plus:

• screen’s fantastic
• speakers’re fantastic
• cpu’s fantastic
• feels nice to hold
• only 2 back triggers to learn to avoid and/or deal with

minus:

• single usb-c
• it’s on the top
• no nifty touchpads
• cloud restore only works if your warranty is active apparently which i promise will be annoying

nightmare:

• the windows 11 and asus trashware startup experience; i mean my god, i had to do the cloud reinstall to even login to the thing reliably

on first boot OOBE i tried to just login with my existing personal ms account which i guess was my first mistake, but it worked fine. i added a fingerprint and it also worked fine. i then added a PIN and it also worked fine. windows downloaded updates and demanded a reboot which is fine. it rebooted and i logged in with a thumbprint just fine. then armoury crate said HEY FIRMWARE UPDATE DEMANDS REBOOT so ok fine reboot and down the spiral we go. fingerprint doesn’t work. PIN fails, “something went wrong” with a side of 0xd0000225 over and over. check bios, v317. event viewer says something about some exe with “biometric” in its title failing repeatedly. looks like i have to update through armory crate again? oh, the asus app? does that require me to sign up? it sure looks like it does… ok no, just dark patterns. more updates. more failed login attempts and the most alerts from MS authenticator i’ve ever had in one afternoon. bios v319, windows and my asus and armoire box all claim everything’s as up to date as one can get, but you’re sure gonna have to get a notification and cancel a request to reset your PIN on each login

i genuinely thought it might be headed for a refund, but shift+f10 and OOBE\BYPASSNRO after cloud restore let me make a local account and it’s been smooth since, but i’ve barely installed we <3 katamari reroll on it

currently we <3 katamari reroll which is such a perfect fit on the platform it almost hurts