ASUS Raises the ‘Touch Bar’ with a 14″ 4K Secondary Display

Apple Touch Bar, move over — ASUS just one-upped you. The Taiwanese electronics company just unveiled the ZenBook Pro Duo, a laptop that features a 14-inch 4K touchscreen as a secondary display right above the keyboard.

“[For years,] innovation has been focused on cramming increasing amounts of power into smaller form factors, and there hasn’t been much consideration of other ways to improve productivity,” ASUS says. “Outside of being slimmer, lighter, and more powerful, our computers look largely unchanged from nearly three decades ago.”

The new ScreenPad Plus on the ZenBook Pro Duo is a second display that spans the full width of the keyboard on the 15.6-inch laptop. It improves workflow by allowing you to access quick controls, organize applications, position windows, and free up space on the main 15.6-inch NanoEdge OLED screen.

Since the ScreenPad Plus has a width and resolution that matches the main screen, dragging windows between the two displays is smooth and seamless.

For photographers, the secondary screen can serve as a large photo-editing tablet.

The ScreenPad Plus pushes the keyboard to the front of the surface and the trackpad to the right. Instead of wresting your wrists on the laptop, they’ll hang off the edge like they do on a regular keyboard.

Other features and specs of the ZenBook Pro Duo include 100% coverage of the DCI-P3 color space, powerful Intel processors (up to a Core i9-9980HK), up to 32GB RAM, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 GPU, fast PCIe SSD storage (up to 1TB), USB Type-A/C ports, a Thunderbolt 3 port, an HDMI port, a thickness of less than an inch, and a weight of 5.5 pounds.