Don’t be fooled by Fujitsu’s latest ultra-light Intel laptop

After CES 2025, the latest and greatest thin and lightweight laptop is the Asus Zenbook A14. It doesn’t look like this one is in anyone’s hands yet, but it already has a new competitor. The Fujitsu FMV Note U weighs an incredible 1.87 pounds (848 grams), and perhaps most impressively, it’s powered by an Intel CPU.

Asus and other laptop manufacturers have been relying on Qualcomm’s Arm-based Snapdragon But Fujitsu is sticking with the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor in the base model. The impressive weight class at under two pounds is well below the Zenbook A14, though I have to point out that its battery life estimate is a bit of a cheat.

FMVWorld (automatically translated via Tom’s Hardware) claims “up to 36 hours of battery life” from 64 watt-hours, but this only occurs while using “Long Range Driving” mode. Elsewhere he says the number is 36 hours In idleness (i.e. doing nothing). It quotes 15.5 hours of video playback, which is more in line with the latest Lunar Lake laptops, and about half the battery life of the Zenbook Z14 in the same test. It seems Snapdragon laptops are still the best in terms of battery life, as long as you don’t hit them with anything too hard.

Other features of the FMV Note U include a 14-inch display with 1920 x 1200 resolution, 32GB of RAM, 256GB to 2TB of storage, and a backlit keyboard. You get a surprising number of ports on this 17.3 mm (0.68 inch) laptop: two USB-C ports, two USB-A ports, full HDMI, microSD, and Ethernet. Fujitsu guarantees that the battery can be charged (slowly) with anything that can output 7.5 watts (i.e. most suitable mobile phone batteries).

Fujitsu

It’s certainly an interesting proposition, especially if you’re willing to make some sacrifices to get an incredibly lightweight laptop that still uses x64 hardware. For comparison, the 13-inch iPad Pro weighs just 1.28 pounds (582 grams), which is only half a pound lighter with much less complexity in terms of hardware and components.

FMV.com puts the price at 214,000 yen for the base model, and will ship within a week or so. That’s around $1,370 (or €1,315) at the moment, but getting Fujitsu’s specialty models outside of Japan can sometimes be difficult. There is no information about an international release yet.