When comparing MacBook Air vs ASUS ZenBook 3 UX390UA, the Slant community recommends MacBook Air for most people. In the question“What are the best 12" laptops?” MacBook Air is ranked 1st while ASUS ZenBook 3 UX390UA is ranked 2nd. The most important reason people chose MacBook Air is:
Macbook Air has a high quality all-aluminum body that looks great and is sturdy enough that worries of accidentally damaging are mostly alleviated. It has a robust lid, well-spaced back-lit keyboard and an excellent button-less trackpad.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Solid build quality and elegant design
Macbook Air has a high quality all-aluminum body that looks great and is sturdy enough that worries of accidentally damaging are mostly alleviated. It has a robust lid, well-spaced back-lit keyboard and an excellent button-less trackpad.
Pro Great keyboard
The MBA has a well-spaced, back-lit keyboard with convex keys and placed in way that the resting arms on the sides of the trackpad is comfortable.
Pro Good battery life
The 11" model lasts up to 9 hours and the 13" model up to 12 hours. Great for programming on the go as you don't have to worry about the battery dying.
Pro Best-in-class trackpad
MBA has an excellent button-less muti-touch trackpad that's highly accurate and comfortable to use.
Pro OSX is developer-friendly
OSX is based on XNU (Darwin) kernel, it's certified Unix and arguably a lot more developer friendly than Windows. Development for Unix is native on OS X.
There's a large selection of great development tools available for OSX. The operating system itself comes bundled with a powerful terminal emulator, called Terminal. Additionally, Apple provides tools, like Xcode, an IDE that contains a comprehensive collection of tools for developing OSX and iOS software, for free.
Pro Charges entirely over USB-C
The Zenbook 3 fully implements USB-C charging and charges at full speed without needing a separate AC cable.
Pro Decent screen
The 12.5inch screen has a FullHD panel and reaches a maximum brightness of 270nits. Color coverage is rather average unfortunately, at just 85% of the sRGB color gamut. One interesting feature of the Zenbook 3 are the thin bezels around the screen which give it a very premium feel.
Pro Great speakers
Zenbook's speakers are certainly a highlight of the laptop. The music is clear and has some depth to it. The sound enhancement software that comes with the laptop does a pretty good job of adding a little bass to the drum beats.
Pro Extremely portable
Weighing just 910g and being only 12mm thick, the Zenbook 3 is a very portable laptop that you can easily carry around in a backpack and forget it's there.
Pro Finger print reader for quickly logging in
Pro Backlit keyboard
Pro Has good keyboard key travel for its size
Pro Has the world's smallest fan
Pro Powered by powerful i5 or i7 CPUs
Pro Up to 16 GB of RAM for double the price
Cons
Con Low resolution screen
Depending on the model, the MBA has either a 1366 x 768 or 1440 x 900 screen and that's behind the expected 1080p screens of most modern ultrabooks.
Con Only one USB-C port
The Zenbook 3 comes with just one USB-C port that acts as a port for the charger as well. This means that you need to use a dongle in case you want to charge your laptop and use peripherals at the same time.
Con The wrist rest area flexes a little
The area where the wrist is supposed to rest has a little flex due to the chassis being made of plastic.
Con Keys are a little shallow
While the keyboard is large and (most of the time) pleasant to use, the keys themselves are a little shallow which introduces a weird feeling that can lead to frequent typos.