With the local launch of the Vivobook S 15 on Friday last week, Asus is the first laptop manufacturer to bring a Copilot+ PC to South Africa. If that’s enough to warrant a purchase for you, then you’ll be happy to know that they’re already available for R30,000. Happy shopping.
For the more discerning consumer, who at least wants to know what they’re getting for their money — or if you’re doing the sensible thing and waiting for reviews — here are the important bits.
‘First’ — Asus, probably
The Vivobook S 15 draws its AI powers from a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chipset. This is still a relatively new chipset (it only debuted in October last year) but, apart from using a different instruction set, it functions the same way as chipsets from Intel or AMD.
The slowest SD X Elite variant (X1E-78-100) that Asus is using for the Vivobook S 15 houses a 12-core CPU that’ll reach 3.4GHz, an integrated Adreno GPU rated for 3.8 TFLOPS (tera floating-point operations per second), and Qualcomm’s Hexagon NPU with up to 45 TOPS (trillion operations per second). South Africans will also get 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM as well as 1TB of M.2 NVMe storage inside their Vivobook S 15s.
Also included in the 1.42kg package is a 15.6in Lumina OLED display featuring a resolution of 2,880 x 1,620 and a 120Hz refresh rate. Asus OLEDs don’t usually disappoint and we have no reason to believe this one will be any different.
The Vivobook S 15 will have Copilot+ friends soon
As exciting as the physical specs are, Asus is banking on the promise of a tightly integrated AI-powered workflow to attract customers.
“The point isn’t about wiping entire industries off the map, but about people finding small but significant time savings through AI-powered processes,” said Juan Mouton, head of marketing at Asus South Africa.
Whether those ‘small but significant time savings’ are all they’re chalked up to be, is another question. Then there’s the potential compatibility issues with running Windows on Arm. Although, Microsoft’s renewed focus on Windows on Arm thanks to Qualcomm’s latest chipsets could mean previous compatibility issues are a thing of the past.