It’s not unusual of Asus to unveil a whole range of new products whenever Computex is held every year, but it’s definitely not often we learn of the local availability of said products in Malaysia. From what we were told, the Asus ZenBook 3, Transformer 3 and Transformer 3 Pro are set to arrive on our shores in the third quarter of 2016.
The ZenBook 3 is by far one of the most interesting productivity laptops in the market. Sure, it bears a striking resemblance to the 12-inch MacBook, but instead of a low-power Intel Core m processor, the ZenBook 3 is packed with several choices of Intel’s ULV processors; up to a Core i7, even.
Aside from that, the ZenBook 3 is also even lighter and slimmer than the 12-inch MacBook at 910g and 11.3mm respectively. However, it does have a fair share of weaknesses as the MacBook: it only has a singular USB Type-C port, not to mention a lower resolution 12.5-inch 1080p display in comparison to the MacBook.
Considering how popular Microsoft’s Surface lineup is, it’s not surprising to see that Asus has released its own take of the form factor with the Tranformer 3 Pro. Under the hood of this tablet are a Skylake Core i5 or i7 processor paired with up to 16GB of LPDDR3 RAM, a 12.6-inch 2880 x 1920 3K display, up to 1TB of PCIe SSD, as well as a slew of connectivity options such as a Thunderbolt 3 port.
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As for the Transformer 3, it shares similar hardware as the Pro variant, aside from the amount of RAM and storage size – it can be configured with up to 8GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD storage only. That being said, the Transformer 3 does have a trick up its sleeves: Asus claims the tablet will ship with a seventh generation Intel Core processor.
Much like the release date of the Asus ZenFone 3 series in Malaysia, the Q3 2016 local availability of the ZenBook 3, Transformer 3 Pro and Transformer 3 is merely a tentative one. Regardless, it will be very interesting to see if the Transformer 3 will really feature a seventh generation Core processor once it starts shipping to consumers.
