Laptops are becoming increasingly difficult to repair and upgrade. In recent years, RAM and SSD chips have been soldered to motherboards, greatly limiting your options in the event of breakage or if you want to change a part.
The 2025 edition of the Asus ROG Strix SCAR gaming laptop reverses this trend, allowing the back cover to be opened with the simple slide of a button. It is then possible to remove (still without tools) the RAM, SSD storage and battery.
You don’t believe me? Here is the proof:
And if I had had a simple screwdriver, I would also have had access to several other parts, like the Wi-Fi chip, for example.
Be careful though, it’s expensive. When it launches in Canada in March, the ROG Strix SCAR 18, with Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX chip and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti mobile graphics card, will start at $3,999 (and if you want to rack up extra points on your credit card, you can even pay more by opting for an RTX 5090 mobile card, 64 GB of RAM rather than 32 and 4 TB rather than 1 TB of space).
The ROG Strix SCAR 16 model will be sold from $3,799.
Zenbook A14: lighter than a MacBook Air, with Windows
Photo : Maxime Johnson.
The ROG Strix SCAR was one of my main favorites in ASUS’ suite at the CES tech show in Las Vegas. But this one is heavy and thick, and definitely not for everyone.
My other favorite is at the other end of the spectrum: the Zenbook A14 (UX3407), probably the lightest full-featured laptop I’ve ever lifted, at just 899g (that’s over 25% of less than the weight of the equivalent MacBook Air).
This is equipped with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X chip (a slightly less powerful version than those launched last year with the first Copilot+ PCs with ARM chips). This chip was presented at CES by Qualcomm to help reduce the price of Copilot+ PCs to $600 US (around $850 Canadian), but here, Asus is using it instead in a high-end computer, with an OLED screen, for example. example.
The Zenbook A14 is really impressive in the hands, but it is above all its performance that I can’t wait to try, in particular its autonomy, which is announced at 32 hours on a single charge.
The Asus Zenbook A14 will be sold starting at $1,199 in February. This will, in my opinion, be the Snapdragon chip computer to watch this year.
