Asus releases affordable MacBook Air rival with Intel Wildcat Lake and thin design

Asus has started rolling out the refreshed Vivobook 15 (X1504) with Intel's Wildcat Lake processors to replace the previous Raptor Lake-powered variant. The new 15-inch laptop is now available in Canada, initially with the Core 7 350.

Pricing starts at CA$1,399.99 (~US$1,006) for a configuration with 8GB of DDR5 RAM and a 512GB PCIe 4.0 SSD. Upgrading to 16GB of RAM raises the price to CA$1,499.99 (~US$1,078). Even then, it remains considerably cheaper than the 15-inch MacBook Air M5 (Notebookcheck review), which starts at CA$2,099 with the same amount of RAM and storage.

Needless to say, the Apple M5 chip will run circles around the Core 7 350, but the Intel chip should still be sufficient for everyday office work and schoolwork. Asus lists even more affordable Vivobook 15 configurations with the Core 5 320, Core 5 315, and Core 3 304 on its website, but they are not yet available.

Upfront, the Vivobook 15 has the same standard 15.6-inch IPS display as its predecessor. It offers a 1920 x 1080 resolution, 250 nits of brightness, a basic 45% NTSC color gamut, and a 60Hz refresh rate. Moreover, only the non-touch display is currently available in Canada.

Compared to the previous Raptor Lake variant, the only change here is the newer Wildcat Lake processor. The Core 7 350 is more efficient than the Core 7 150U in the outgoing model and, according to our benchmarks, slightly faster as well. It also adds a built-in NPU for handling local AI tasks. One trade-off is that Wildcat Lake supports only single-channel memory.

Other highlights include a 42Wh battery with fast charging, a full-size keyboard with a number pad, and a relatively thin 0.70-inch chassis. It also offers a wider selection of ports than the MacBook Air, with USB-C, USB-A, HDMI, and a headphone jack. The new Vivobook 15 (X1504) with Wildcat Lake is now listed on Amazon Canada, although it is currently marked as temporarily out of stock. We could not find similar listings in the US or Europe.