The keyboard has nice action and pitch—despite maddeningly small arrow keys, which seem to be becoming the norm—and it’s aided by a curious design that sees the lower-rear portion of the screen’s bezel hitting your desk when the screen is opened. This causes the back of the laptop to be propped up by a few millimeters. It’s not much, but it does help to angle the keyboard a little, making for a slightly easier typing experience.

The touchpad is a topic of conversation on its own. While it’s spacious, the unique selling point is its ability to do double duty as a numeric keypad and calculator. Tap the top right corner and a full 10-key setup emerges in backlight from beneath the pad, working like a standard numeric keypad in any application. Swipe down on the left side of the pad and the Windows calculator app pops up, ready to help you figure out this week’s pistachio budget on the fly.

The Zenbook 14’s fan does seem to run a bit more than expected, but it’s never very loud, even when the needle is pinned under load. It’s more of a low rumble that is readily drowned by perfectly loud Harman Kardon speakers.

Budget laptops don’t often impress, but Asus defies the odds with a machine that provides a balanced combination of good performance, great battery life, and an even better OLED display— all for a $699 price of entry. I expect most users will want to bump the RAM and storage capacity up a notch or two, but even those upgrades won’t come close to breaking the bank.