Asus Releases $999 AsusPro B9440UA Laptop

[Guest]

The laptop features a new hinge that changes the angle at which you'll type--and means you won't have a built-in webcam to use.

Asus Releases $999 AsusPro B9440UA Laptop : Read more

 

[bjornl]

Prosumer and uses built-in HD graphics? I'd say this is a rather uninteresting (generic/low-end) model and far from pro-sumer.

 

[jacobdrj]

BJORNL, I disagree. I was in the market for a laptop without dedicated descret graphics as it needlessly reduces battery life, adds weight, reduces durability, increases driver completely and generally is a waste for my work. I wish more laptops at this price point came with better integrated graphics...

 

[Xajel]

Prosumer and uses built-in HD graphics? I'd say this is a rather uninteresting (generic/low-end) model and far from pro-sumer.

You're confusing between Prosumer and Professionals.

By Prosumer, they mean SOHO & Enterprise environment.. you don't need dGPU as most of the work is web, office & few apps ( Accountant, Management, HR admin, etc... ). and you can do more than what you need with that silly Dual-Core i7 U series.

Professionals are those with more demands, mainly in multimedia performance, a high end Quad Core i7 is a must for any of them. a dGPU will help in a lot of applications ( where acceleration is possible ), some might even have a Pro grade dGPU like Quadro/FireG/Radeon Pro. as these tends to have a more stable and solid drivers.. and some even will have a workstation CPU ( Xeon ), in that time the laptop will be a mobile workstation.

 

[dstarr3]

The iGPU is fine. What surprises me is that this is aimed at professionals and they ditched the webcam. Don't know about you, but I spend a lot of time Skyping into meetings. Webcam's pretty necessary for a lot of professionals. Plus no ethernet port. So it's a $1k laptop that I'd need to pour even more money into. Not brilliant.

 

[cgeorgescu]

"Prosumer and uses built-in HD graphics?"
"Professionals are those with more demands, mainly in multimedia performance"
People wrongly think of PRO as automatically meaning Photoshop, Premiere and GPGPU compute.

There are lots of guys using laptops to write software and only 0.01% of them need a GPGPU, the rest only need (in this order) a fast SSD, 16GB+ RAM and an i7 HQ. For these guys, a dGPU or a calibrated LCD won't speed up their compile time or the locally-installed Oracle server.

Another example: architects spend 99% of their time drawing and they like 4k screens for their fine lines but color accuracy isn't important, nor huge amounts of RAM, nor how fast the processor is. Common rendering modules for their software can use some GPGPU but architects render those models at the best quality only once every few days, normally they do fast-renders which take 3s anyway, is nothing to benefit from having an expensive NVidia card.

For my father in law, PRO is a 17" laptop with a 4K screen no matter how lame (color-wise) or how slow as his business is AutoCAD-based, topography.

So PRO doesn't mean only multimedia.