I tested Asus’s Zenbook A14 and A16 — these aren’t the MacBook Air killers I expected

The laptop Asus really wanted to call the Zenbook Air (if it weren’t for an “easily spooked” legal team) is back in two sizes — the Zenbook A14 and A16 with Snapdragon X2 Elite upgrades under the hood. It’s clear that they have the M5 MacBook Airs in their sights, so do they take the fight to Apple and win? It’s complicated.

Because when you face the A14 with the 13-inch M5 MacBook Air, the competition is tight. For $50 more than the Air, you’re getting a laptop that feels as zippy, has a nice premium construction that’s just 2.2 pounds, an OLED display and strong battery life. It really feels like Asus has got the formula right this time around.

Then we turn our attention to the Zenbook A16 sporting Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme. Now don’t get me wrong — this is a beast. As I found out testing this chip last year, and going hands-on with this 16-inch monster, the snappiness of general productivity and workhorse nature of speeding through intense tasks is impressive. Plus, you’re getting all of that in the lightest big laptop I’ve ever held with a mouthwatering screen.

But with great power comes less than great battery life, and in the face of the 15-inch M5 Air, this falters quite sizably while being significantly more expensive.

Like I said when I reviewed the first-generation model last year: to beat the MacBook Air, you must become the MacBook Air. In many ways, that margin has narrowed, and in the big space, the gap has widened. It’ll come down to what you want to do with it. Let me explain.

Asus Zenbook A14 & A16: Cheat sheet

• What is it? The Zenbook A14 and A16 are super-thin and light 14-inch and 16-inch laptops.
• Who is it for? This is for those who are always on the go and need a machine that keeps up with them.
• What does it cost? This laptop starts at $1,149 for the Snapdragon X2 Elite A14, and $1,599 for the X2 Elite Extreme-armed A16.
• What’s good about it? Same as last year, these are gorgeously upmarket, thin and light systems that pack impressive performance and stamina (the latter specific to the 14-inch model).
• What’s not so good? Tiny speakers on both of them. The battery life on the A16 takes a big dip when putting a same-size battery in it compared to the A14, and expecting it to run the monster X2 Elite Extreme chip. Pair that with a far higher price, and it becomes a different beast altogether.

Asus Zenbook A14 & A16: Specs

Asus Zenbook A14 & A16: The ups

Just like last year, the Zenbook A-series is one of the best hardware expressions of a Snapdragon laptop — thin, light and impressively performant both on and off the charger.

Same gorgeously svelte design

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” It’s a mantra that Apple’s maintaining with its MacBook Air design, and Asus is standing firm too — just making it significantly larger with a 16-inch model in tow too:

What’s probably most impressive looking at these numbers here is that even though the Zenbooks have bigger, better screens (more on those later), the dimensions are barely bigger and they are quite a bit lighter too.

But none of these stats tells the story of the ceraluminum material used to build these machines. Just like the name says, it’s what happens when you fuse ceramic and aluminum, and the result is a fingerprint-resistant deck that feels almost like paper to the touch.

It’s a nice embrace for your wrists to lie upon as you type away, which, by the way, those keyboards feel stellar with a nice tactile response to each press. Pair it with gigantic touchpads on both the A14 and A16, and all the ports you’d need (shout-out to the full-size SD card slot on the 16-inch), and you’re golden design-wise.

Light of my life

With instant-on, the moment you open these up, you’re greeted by glorious OLED across the board. It’s a flash flood of color, whatever you work on, watch, or play.

The 14-inch FHD OLED panel breathes more life into your day-to-day compared to the LCD panels you see on the Air — making up for the lower resolution by bringing more vibrancy to everything you’re doing. Meanwhile, that massive 16-inch 2880 x 1800-pixel display feels buttery smooth at 120Hz, ultra bright and mightily gorgeous as colors melt off the screen.

Whether you’re binge watching, dealing with a workload that requires color accuracy or even gaming (more on that in a second), these are great screens.

Unleashing a beast

Let’s get to it. These are the fastest Windows laptops I’ve ever tested, and X2 Elite well and truly takes the fight to Apple M5, while the X2 Elite Extreme breezes past it in some key areas — performing somewhere between M5 and M5 Pro.

M5 may have the edge in snappy single-core performance (something that, in my own side-by-side testing of opening apps, is the difference of maybe half a second in load times), but multitasking and media processing are where this starts to take the lead. And while they do fall behind the MacBook in the read/write speeds, they edge ahead in the GPU department, too.

And speaking of that GPU, that’s where we get into gaming. Now, of course, Intel Panther Lake and AMD Strix Halo are in the lead here with their x86 computational wares and software integration boosting frame rates (like Intel’s XeSS multi-frame generation).

That being said, though, the GPU upgrades on X2 Elite and the improvements made to emulation happening in the background do make some great things possible! Matching the testing I did over at Qualcomm’s campus, Cyberpunk 2077 can run on the A16 system at over 75 FPS. For the A14, that’s more like 52 FPS average, but that’s still an impressive feat!

Put simply, its focus is productivity, but these can just so happen to game rather well!

Asus Zenbook A14 & A16: The downs

So the competitive gap has narrowed between Asus and Apple in many ways, but there’s one where it’s widened for the worse.

Battery woes (for the A16)

When it comes to getting bigger, everything else needs to be in proportion. If you upgraded to a pick-up truck, having the gas tank of a Honda Civic in there would be a terrible idea. And that is why when I got the lab test results back for the Zenbook A16, I was honestly gutted.

Because Asus had thought about almost everything — giving the big one the big engine, the better screen, a full-size SD card slot, and an ocean of a touchpad. But with it having exactly the same battery as its smaller brother, it’s not a stamina champ.

Keen to look into it further, I downloaded HWinfo — a great app if something feels a little off about your system to see if something is working a little too hard (or not hard enough) — and the picture became clear.

Running a Geekbench test on both and monitoring the average battery discharge rate over the test, I found the following:

• Zenbook A14: 8.9 watts
• Zenbook A16: 15.6 watts

If you’re going to do a bigger laptop with a more power-hungry chip, everything needs to be in proportion. And yes, just over 10 hours in our test will be enough for casual work, but you can burn through that much faster when you throw something more intense at it.

Asus Zenbook A14 & A16: Bottom line

As the Asus Zenbook A14 was put on the right track to take on the MacBook Air last year, this year’s A14 and A16 march forward and come damn close to being the Windows replacement.

For great ultra-portable all-rounders, Apple may still be in the lead, but if you’re loyal to Microsoft’s OS and want that same experience, the Zenbook A14 is a stellar alternative. Meanwhile, the A16 sets a new precedent for a thin and light pro machine that bridges the gap between MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, but the stamina suffers because of it.

And with far better pricing than last year’s model (shocking given the company’s price hikes over the past few months), these could be two of my favorite systems of the year.

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