 I just folded this clean in half! Ha ha ha, I got you. This thing's designed to fold in half. The ZenBook 17 Fold is the largest foldable device that we've seen hit the market yet. It's equipped with an enormous, vibrant OLED display that puts nearly every other laptop to shame, and offers unparalleled flexibility. Traditional clamshell? Of course, sir. Would you like a physical or touch screen keyboard? Kickstand? Naturally. Book? Well, that's a new one. It looks like an amazing little package, but perhaps like my demonstration of strength. There is more here than meets the eye. It's okay though, because I'd never deceive you about our sponsor. War Thunder is an online military vehicle combat game that's free to play and a lot of fun. Get free down below today and get some special bonus items just for signing up. Go get them! The usability of any foldable device hinges, pun intended, on the mechanism for opening and closing the main display. And there's a lot that ASUS got right here. The rear panel is partially covered in a large, faux leather binding that protects the hinge assembly, and on the top portion we've got a really trippy holographic effect etched on dark blue glass. The hinge itself is surprisingly smooth, and while it is stiffer than you might expect, I think it's fair to say that it still qualifies as a one-finger lift. ASUS rates the hinge for about 30,000 folds, and while the 12.5-inch size might not impress you in its clamshell mode, the story changes dramatically when you pop off the removable lid, more on that later, and open it up into tablet mode with a reassuring thunk. Now that's impressive. The FOLED or flexible OLED panel comes courtesy of BOE and is both Pantone validated and capable of a whopping 500-nit peak brightness. It runs at 2560x1920, which is suitable for even up-close viewing. And did I even mention Dolby Vision certification yet? With the included kickstand, this thing is basically a home theater-grade HDR display that you can take with you on the airplane. I've never seen anything like it. And they claim it should sound just as good thanks to a quad-speaker arrangement with Dolby Atmos support tuned by Harman Kardon. Without rear speakers, you shouldn't expect any kind of meaningful surround out of Atmos content, but the audio is surprisingly clear throughout the entire range with a very wide soundstage. It gets easily loud enough for viewing with a friend, and while the bass is a little lacking compared to the latest from Dell or Apple, I'd give it a solid A-. Probably the best thing is we haven't talked about so far, or even really noticed, the crease. Every foldable is going to have a bit of waviness near the fold, but on the ZenBook 17 Fold, it's only really noticeable when the light catches it, and from straight on, it's hard to notice even that. If this was a portable monitor instead of a computer, I'd be impressed as hell and throw it straight into my backpack. The super durable, tech-friendly one I got from LTDStore.com, now with limited lifetime warranty. It's pretty good, trust me bro. Unfortunately, it's not an external monitor, and that's where the sheen starts to come off a little. To start with, the CPU and GPU are a little underpowered for the price. The Core i7-1250U has a base speed of 1.1GHz, and the efficiency cores outnumbered the performance cores four times over. It's not unusable, and it can boost to 4.7GHz, but the general experience in PC mode isn't as smooth as I'd like. You're not going to be gaming on this thing, and playing back 4K HDR content on YouTube nearly pegs the integrated Xe graphics. The good news is, it doesn't get very hot under load, nor does the fan get very loud. Having achieved that, however, I can't tell you, since ASUS specifically forbade me from disassembling this one. Frankly, I don't think I would have tried anyway. It looks extremely intimidating to take apart, but it apparently does come apart, and it's possible to upgrade the SSD. This internal imagery also reveals the 75Wh battery in there that contributes to 11 hours of battery life at 50% brightness. It's not quite MacBook territory, but despite the fact that I literally sneezed while writing this line, it's nothing to sneeze at. By the way, given the glossy finish of the display and the shmoo accumulating nature of its rubberized bezel here, I'd recommend the down-the-front-of-the-shirt technique anytime you need to sneeze in front of your ZenBook 17 fold. Keeping it clean has been a real chore. Not that I think many of you will end up owning one of these. I'm not even saying that you can't afford its $3,500 US starting price. It's just that it's time for me to start talking about the problems. Starting with the keyboard and trackpad. The included compact Bluetooth keyboard can conveniently be stashed inside of the fold when it's folded, and it has two Bluetooth profiles so you can use it on multiple devices should that strike your fancy. The keys themselves are pretty solid and have way more travel than you'd expect considering the keyboard's extremely thin profile. It's also got a very slick glass trackpad underneath that's big enough, but it has one of the worst click hinges I've seen in a long time. It's supposed to click along the bottom here, but it's so flopsy that you can actually click it at the top point if you push hard enough, or even from the underside. And if you're supporting the device one-handed, it's so poorly supported that it will sometimes fail to return to a neutral position. And it gets worse. While it's solid on a desk, when you use it on the ZenBook's folded screen, its feet sit on the slightly raised, rubberized bezels, making for some worrying deck flex even while trying to type normally. It also has the tendency to move around slightly too and generally feels not much better than if you'd plopped a keyboard on top of a tablet screen. Making matters worse, it's a dumb Bluetooth keyboard, meaning that while the ZenBook can detect its presence, the keyboard itself doesn't actually come out of sleep when you open the lid. You need to hit a key and wait for it to connect and then wait for it to actually start working. And if you leave it for a second or two without touching anything, the touchpad will skip when you touch it. It's just a real pain, and there's no wired option either. That port on the side is for charging only, and yes, it must be charged separately too. The very worst thing about it is the input lag. Never mind for gaming, it's so bad that it impacts even accurately moving the cursor around the screen to click on icons. Like the tablet sized keyboard, Tablet really defines the ZenBook Fold's IO too. There are physical buttons for volume up and down, and a power button as well along the top right corner. The headset jack is at the right or the top depending on the orientation, and while it lacks a dedicated charging jack, meaning you'll need to use your Thunderbolt 4 ports to charge, it does have two of those, so I kind of consider this a non-issue and use with a Thunderbolt dock with power delivery. Also unlike Apple, Asus had enough sense to include a type C to A dongle in the box, so at least you don't have to shell out for one of those should you want to use a mouse or a flash drive. Though that doesn't mean I'm giving it full marks for usability. Let's make our way through all of Asus' recommended modes. PC mode I already touched on is in my opinion the strongest argument for buying a ZenBook 17 Fold. There simply isn't anything else on the market with a screen this size that packs up this small. Unfortunately, laptop mode is not as good. Folding the ZenBook and placing the keyboard on it automatically switches the screen to portrait mode and disables the bottom half, imitating a 12.5 inch display. In this configuration, it has no additional functionality compared to a standard ultrabook, and it's nearly twice as thick at the hinge. The Windows Hello webcam is awkwardly in portrait mode like this too, you know, since the device is kinda in portrait mode, and I wouldn't have thought it possible, but Asus managed to make the Windows 11 taskbar worse by adding a curve to it that makes it hard to activate with the touchscreen if you have large fingers like I do. It's usable, but if you want a laptop, then just buy a laptop. But Anthony, you say, you can easily solve this. Just take off the keyboard. Hahaha, oh yeah, I could do that. Look at how many comments I can read under our YouTube videos this way. And it's so fun to scroll, but the second I want to reply to anyone, the experience is pretty bad. The included window management software, and I think this is actually part of Windows, pops up to help you better utilize the bottom display, but you'll find yourself really wanting to use fancy zones to split the top and bottom into separate virtual displays, since dragging windows between them is pretty cumbersome without a trackpad. Using the Bluetooth keyboard separately in what Asus calls Extend Mode could make sense in some situations, but it's hardly the killer app this device desperately needs. Tablet mode, on the other hand. Have you ever wanted a massive tablet? Well, you're in luck. I legitimately could see some people buying this NBook 17 Fold for this reason, especially someone older or with a visual impairment that makes large print a necessity for reading. It does have some drawbacks, though. The 1.4 kilogram weight means that you're going to want to rest it on your lap or the seat back in front of you. Or failing that, Asus suggests holding it partially folded in what they call Book Mode. This just about made my eyes roll out of their sockets, but it is legitimately easier to hold like this. Like any foldable, though, the ZenBook is only about 40% about the hardware. The rest is software, and out of the box, we got off to a bad start with McAfee Live Safe just yelling at me that I was unprotected. I chose to accept the risk, only to be bugged again and again and again. This on a laptop that starts at $34.99 US, the same price as the M1 Max 16-inch MacBook Pro, which has a much faster CPU and GPU, more I.O., a better trackpad, and double the memory. Now, why aside from the price am I comparing it to a MacBook? Because Asus has a service they call Glidex that allows you to extend or mirror your screen to an external device, either wired or on the same Wi-Fi network, just like Sidecar from Apple. The problem? It's a subscription service for a feature that requires no server. It's literally your PC and your phone or tablet. There is a free version, but this can only be used via Wi-Fi, only does 720p at 30fps, and is ad-supported. You get a year of Pro with your ZenBook purchase, a $36 value for a feature that's literally just a DRM lock. This is a really cynical cash grab by Asus, and they should feel bad for it. If you thought that was a digression, go check out this exclusive over on Floatplane.com where Linus goes completely off into Tangentville. If none of that matters to you at all, then on the PC side you can buy an XPS 13 with the same laptop form factor for $19.99, and it also has a faster P series CPU with 3x the PCores and twice the memory. Compared to either the XPS 13 Plus or even a base model M1 MacBook Pro, this thing might be in the ballpark per thread, but doesn't cut it in multi-threaded. That means that this laptop is almost purely a content consumption device that might be good for 2D artists if, like the Lenovo X1 Fold, it had an optional stylus, but sadly it does not. And if you needed to do any kind of heavier work, MacBooks aside, the most expensive XPS 15 pre-config is still $600 less expensive, has a dedicated GPU, a full fat Core i9-12900HK, far far more I.O., and yes, double the memory too, which is even upgradeable. We'll have these laptops linked down below, but in the end what you are paying for with the ZenBook 17 Fold is the privilege of being one of the first to buy a premium foldable laptop and the privilege of helping answer the question of why it needs to exist. Now I'm sorry if this is getting a little ranty, it's been a little ranty already I know, but that really is a legitimate question. Even ASUS didn't really want credit for the idea for this thing, rolling that poop ball down the hill onto Intel. And given this was conceived before Intel's current CEO Pat Gelsinger took the reins, when they had no clear answer to Ryzen and were bleeding market share, I honestly doubt Intel knows either. I think it's possible that they were just throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks. All of which is to say, the ZenBook 17 Fold is a very niche product. One that will appeal to a small number of people, an even smaller number of which will actually be able to afford it. The cold hard truth is I don't see ASUS selling very many of these. On the box is ASUS' long time motto, in search of incredible, they'll have to keep searching. But your search has ended for our sponsor. War Thunder, it's a free to play online military vehicle combat game. It's available on Windows, Mac, Linux, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. With cross play, with over 2,000 vehicles, including tanks, airplanes, helicopters, and ships, there's surely something exciting for everyone to pilot. 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It's way more interesting than the view count would ever suggest.