Asus Vivobook S 15 (2024) Review: Your Copilot for AI Adventures

For the last 40 years or so, all our computers have been powered by processors based on derivatives of the X86 architecture. Only Intel and AMD manufacture these, and they’re sold under the Core and Ryzen brands, respectively. This term, X86, really hasn’t mattered much, because there wasn’t any other option, so no one really needed to use it in marketing. On the other hand, our smartphones and many of the devices we now have in our lives are powered by a totally different architecture, called Arm. These chips are designed by multiple companies, most notably Qualcomm, MediaTek, and recently, Apple.

After many years of trying, Qualcomm is the first to bring Arm chips to the PC space. This has taken a lot of work, mostly to make sure that PC software actually runs. Microsoft has been instrumental in making this happen, and in 2024, the first seriously competitive Windows-on-ARM laptops are now hitting the market.

They look and feel much like every other laptop you’ll see in a shop – and that’s pretty deliberate. They’re being designed and sold by all the brands you’d expect. One added factor is the addition of AI features, which are currently exclusive to Qualcomm-powered laptops, and we’ll be talking about that soon.

Asus is one of the first companies off the block with its Qualcomm-based Vivobook S 15 (2024). It slots into the existing Vivobook lineup alongside several very similar options with standard Intel and AMD processors. I’m excited to review this new processor and platform for the first time, and also see what Asus has done to make it a viable option for premium laptop buyers in 2024. Oh, and there are those AI features to check out along the way too! Let’s get started.

Asus Vivobook S 15 (2024) Price

Asus sells a vast and complicated range of laptops, and even within the mainstream Vivobook series there are multiple categories. The S in this laptop’s model name tells us that this is an aspirational thin-and-light model, with a crisp OLED screen and premium design elements. Even so, it’s one of Asus’s highest-priced mainstream models in India right now at Rs. 1,24,990 (MOP). The Vivobook S 15 (2024) is available on Asus’s own website as well as Flikpart and other authorised dealers.

Asus Vivobook S 15 (2024) Look and feel

15-inch laptops sell well in India, trading a bit of portability for expansive screens and keyboards with number pads. The Vivobook S 15 weighs 1.42kg and is 15.9mm thick at its thickest point when closed. You can carry it around every day without feeling too much weight, but it isn’t what the most dedicated road warrior would choose.

The body is made of aluminium and the lid has an extremely simple, minimalist finish in plain silver. I like the subtle logo which is offset to one side. The lid can easily be raised with one finger, and Asus has designed a slim hinge that can open to 180 degrees. This makes for comfortable use when lying down and can help prevent damage if your laptop gets knocked over backwards when open. Unlike many other Asus laptops, the bottom of the lid doesn’t act as a buffer to raise and tilt this one forward, so the keyboard stays flat. The lid does flex and twist slightly when pressure is applied, which is not easily avoidable with laptops this large and thin. I wouldn’t recommend placing small, heavy objects on top of it when closed.

The 15.6-inch "Luminia OLED" panel is crisp and vivid, with great colour reproduction.

Asus Vivobook S 15 (2024) Display

Flipping the lid up reveals what Asus calls a “Luminia OLED” screen. It certainly does grab attention, with vivid colours and rich contrast. The 15.6-inch panel has a 3K (2880x1620) resolution and it’s immediately clear that this isn’t your average laptop display. It is fairly reflective, but thankfully not too glossy. The refresh rate goes up to 120Hz which is great for everyday use. On the downside, display scaling is set to 200 percent which makes everything on screen look cartoonishly big, and I find it a total waste. I took that down two steps to 150 percent in the Windows 11 settings and was much happier (and more productive). 

Asus reports 100 percent DCI-P3 colour gamut reproduction 600nits peak brightness, and a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio with True Black DisplayHRD certification. High-res streaming movies and videos definitely looked good on this laptop display, and it should be colour accurate enough to work on photos or creative tasks. 

If you’re worried about OLED longevity, there are software tweaks that should mitigate this, such as being able to bump up the power being fed to some areas of the screen and shifting the entire display area by a few pixels to prevent burn-in. Asus even offers a free panel replacement within the warranty period. 

The Vivobook S 15 has relatively narrow screen borders on the left and right, and thankfully Asus hasn’t sacrificed the webcam’s  position on top just to prioritise looks. There’s a physical camera shutter for privacy and Windows Hello face recognition is supported.

The keyboard layout is quite standard, but RGB backlighting is a quirky touch.

Asus Vivobook S 15 (2024) Keyboard and trackpad

Layout-wise, the keyboard on this laptop is fairly standard. The arrow cluster is squashed into one row, which is unfortunately normal these days. Typing is comfortable enough and there’s good key travel but I’m not a fan of the texture that Asus has gone with on the keys themselves. The labels are also hard to see in the daytime when the backlight is on and set to white. Speaking of which, RGB backlighting is uncommon on non-gaming laptops so that might be a quirk that some buyers really like, but I chose to just set it to white. There’s a zone so you can’t create elaborate lighting patterns, but there are still some animation effects.

The trackpad is very large and easy to use. Asus has gone with a standard clickable one, which I much prefer to the haptic, non-moving type that are becoming common now. Palm rejection was a bit off and I sometimes found the cursor moving erratically while I was typing. Asus has also implemented its own gestures in addition to the usual Windows 11 ones – slide vertically along the left side of the trackpad to adjust volume and the right side for brightness. A horizontal swipe along the top will move you forward or back in a video, and a diagonal inward swipe from the top-right corner launches an Asus screen sharing control panel (more on that later). These gestures are useful in theory but annoying when triggered accidentally. They aren’t customisable and you either have them all enabled or disabled; you can’t choose.

A cutout at the bottom of the lid allows hot air to be exhausted through the vents on the rear.

Asus Vivobook S 15 (2024) Hardware specifications

The star of the show here is of course the Qualcomm processor. Asus has used the Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 which has 12 CPU cores running at up to 3.4GHz. You also get integrated Qualcomm Adreno graphics and a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for AI tasks. The Vivobook S 15 comes with 16GB of LPDDR5X-8448 RAM which is a notably faster spec than we’re used to seeing, but isn’t upgradeable or replaceable. There’s a 1TB PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD which can be swapped out.

Although slim, this laptop has a dual-fan cooling system, and Asus says it runs 16.5 percent cooler while making 20 percent less noise than an equivalent X86-based laptop. Hot air is exhausted out the back and downwards. In my usage, I didn’t feel uncomfortable heat on the keyboard or on any part of the chassis that my hands would touch in normal use.

The 70Wh battery is claimed to last through over 18 hours of normal use which should be enough to get through two work days. Asus also says its software extends the lifespan of its batteries. The Vivobook S 15 comes with a 90W charger which is relatively small, and it’s supposed to charge to 60 percent in under 50 minutes. It will charge slower with lower-rated chargers, even a 30W USB-PD unit or a power bank. 

I was happy to see a lot of useful ports on the sides of this laptop. On the left there’s an HDMI 2.1 output, two USB4 Type-C 40Gbps ports (with video output), a microSD card slot, and a 3.5mm audio socket. On the right, there are two USB 3.2 Type-A 5Gbps ports and also two status LEDs – white for power and orange for charge status. These can be pretty bright and don’t go off when the laptop’s lid is closed, which was sometimes distracting. There’s also Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and stereo speakers. 

The Vivobook S 15's port selection should be more than enough for most people.

Asus Vivobook S 15 (2024) Copilot+ features and software

We have to talk about Windows 11 and the AI-enabled features you get as part of Microsoft’s Copilot+ push. Because of the Qualcomm processor’s built-in NPU, the Vivobook S 15 is qualified to run a few extras in Windows 11, plus of course whatever third-party software vendors decide to use to their advantage. For now, Microsoft and Asus are promoting a few interesting little tricks. 

First, you can turn on live, real-time captioning for any video, and it can translate spoken words from other languages into English (with more languages coming in the future). In real-world use, I found this unreliable. Often, it simply would not pick up speech and the caption area would be blank. I also found it frustrating to have to reposition this band manually each time I tried using the feature. When it did work, it wasn’t always in sync with video, but it was still remarkable to see live translations just appear.

Then there are live webcam effects, such as being able to blur your background and apply live artistic filters. The former is useful but the latter is just for amusement. Windows 11 is also supposed to be able to crop and pan the webcam’s view so your head is always in frame, but this rarely worked for me. Image and audio quality enhancement happen in the background. 

Microsoft Paint, the ultra-basic and often-forgotten app, gets a very neat Cocreator tool that instead of just text prompts, lets you also turn simple scribbles into detailed drawings. It needed a bit of extra prompting when I tried it but was fun to experiment with. Once you have your basic composition you can tweak the art style or adjust a “Creativity” slider to change the algorithm’s effect.

There’s also the Copilot app which is Microsoft’s AI chatbot. It lets you search the Web, build multi-step questions and branch off based on answers to get what you want. It can follow context but isn’t always helpful in terms of data, unless you stick to the basics like asking it about weather. It also has an image generation tool powered by Dall-E, which lets you use 30 prompts per day. I had fun with this as well, and the results can be surprisingly professional-looking, except that they are limited to a resolution of 1024x1024. 

The physical privacy shutter over the webcam is a nice touch.

Unfortunately this app will try to sell you a Copilot Pro subscription to generate images quicker and use better tools such as writing assistance and the ability to generate presentation slides. It’s also disappointing that these apps require a Microsoft account, since the whole point of the NPU is to be able to process AI requests offline.

The big headlining Copilot+ feature, Recall, has been delayed due to security issues. This was meant to index basically everything you do on your PC, from websites visited to files opened, in order to help you retrieve information using natural language queries or contextual clues. While I’m not sure I’d want all my usage data accessible like that, it is at least a look at how AI could change the way we use devices, rather than these simple features that are nice to have but won’t really make a huge difference to anyone’s life.

Asus has added its own AI-enabled photo and video management tool called StoryCube. It displays your media in various ways and lets you group, tag, and organise it quickly. The NPU has also been used to do things like presence detection, dimming or locking the screen when you’re away from your laptop, without draining the battery.

There are some other non-AI software features too. The MyAsus control panel has loads of options for everything from keyboard backlighting to performance profiles to speaker equaliser settings. It also lets you connect to customer support and troubleshoot problems. GlideX lets you control multiple PCs with one keyboard and trackpad, and mirror a smartphone on your desktop. 

ScreenXpert is an annoying utility that is supposed to make it easy for users to manage apps across multiple monitors, which really isn’t a common use case for anyone who buys a laptop like the Vivobook S 15. This app interrupted me with an unwanted full-screen tutorial shortly after I began work one day, and then continued to stay active as a floating icon in one corner of the screen. There’s no way to exit it – I had to manually kill its processes in the Task Manager and prevent it from starting up automatically. 

You might be used to seeing this logo on smartphone boxes and advertisements.

Asus Vivobook S 15 (2024) Performance

I enjoyed using this laptop for everyday work and entertainment. Once I had the display settings adjusted to my liking and had gotten used to its keyboard, I was able to get work done and use my everyday browser-based tools without any trouble. It didn’t even occur to me that I wasn’t using a standard Intel- or AMD-based laptop. This will be the experience for nearly all users who just want Microsoft Office or Google Docs, a functioning browser, and maybe some light games.

Qualcomm has published a huge list of software that’s natively compatible with Arm processors, including most of Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite, DaVinci Resolve, Affinity’s creative tools, Blender, OBS, Zoom, Slack, Dropbox, WhatsApp, several streaming apps, and even developer tools. Microsoft’s Prism emulation layer is supposed to take care of everything that isn’t native. I never saw any warning popups or notices that performance might be impacted, which is both a good and a bad thing – most laptop users don’t need to know what’s going on in the background, but anyone trying to diagnose a problem or performance issue will also have to go through some guesswork.

That said, Windows on Arm is still new and forums online are filled with not-so-great experiences. Some hardware drivers don’t work, some niche software isn’t compatible, and some performance issues have cropped up with games. Many of these issues will be resolved over time, but it’s important to do some research before making your next laptop purchase.

As for benchmarks and numbers – keep in mind that not all tools used here are native. PCMark 10 could be installed and it loaded, but refused to run any tests citing Arm incompatibility. Geekbench 6 ran just fine, producing single- and multi-core scores of 2,306 and 13,238 respectively. The new Geekbench ML test also put up scores of 1,978 (single-precision) and 5,318 (quantised).

The dedicated Copilot key brings up Microsoft's default AI chatbot.

Cinebench 2024 runs natively, and managed single-core and multi-core scores of 105 and 943, respectively. The much older and definitely non-native POVRay ran without a hitch, managing its render test in 1 minute, 11 seconds. These are good numbers for a mainstream laptop that won’t really be used for heavy 3D rendering or content creation. The upper middle of the Vivobook S 15’s keyboard did get warm during these benchmarks but not to an uncomfortable level.

SSD performance was excellent, with CrystalDiskMark reporting sequential read and write speeds of 5038.98MBps and 3630.04MBps respectively, and random reads and writes at up to 2445MBps and 2837.55MBps respectively. 

3DMark’s Solar Bay test returned a score of 9,752 while the Night Raid test result was 25,371 and Wild Life managed 18,777. The Unigine Superposition test crashed on loading and could not run. 

Shadow of the Tomb Raider claimed that no display hardware was installed, but seemed to run just fine anyway. At the Medium quality preset, with the resolution set to 1280x1024 (without any upscaling), TAA enabled and ray tracing off, the built-in benchmark showed an average of 28fps. This is not bad at all, especially since there were no major stutters and no issues with textures popping in. I also tried the somewhat dated title Gears Tactics, at 1920x1080 with all settings at Low or Medium, and its built-in benchmark averaged a healthy 58.7fps but there was some variation, with the bottom 5 percent averaging 34fps. 

The bottom-firing speakers are okay but won't exactly get the party started.

Civilization VI could not detect the Vivobook S 15’s hardware capabilities and wasn’t able to run full-screen after setting the resolution to 1920x1080 manually. The average of 28.55fps, after experimenting with quality settings, was enough to fully enjoy this game. Interestingly there’s also an AI benchmark, though this game predates NPUs by many years and was not using this laptop’s native AI hardware at all, according to the Windows task manager. Average turn processing time was 9.27 seconds, which is fine for a non-gaming laptop.

Finally, I tried to play a bit of Doom Eternal, with the resolution set to 1280x720 and overall quality set to Medium. This proved to be too much for the Vivobook S 15, averaging 30fps when just sprinting through the Super Gore Nest level but dropping well below 20fps and stuttering badly in even small skirmishes with demons. Here again, the middle of the keyboard got a bit warm. This game is forgiving of weak hardware but going so low was expecting too much.

As stated earlier, the Vivobook S 15 has a fantastic screen, and watching all sorts of content was generally enjoyable. However the speakers are a bit weak - they do get loud, but the sound is thin and stretched, with very little bass and some noticeable distortion at high volumes.

Battery life is a huge selling point for Qualcomm, and in my experience this laptop did last through well over a standard work day without needing to be plugged in. I was also impressed with its low standby power consumption – it was ready to go with minimal drain after lying in standby over a weekend. The Vivobook S 15 charged to 19 percent in 10 minutes when powered down, and 47 percent in 30 minutes when in standby, which is pretty good.

The minimalist appearance of the Vivobook S 15 belies its powerful hardware.

Asus Vivobook S 15 (2024) Verdict

It’s hard to wholeheartedly recommend first-generation products because it’s impossible to tell what issues might crop up for every single use case. However, with the amount of effort that Microsoft and Qualcomm have put in here, it’s likely that many people will use first-gen Copilot+ laptops and never know that there’s anything different about them. I’d still caution people who rely on specific older software or hardware or who need a PC for demanding work, but that’s not the audience for this laptop anyway.

Windows 11’s AI features for now are largely gimmicky but that could change in the future. Intel and AMD both have major laptop platform launches coming up, and we haven’t yet seen how they will respond and compete in the Copilot+ space. On a platform level, it would make sense to wait and watch.

On its own though, the Vivobook S 15 is fast and responsive with everyday work, handles browser-based apps perfectly well, and has a fantastic screen too. Battery life is impressive, there’s lots of connectivity, and it’s relatively portable. The only downsides are that it’s expensive, the speakers are just average, there’s some annoying bloatware, and the keyboard and trackpad could have been better.

This laptop goes up against the 15-inch MacBook Air, and in fact costs a bit less. For the price, you still get better specifications and features, though not Apple’s ecosystem and not quite the same level of overall polish.

If you just want a laptop for everyday use, you do now have additional choices in the market, which means more factors and variables to consider. The rest of 2024 is sure to be interesting!