BERLIN – There’s light and then there’s light. The Asus Pro B9 is definitely the former at 1.9 pounds.
There's no word on pricing or when the Pro B9's launching, but it’s clear that Asus is gunning to be a major player in the business laptop space, an arena the company seemed to have left to the likes of Dell and Lenovo.
Design
I haven’t seen a laptop this light since the Lenovo LaVie Z. And honestly, it made me want to toss it like a frisbee. Let’s hope the Pro B9 fairs better. It looks to be made from the same blue aluminum seen on the likes of the Asus ZenBook Pro Duo so it’s definitely got a leg up. And the fact that the slim stunner has undergone MIL-SPEC-810G testing is reassuring that this isn’t a flimsy toy.
At 0.6-inches thick, it’s on a par with the Lenovo X1 Carbon, but the former is much heavier at 2.5 pounds.
From the quick glimpse I saw of the notebook during the slide presentation, it appears to have a variation of Asus’ ScreenPad.
MORE: Best Business Laptops
Specs
In another rebuke of the slim = weak narrative, Asus has found a way to outfit the Pro B9 with some seriously powerful specs. When it launches, it will have an Intel 10th Gen Core i7 processor, a pair of 1TB PCIe SSDs in either RAID 0 or RAID 1 configuration. It will also have Wi-Fi 6 and Thunderbolt 3 ports.
And if like any good laptop, it will have TPM software and a fingerprint reader to keep your sensitive information under lock and key.
Bottom Line
Asus is making an aggressive play on the business space with the Pro B9 laptop. As you’d come to expect from the brand, it’s undeniably pretty and really powerful and it’s incredibly light. If it can offer reasonable battery life and it delivers on the performance, the Asus Pro B9 might be the laptop du jour for mobile professionals.
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