Asus takes on the Macbook Air with the Zenbook A14

Road warriors don’t believe in a laptop that’s too light. Such principles are why we have designs like the ThinkPad X1 Nano, the LG Gram, and, of course, Apple’s Macbook Air series. Asus’ Zenbook designs has done sleek and light for a long time, but the new Zenbook A14 is stepping things up with an incredible mix of longevity and light weight.

I’ll start with a potential deal-breaker: The Zenbook A14 uses a Snapdragon X processor. That means Windows on Arm, which might be a turn-off for a lot of users. But if you’re okay with the newfangled platform that debuted last year, you already know how this goes — users sacrifice gaming performance and deal with a few compatibility issues, in exchange for incredible battery life and (at least in some designs) thinner, lighter hardware.




Asus

The Zenbook A14 (UX307) accomplishes both of these in dramatic fashion. Asus calls it the “world’s lightest Copilot+ PC.” That title has some hefty qualifiers, especially since it doesn’t say “laptop.” But having put my own fleshy hands on this thing, I’m inclined to believe the hype at least to a degree. At 980 grams (2.16 pounds) it’s about the same weight as my years-old ThinkPad X1 Nano, but far thinner and sleeker.

The special sauce in this particular Big Mac is what Asus calls “Ceralumnium,” a lightweight composite alloy the company has been using for a while. In the Z15 it’s used in the entire body, including the keyboard frame, giving it light weight with extremely thin materials. Asus says that it’s three times stronger than aluminum (which, um, isn’t a huge boast — I recall a lot of dented Macbooks in college) and resistant to scratches from things like keys and coins.

Aesthetically it’s very nice-looking, with flat, muted greys in two shades, but the feel of the stuff is probably the biggest appeal. It’s like a smoothed river stone with just a little bit of resistance, extremely nice to handle and grip without leaving any fingerprints like many carbon-fiber finishes. Asus highlighted the engineering work that went into the hinge and lid, which required special attention to open with one hand considering the light weight of the chassis.




Michael Crider/Foundry

The rest of the laptop is pretty basic, nailing the familiar clamshell layout without screaming for attention beyond its slinky dimensions (16 millimeters at its thickest point). You get a very nice 14-inch OLED screen (non-touch, notably) with a 1920×1200 resolution, just 60Hz but fine for this laptop’s non-gaming focus. On the left side are two USB-C ports (one of which is USB 4 rated) and, shockingly, a full-sized HDMI 2.1 port. Over on the right is a single full USB-A port for older connections. The webcam is a bit underwhelming at 1080p.

Inside the base configuration gets a Snapdragon X Plus processor, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage. The X Elite package bumps it up to 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. Both of them get an absolutely massive 70 watt-hour battery. I really can’t stress how big of a deal that is — 100 watt-hours is the maximum allowed on most flights, so it’s what you see in big, beefy gaming laptops. My Thinkpad at around the same weight has 48Wh, and it’s considered big for the size. (Some versions of the A14 will, indeed, use a 48Wh battery, but 70Wh is what Asus is showing for the U.S.-spec version of the laptop.)




Michael Crider/Foundry

Asus claims that this slinky little laptop can go for up to 32 hours of video playback with that bigger battery installed. Based on other laptops with the latest Snapdragon processors, that sounds about right — though I should stress that the video playback rating isn’t anywhere close to what you’ll see running multiple browser tabs or streaming video from the web. But even cutting that estimate in half would provide an absolutely incredible amount of untethered computing, especially considering the size and weight.

If you’re cringing as you wait for me to talk about the price, you can relax a bit. The base configuration (16GB/1TB) of the Zenbook A14 will start at $900 when it releases in “late March” in the U.S. If you can’t wait that long, the higher-end unit with more RAM and storage and the faster X Elite processor will be $1,100, releasing on January 13.




Asus

Not cheap, but not exorbitantly pricey, either. The Snapdragon X Plus version of the latest Surface Laptop costs $1,200 with a 16GB/512GB configuration, and the Macbook Air that Asus encourages me to compare with the A14 costs $1,300 for similar hardware. (If you’re wondering, those laptops are 1.34kg and 1.24kg, respectively.) So Asus is competing well on value here.