The Asus VivoBook Flip 14 (starts at $399.99; $499.99 as tested) oozes style for a budget convertible. In clamshell-laptop mode, the thin, flat, aluminum design will turn heads, and that thinness makes it feel fairly natural as an oversize tablet. Backed by a Core m3 processor and eMMC flash storage, our test configuration rests near the budget end of the Flip 14 lineup. The good news about this component pairing is that the Flip 14 can run all day and deliver enough oomph to power Windows 10 smoothly—and fanlessly. The bad news: Media editing will require patience, and the local storage is practically nil. On the whole, however, the VivoBook Flip 14 makes smart allocation of your budget dollars, particularly if you have embraced cloud storage.

Asus would have a hard time denying it borrowed inspiration from the Apple MacBook ($999.95 at Amazon) when putting together the VivoBook Flip 14 ($574.99 at Amazon) . It features an impressively thin keyboard deck with rounded corners and straight edges that don't taper. The two 360-degree display hinges feel sturdy and hold the display in place, no matter the angle you choose. The thin, slab-like shape of the system looks cool, and when you rotate the display around and put the Flip 14 into Tablet mode, it doesn't feel bulky and awkward like some larger-screen convertibles do.

I challenge you to find a more compact, lighter 14-inch budget convertible. The VivoBook Flip 14 measures 0.6 by 12.9 by 8.9 inches (HWD) and weighs only 3.31 pounds. It's not quite as thin as the pricier Asus ZenBook Flip 14 UX461UN ($1,699.00 at Amazon) (0.55 by 12.9 by 8.9 inches), but it's thinner, trimmer, and lighter than the similarly priced Acer Spin 3 (0.82 by 13.2 by 9.1 inches; 3.75 pounds).

Like the laptop itself, the keyboard is thin and quiet. The keys provide a pleasing, springy feel with a muffled click sound that makes it one of the quietest laptop keyboards on which I've had the pleasure to type. The keyboard lacks backlighting, which is a bummer but a feature that's often left off of budget models.

The touchpad feels responsive and has a smooth, matte surface for easy gliding and swiping. Its clicks are a bit pronounced, though, and the necessary depression requires too much travel, which makes using it a bit of an effort. Compared with the quiet keyboard, the clicky-sounding touchpad is even more noticeable.

A wide palm rest holds court below the keyboard, and a fingerprint reader sits in the top-left corner of the touchpad. The keyboard deck feels rigid, but the lid and bottom panel each flex a bit under your fingers when you're carrying the laptop with the lid closed. The case's flex isn't a big deal otherwise.

The 14-inch full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) touch screen looks sharp, but I needed to tweak the display scaling (Settings > System > Display) out of the box, something I don't normally find myself adjusting on Windows laptops. Asus set the system to scale Windows 10 at 150 percent, which made windows, text, and icons too large (to my eyes, at least) and made the desktop thereby feel cramped. I dropped the scaling down a notch, to 125 percent; text remained legible, and I was able to juggle multiple windows more easily.

The display isn't dull, but it's not the brightest panel I've encountered. The glossy screen coating can also be troublesome in terms of glare and reflections if you use this machine outdoors or under harsh indoor lighting. Colors look accurate, however, and the touch screen feels snappy and responsive.

The screen bezels are narrow on the sides but a bit wider above the display and much wider on the bottom. This gives you a couple of comfy zones on which to rest your thumb without interfering with the screen, if you're gripping the laptop in tablet mode.

I have no complaints about the system's speakers. Despite using small, 2-watt stereo drivers, the VivoBook Flip 14 kicks out the jams. Music usually sounds tinny on a budget laptop and distorted at the maximum volume level. Not only does the VivoBook Flip 14 offer full, convincing sound, but it also stays clear at its top volume setting. Honestly, I was shocked at how good its audio output sounds. While watching Vulfpeck videos on YouTube, the high tones of the funk rhythm guitars and keyboards came through cleanly, while the bass was able to fill out the bottom end. The laptop's sound won't fill a large room, but you'll be able to enjoy your tunes in small and medium-size ones. For personal listening, it's surprisingly good.

To cut such a trim profile, the VivoBook Flip 14 jettisons USB Type-A ports for the smaller, thinner Type-C variety in the form of a lone USB 3.1 Type-C port, along with a (likely less useful) micro USB 2.0 port. You'll also need to make do with a micro HDMI port instead of the full-size flavor, which means yet another dongle to carry in your laptop bag. The Type-C port and the micro HDMI are on the laptop's right edge, along with the AC-adapter connection point and an audio jack.

You do get a full-size SD card slot, however. Also on the system's left edge is the power button and a volume rocker, the latter of which is particularly useful in tablet mode when you can't access the function-row keys that double as volume controls.

Our Asus VivoBook Flip 14 test configuration (model TP401CA) features an Intel Core m3-7Y30, which is a 1GHz (2.6GHz turbo) dual-core processor, along with 4GB of RAM and only 64GB worth of eMMC flash storage. (Note that eMMC is flash storage, but don't confuse it with a true solid-state drive, or SSD.)

You'll see many configurations for the VivoBook Flip 14, from entry-level Celeron- and Pentium-based models to pricier units rocking Core i3, i5, and i7 U-series chips. The Core m3 processor is a lower-end processor designed for efficiency over power. It has a stock thermal design power (TDP) rating of only 4.5 watts, but Asus has it configured in the VivoBook Flip 14 at an upticked TDP setting of 7 watts, which sets its base frequency at 1.6GHz. By comparison, the Acer Spin 3 features a Core i3-8130U, a 2.2GHz (3.4GHz turbo) dual-core processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 1TB hard drive.

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While the speedy eMMC storage helped the VivoBook Flip 14 keep pace with the Acer Spin 3 on PCMark 8, the limits of its Core m3 processor are clear when you look at its scores on our media processing tests. They are well behind the Spin 3 and two other Core i3-based systems, the Dell Latitude 3390 2-in-1 and the Lenovo Yoga 720. The VivoBook Flip 14 had no trouble, however, outpacing the Celeron-based Acer Spin 1.

All of the systems assembled here feature integrated Intel graphics and, thus, fail to distinguish themselves on our 3D graphics and gaming tests...

The VivoBook Flip 14 uses the Intel HD Graphics 615 variant and is about a half-step behind the scores posted by the Core i3-based systems and their Intel HD Graphics 620 silicon.

One aspect in which modest eMMC memory paired with a low-power CPU come into their own is on battery life. The VivoBook Flip 14 puts its efficient Core m3 processor to good use on our battery-drain test, lasting 11 hours and 17 minutes playing back our test video. That tops the Acer Spin 3's excellent time of 11 hours flat and is five hours longer than the Latitude 3390's showing on the test.

The biggest hang-ups for the Asus VivoBook Flip 14 are its minuscule storage capacity (which really puts it in a class with under-$400 models that we have seen in recent years) and the limited performance potential of the CPU. The Core m3 processor will struggle with media-editing tasks, and the 64GB of eMMC flash storage (of which only 24.9GB was free of the available 57.1GB, when the system first powered on) leaves little room for storing photos, to say nothing of videos. The Acer Spin 1, our Editors' Choice among budget 2-in-1 models, may not match up to the Flip 14 in performance, but it costs almost $200 less and sports long battery life and a healthy selection of ports. If you can stretch your budget by $300, the Lenovo Yoga 730 ($645.99 at Amazon) is another Editors' Choice 2-in-1, but one that packs plenty of power in a thin-and-light body.

As an affordable and versatile laptop for consuming rather than creating media, however, the VivoBook Flip 14 brings the goods. It looks like a much pricier convertible, and the audio simply has no business being this good in a budget laptop. In exchange, you'll just need to be comfortable using cloud storage or SD cards for storing your files.

It doesn't pack much local storage in our test configuration, but the Asus VivoBook Flip 14 is a long-running, sleek-looking, and sweet-sounding 14-inch convertible laptop.