Asus’s Zenbook line of laptops have always been known for being light on weight and heavy on premium features, but the latest member of the family is svelte to the extreme. The new Zenbook A14 – the A is for “air” – sports a starting weight of just 2.18 pounds (989g) while packing in a whopping, 70 Whr battery that promises up to 32 hours of endurance.
The 14-inch laptop will feature a 1920 x 1200 OLED screen that promises to reproduce a full 100 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut. Not every OLED panel on the market is that vibrant. For example, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 13) we recently reviewed with an OLED panel only reproduced 82.4 percent of the gamut. We’ll have to wait for a review unit to test and see how close Asus’s p[anel gets to its color claims.
At 12.23 x 8.42 x 0.63 inches, the ZenBook 14A is also really compact and slim. However, it finds room for all of the legacy ports you might need, including a full-size HDMI 2.1 jack, a USB Type-A port, two USB-C 4.0 ports, and a 3.5mmaudiojack.
Asus says it achieved this low weight by using a blend of aluminum and ceramics in its chassis material. It calls this amalgam “Ceraluminum,” and it’s been using it on the lid of its Zenbooks for a couple of years now. In its press materials, Asus claims that Ceraluminum is 30 percent lighter and three times stronger than ordinary aluminum. The company says that it tests the material for drop and wear resistance to make sure that it stays scratch-free.
The laptop is available in two colors: Iceland Gray and Zabriskie Beige. However, the spec sheets we saw for two U.S. SKUs show them only coming in gray.
At a press event we attended, the company talked about how it had to carefully balance the laptop so it wouldn’t tip over when the lid is opened. It also displayed a transparent build of the ZenBook A14 that shows how the interior is packed with components and not as empty as you might expect for something this light.
You’ll notice that the battery takes up a huge portion of the space compared to the motherboard and dual-fan cooling system. The company claims 32 hours of endurance, but that’s on video playback, so we’ll have to see how long this really lasts when we run it through our web-surfing-centric battery test.
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Asus Zenbook A14 Specs
Available starting this month, the A14 is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon X processor – the exact SKU and how many cores depends on configuration – which means that it’s part ofMicrosoft’s Copilot+ PC initiative. That gives you a few extra AI features inWindows 11, such as text-to-image drawing in Paint, live captions with translation, Windows Studio Effects filters for your webcam, andRecall, the optional feature that takes screen shots of all your activities to help you remember what you were doing.
Normally, for this kind of light weight, you have to pay a hefty premium, but here you’re either spending a little more than $1,000 or a bit less. The Zenbook A14 that’s coming to the U.S. in January will go for $1,099, but a model that launches in March will be just $899. The less-expensive model will weigh a little more, and have 16GB instead of 32GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD instead of a 1TB SKU. It’s not clear yet exactly which Snapdragon X CPUs each config will have, but somewhere on the planet, there will be models with X Elite chips (12-cores), and elsewhere there will be units with fewer cores.
Avram Piltch is Managing Editor: Special Projects. When he’s not playing with the latest gadgets at work or putting on VR helmets at trade shows, you’ll find him rooting his phone, taking apart his PC, or coding plugins. With his technical knowledge and passion for testing, Avram developed many real-world benchmarks, including our laptop battery test.
