In a surprising turn of events, an Asus ROG laptop was recently spotted in a courtroom during former President Donald Trump’s $250 million fraud trial in New York. The laptop belongs to one of Trump’s attorneys, Alina Habba, and its presence caught the attention of Ryan Rigney, a marketing director at Odyssey Studio.
Rigney took to Twitter to share his discovery, revealing that the laptop is an Asus model with an Nvidia RTX 2070 Ti graphics card. However, it’s worth noting that the RTX 2070 Ti doesn’t actually exist, leading to speculation that Rigney may have been referring to the RTX 2070 Super.
Kotaku has identified the laptop as the Asus ROG Strix G17 G712, but it’s difficult to confirm with certainty. From the back, many laptops in the Asus ROG lineup appear similar. Nevertheless, one thing is clear – this is a gaming laptop with eye-catching RGB lighting, as seen with the cyclical color changes of the Asus logo transitioning from blue to green, orange, red, and more.
If this laptop is indeed the 2021 ROG Strix G17 G712, it boasts impressive specifications. It features a 17-inch 144Hz IPS display, a 10th-Gen Intel Core i7 processor with a boost clock of up to 5.1GHz and eight cores, an Nvidia RTX 2070 Super graphics card, and 16GB of DDR4 RAM. These specifications are quite remarkable for a laptop being used in a courtroom setting.
The presence of this gaming laptop raises questions about its purpose. Is it a personal gaming laptop that also serves as a work machine, or did Habba simply choose a powerful laptop that suited her needs? Gaming laptops often offer better value for the money, with more powerful specifications compared to productivity-oriented laptops that prioritize a thin and lightweight design.
In the current market, finding a reasonably priced and powerful laptop can be challenging, especially with Nvidia’s latest RTX 40-series. While Acer offers laptops under $1,000 equipped with an RTX 4050, Habba’s equivalent would likely be more expensive, as it currently retails for $1,700. For those interested in the performance of the current model, a review of the Asus ROG Strix G17 is available.
Overall, the presence of the Asus ROG laptop in the courtroom inadvertently provided Asus with some unexpected marketing in front of a whole new audience.
