That story anchors ASUS’s latest initiative focused on female empowerment through technology in South Africa, and it’s a good one. Nozipho is a real person with a real journey, and the device made a real difference. The honest reading, though, is that the story also does a lot of work for ASUS that the broader initiative doesn’t yet do on its own.

The context matters here. South Africa’s gender employment gap is persistent and well-documented. Women’s unemployment sat at 35.9% in Q2 2025, almost five percentage points above the rate for men, and only 54.9% of women participated in the labour force at all, against 65.5% of men. Women remain concentrated in lower-skilled roles, and those who do find work often carry caregiving responsibilities that men in equivalent roles don’t. These are structural problems, and no single hardware brand is going to solve them. ASUS isn’t claiming otherwise, to be fair. What they are doing is using the language of transformation in a way that sits uncomfortably against the scale of what’s actually described.

The ExpertBook range itself is a solid business machine. The Ultra variant, launched locally earlier this year, weighs under a kilogram, runs Intel Core Ultra processors with dedicated AI processing, and is built to MIL-STD-810H military durability standards. It’s a genuinely good product for professionals who need a portable, capable machine. The ExpertBook Nozipho received is described as faster and lighter than her previous device, with enough processing power to move her editing work off her phone and onto a proper screen. For someone building a content career while studying data science and raising a child, that’s not a small upgrade.

ASUS isn’t alone in this kind of positioning. Huawei South Africa has trained over 300 women through its Women in Tech programme, combining technical skills in 5G, AI and cloud with leadership development. HP has run similar empowerment campaigns across Africa. The pattern across all of them is the same: a real person’s story, a real product, and a genuine but bounded intervention attached to a marketing objective. None of these brands has reworked its pricing, financing, or distribution model specifically to address women’s access to devices at scale. That’s the gap between what the campaigns claim and what they deliver.

Werner Joubert, Commercial SYS Business Director at ASUS South Africa and SADC, frames it this way: “Digital transformation is only as valuable as it is inclusive and impactful.” The challenge is that inclusive digital transformation requires addressing affordability, connectivity, and caregiving infrastructure simultaneously. A gifted laptop moves one person forward. It doesn’t move the 35.9%.

None of this should diminish what happened in Nozipho’s case. She’s using the device to build projects, apply for jobs, and grow an audience across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. Her goals are concrete and her trajectory is upward. The ExpertBook is doing what ASUS says it will do: enabling her to work faster, move more freely, and take her career seriously. That’s worth saying plainly.

What’s also worth saying is that the ambition in ASUS’s positioning outpaces the scope of what a device campaign can deliver. South African women don’t primarily need better laptops. They need lower unemployment, better childcare infrastructure, more equitable access to education, and devices they can afford without waiting to be gifted one. When those conditions are met, a capable, lightweight business laptop becomes the tool it should be rather than the symbol this campaign needs it to be.

Nozipho’s situation improved because she got a capable machine at the right moment. For her, that was enough. For the 35.9%, it’s a different conversation entirely.

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The HONOR 600 Series is heading to South Africa, and the specs that matter most aren’t the first ones HONOR leads with.

HONOR’s pre-launch communication leans hard into “cinematic” and “expressive,” which is understandable given that AI-generated video has become the new camera megapixel race in mid-range marketing. The more substantive detail is the processor: the HONOR 600 Pro runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite, the same 3nm chip found in the Galaxy S25 Ultra. At whatever price HONOR lands this locally, that chipset puts the Pro in a different bracket from most of what it’ll sit next to on a shelf.

The standard HONOR 600 runs a Snapdragon 7 Gen 4, a meaningful step up from its predecessor and more than capable for the content-creation use cases HONOR is targeting. Both devices carry a 200MP main camera on a 1/1.4-inch sensor, positioned around night imaging rather than raw resolution. The HONOR 400 Series already showed that 200MP can be a legitimate differentiator at this tier, and the 600 Series adds AI Remosaic processing for improved low-light performance.

The feature that actually changes how people use the phone, if it works as described, is AI Image to Video 2.0. Unlike basic single-image video effects, this combines up to three images with a natural language prompt to produce short video sequences, with control over both the opening and closing frames. For someone shooting content for Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts, this is where the 600 Series makes a concrete pitch. Whether the output holds up under real-world conditions rather than branded demos stays open until local reviews land.

Both models pack a 7,000mAh battery. Load-shedding makes that a practical consideration rather than a headline number, and the HONOR 600 Lite’s launch at R8,999 earlier this month showed the brand is pricing with this market in mind. The 600 and 600 Pro sit above that, and local pricing hasn’t been confirmed, but global numbers suggest the standard 600 lands around R12,000 and the Pro closer to R15,000. At that price, the Snapdragon 8 Elite needs to justify the gap against a Samsung Galaxy A56 with its established repair network and documented software support commitments.

The 8,000-nit display on both devices matters for the same reason it mattered on the 600 Lite: outdoor legibility in high-glare conditions is something you either have, or you don’t, at this price tier.

Samsung owns mid-range volume locally, Google Pixel owns the AI photography conversation, and Xiaomi owns aggressive specs per rand. The 600 Pro, with a Snapdragon 8 Elite at sub-flagship pricing, is targeting the performance gap between those positions and the R20,000-plus flagship bracket. If local pricing lands close to what global numbers suggest, it’s a competitive device in a segment that doesn’t have many of them.

The South African launch date hasn’t been announced, but the 600 and 600 Pro are already listed on the HONOR South Africa website. Pricing is the remaining variable.

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Google’s recent Pixel event contained many instances of the company espousing its industry-leading prowess and how flattered they are that other brands have blatantly copied its innovations at a much slower pace. This incredibly transparent jibe at Apple is nothing new, however, as MKBHD pointed out in his video covering the new Pixel products, it’s very clear that both Apple and Google — and other companies — liberally borrow from each other and then claim to have innovative new ideas. 

While there’s nothing wrong with putting your own spin on an existing idea, my issue is the divisive nature in which brands weaponise them, thereby resulting in a consumer public that aggressively defends, to the point of insult, one brand over another. What people like this are defending is their reasoning for choosing a product that fits their life and workflow more than another product. There’s nothing wrong with that, but that doesn’t mean that they get to decide what’s right for someone else’s needs. Ultimately, all tech companies are creating products that focus on the key features they’ve identified as being the most important for their users, and really what you’re getting (regardless of brand) is the same exact thing with a different coat of paint. 

When it comes to the PC market, things aren’t quite the same. Yes, laptop and PC manufacturers face similar challenges to their smartphone counterparts in terms of manufacturing constraints, rising costs and having access to the exact same components as their competitors, but what we’re seeing come out of companies like ASUS is true focused innovation. 

According to Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger: “Technology has never been more important for humanity than it is now. Everything is becoming digital, with four key superpowers.” The superpowers – ubiquitous computing, cloud-to-edge infrastructure, pervasive connectivity and artificial intelligence – are set to transcend and transform the world. At this time we see no end to the demand for compute, and more compute continues to push the industry for more innovation. For example, the world creates nearly 270,000 petabytes (i.e. 27 x1019) of data every day. We are projecting that by the end of this decade, on average, all of us will have 1 petaflop (1015 floating-point operations per second) of compute and 1 petabyte of data less than 1 millisecond away.”

In my ASUS Vivobook Pro 14X review, I quoted a YouTuber who said: “No-one is doing more for creators right now than ASUS.”

While I still agree with that statement, after spending some time with ASUS and Intel at their recent Performance Day, that statement needs to be expanded to include the impressive work the brand is doing in its business laptop lineup and its bid to push the boundaries of the future of computing with its Zenbook 17 Fold OLED.

Based on stats shown by ASUS at the event, it’s clear that the brand has been making all the right moves. According to information provided by the company, ASUS experienced 20% year-on-year growth in the East EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) consumer segment, it has 68% of the OLED laptop marketshare globally and 94% OLED marketshare in South Africa in 2022. 

These mind-blowing figures prove that Pat Gelsinger’s statement was correct with regards to the explosion in the amount of content created daily and that there is an increasing need for computing devices with impressive displays, new designs and tailored content creation capabilities. 

According to Forbes, “the creator economy is estimated to be worth more than $100 billion, and more than 50 million people worldwide consider themselves creators.” This growing number of creators spans various mediums, including visual and audio, as well as different skill levels and increasing avenues to turn those passions into potentially lucrative businesses. In order to do that, they need the best tools they can afford and the best platform that fits their life and workflow in order to create content that is true to themselves. 

While there certainly are many other brands who offer their own take on creator laptops, no-one is offering the unique, broad range of functionalities that ASUS does, whether it be dual-screens like the Zenbook Duo, physical dials like the one found on the ProArt Studiobook or the capacitive dial found on the Vivobook Pro series.

ASUS devices aren’t just meant for creatives. Around the world, ASUS is probably most well-known for its ROG (Republic of Gamers) range, and to a lesser extent, its TUF gaming lineup. 

For anyone who needs something focused on business, there is the impressive ExpertBook range (which gives the HP Elite Dragonfly a serious run for its money) or the Zenbook lineup. 

What’s even more impressive to me is how user-friendly more entry-level ASUS devices are, as evidenced by a very tech-oriented friend who purchased an ASUS E410 laptop for his, not very tech savvy, mom. His dad then decided that it was time to give up his MacBook and jump to ASUS as well. ASUS is the only brand I know that makes incredible, truly innovative laptops across various pricepoints and product lines, but is also able to make laptops that the ordinary, everyday person can use without hassle.

Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO, said in an interview: “We want to be a platform for platform creators, not just a platform for other people’s apps.” This is only possible by creating devices that meet people where they are and allow them to create within the reality they find themselves in at this very moment in their lives. By constantly evolving their existing product lines, ASUS is doing exactly this and without powerful tools like these, would we have had the internet or any of the apps, services, platforms and opportunities that we have today? 

After all, as Satya Nadella said: “The web, it grew up on Windows. Think about it.” 

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