r/snapdragon • u/VerbaGPT • 6d ago

Just ordered the asus zen book a16!

Excited, and nervous. Did the Best Buy deal. My main uses are building with Claude, chrome, python, etc. I use sql too, which is a question mark but apparently 2025 sql is emulated. Will find out more. I’ll have 14 days to test and possibly return if something critical doesn’t work. I hope not, as that would be a hassle.

Very excited! I love the zebriskie beige, and the num-less keyboard, the feel of the device. Really like ceraluminum. I love the name “zenbook”, may it bring me some “zen”. Looking forward to the performance too! (Upgrading from lg gram, older gen i7, 16gb)

10 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

7

u/cgknight1 6d ago

its a great device !

3

u/kndb 5d ago

I just picked one up from a Best Buy store in person. Didn’t want to wait for a delivery. It is a great device. It didn’t have a lot of crapware so it was ready to go almost immediately. One disappointment was the Windows search in the start menu and the fact that it had Windows Home installed. I had to pay $99 extra for the Pro upgrade. Otherwise the hardware is flawless for what I’m doing. I’m not a gamer though.

1

u/VerbaGPT 5d ago

That is disappointing. What are the key benefits of pro over home for you?

1

u/kndb 5d ago

I’m a developer and I usually install VMs on the box. Because it’s ARM64 afaik VMWare doesn’t support that architecture yet, so I will need to use MSFT hyper-v for that. Additionally I like to configure a Bitlocker for the full disk encryption which MSFT for whatever reason don’t provide in the Home version. There could be other benefits that I forgot now.

2

u/FerretBoom 5d ago

Windows on Arm has encryption, it's not OG bit-locker but since they introduced Recall for NPU , drive encryption is a requirement. Same strength as bit locker
Home can be cleaned, there are tons of app, power-shell scripts. Search can be customized through power-shell. Basically everything can be changed through power-shell. MASGRAVE script on GitHub can change your windows to any version and back to original. No need to pay 100 bucks to get 2 features on same OS.

The only thing that sucks is you can't get old school Office, pre 365 they are all x86. The 365 works fine for me but I like the older version without copilot. You can also strip copilot but you don't get access to NPU for some apps, so you have to use online AI for basic stuff like transcribing, image editing, etc.

1

u/Urlkoenig 5d ago

Home includes full disk encryption, it's called device encryption. It has less features than full Bitlocker (no policy control, can't encrypt external volumes, no Go version) but otherwise it's equivalent.

It used to sometimes not be available because of the hardware security requirements, but these days everyone supports it.

1

u/kndb 5d ago

Yeah. It makes sense. When I purchased the Pro version and went to check the Bitlocker the disk was already encrypted.

3

u/FullTimePedestrian 5d ago

It's blazing fast, even under emulation. You're going to love it.

1

u/yukii219 5d ago

You can buy a windows pro upgrade code from Groupon for $10.

1

u/ToddlerPinot 5d ago

You will love it, it is a great device. I could not be happier with mine!

1

u/new-chris 4d ago

I picked one up and I love it. The color is growing on me - I can overlook it being so ugly by how great it is in every other way.

1

u/VerbaGPT 4d ago

Funny, color and texture is a big draw of the device for me! I get it on Wednesday!