ASUS VivoBook Flip 14" J401MA-DB02 Light Grey 2020

A sleek 2-in-1 body housing a painfully slow engine. Buy a used ThinkPad or a Chromebook instead.

We were genuinely surprised by how quickly this machine runs out of breath. The Intel Celeron N4020 and 4GB of RAM are a recipe for frustration. Opening more than two or three browser tabs introduces noticeable lag, and the 64GB eMMC storage is painfully slow, sitting at the 5th percentile in our database. It's not just small, it's sluggish. The 720p display is another letdown, landing at the 2nd percentile. On a 14-inch screen, that resolution looks soft and text is far from crisp. It's fine for a single video stream, but side-by-side work is a non-starter.

Pitting this against an Apple MacBook Pro M4 Max or a Lenovo Legion Pro 7i is absurd, they're in completely different universes. The real competition for this VivoBook is a used ThinkPad or a Chromebook. A refurbished Lenovo ThinkPad T480s with an 8th-gen Core i5, 8GB of RAM, and a 1080p screen will cost about the same as a used J401MA and will be infinitely more usable for actual work. If you just want a screen for streaming, a Chromebook like the Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 5 gives you a gorgeous OLED display and a smoother experience for the same money. This ASUS sits in an awkward middle ground where it's too slow for Windows and too expensive for what it offers.

Pricing on this model is all over the map, with a wild spread from $16,150 to $70,313 across vendors. At the low end, from a seller like Newegg's used-like-new listings, you're getting what you pay for: a very cheap, very limited laptop. But if you're looking at the higher end of that range, you're being robbed. For anything over $200, you can find a used business laptop with a proper Core i5, 8GB of RAM, and an SSD that will run circles around this VivoBook. The value only exists at the absolute bottom of that price spread.

The ASUS VivoBook Flip J401MA-DB02 is a laptop that looks the part but stumbles hard once you actually start using it. The 14-inch screen in a 13-inch body is a neat trick, and the 360-degree hinge is genuinely handy for watching Netflix in a tent or tapping through a recipe in tablet mode. But the moment you try to do anything beyond a single browser tab, the Celeron N4020 and 4GB of RAM remind you this thing is built for the absolute basics, and even then, it struggles. The one thing to know? It's a Chromebook competitor running Windows, and Windows is simply too heavy for this hardware.

If you're looking for a machine to handle schoolwork, office tasks, or anything beyond a single browser tab, this isn't it. Go get a refurbished Lenovo ThinkPad or Dell Latitude instead. You'll get a faster processor, more RAM, a better screen, and a machine that won't make you want to pull your hair out.

Don't buy this unless you find it for a steal and your needs are incredibly narrow. The ASUS VivoBook Flip J401MA is a classic case of a laptop that looks good on a shelf but falls apart under real-world use. The processor and RAM are simply not up to the task of running Windows comfortably. If you need a cheap, portable machine for writing, browsing, and video calls, hunt down a used business laptop. You'll get a machine that lasts for years instead of one that frustrates you on day one.