slots on it and a door on the bottom. Cons: You're going to forget to charge this laptop, because it lasts so long that you sort of just forget about batteries. An additional thing to note is that the USB Type-C port is a great addition, but I can't fathom why they didn't use one for charging the laptop itself. That would have been a very popular feature with the press. Summary: It's really nice, and I think it's absolutely worth the price when compared to the $200 units. I'm sure you can get more powerful laptops for $350-500, but they're going to be thicker and have fans and absolutely have worse battery life. It's essentially an ultrabook for 1/3 of the price and all of the day-to-day performance, and I recommend it wholeheartedly.